1 month ago
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My favourite beach in the world? That would imply that there are at least a few potential candidates on my list, from which I have chosen one. And there simply aren’t.
For me there is only one beach that counts. It is Newport Beach, first, last, always and only. (I kid you not – I once lived 50 yards from the surf at Manly Beach for two years and never swam there once, as somewhere in my bones it would have felt disloyal to Newport. Thank you but I have declined help.)
And even then, in truth, it is not just Newport Beach itself that generates my devotion, it is what lies just 100 metres up the hill from those endless, pounding waves.
See, back in 1923, my grandparents built a simple cottage in one corner of a cow paddock, a cottage that they named Nantucket, to which Grandpa brought my great-grandmother every summer for the next decade and a bit.
If we put Great-Granny Maria Sofia Craigie McPherson Dunn Booth as first generation; Grandpa Fred at second; my mother Helen at third – for she equally spent big chunks of her summer there for seven decades – that puts my six siblings and I as the fourth generation to enjoy that beach house as it became. (It still has the same internal walls.)
All of my own life, the Fitz family have taken the house between Christmas and New Year, all piling in together. The first of our partners joined us from the 1970s on, and our children, the fifth generation, from the 1980s.
How do we now squeeze well over two dozen people into one fairly humble abode, let alone 36 (sweet Etti has just been born!), for Christmas lunch? Only just – and latterly with tents in the backyard, mattresses in the garage, sleeping bags up the wazoo and, last year, some more rented premises down the road. With four more Fitz bubbas of generation six due to be on the ground and advancing on all fronts by next Christmas, that chaotic pressure on space can only increase.
We don’t care. We’ll do what we were taught: scrub up, hunker down, muck in and work it out. With enough fencing wire, love and Auntie Deb and Auntie Cathy sorting something in the garage, it’ll be all right on the night.
For that week at Newport Beach is sacred to all of us – talking, walking, baking, surfing, playing games until the wee hours and doing “parenting on parade” as we raise our own and each other’s kidlets and now grandkidlets, just as we were so raised.
Our time there is so beloved, such an annually deepened and expanded foundation stone of our family life, that last year’s Christmas Eve marked – between us – a collective total of nearly 800 such Christmas Eves spent at Nantucket.
Having missed four of them overseas, I’ll be clocking up my 60th this year. I am expecting a posy of flowers from my great nieces.
Of course, the “beach” part is an enormously important part of the whole experience. For right now, generation six is doing exactly what the preceding generations have done. Everything else of the experience of life of those generations might have changed, but not our time at Newport Beach.
That is, in the mid-morning and mid-afternoon – separated only by a big lunch of leftovers from the night before – you head down to the beach.
Look left and then right and then left again before crossing the hot sands to settle down between the flags. The very littlies of gen-six stick very close to Mum or Dad or one of their bigger siblings or cousins or aunts or uncles, and – as we watch carefully – act as if they would surely die if the water even touches their heels. Screaming and laughing all the way – perhaps the way Indigenous kids did for millennia? – they run back and forth like loons, up and down the sandbank in front of every breaking and receding wave.
(I know it can’t be true but the memory that is implanted in my brain from my own days as a three-year-old is running back and forth, up and down the beach, as one after another of these Poseidon Adventure tidal waves threatened to engulf me.)
Within a summer or two they’re confident to go into the water and swim out a little before uncles Jum or Nook or cousin Nially put them on waves that are about to break – Swim! Swim! SWIM! – and they get the first thrill of shooting forth as bodysurfers before, inevitably, they also experience their first dumper.
“Mummmmmm!”
So it is.
So it was.
So it has ever been.
As a family we have honoured our heritage, deepened our bonds, shared our joys and sorrows, caught up, grown up, been smashed up, on that blessed beach.
So it will ever be, while I have breath.
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