I just returned from France, but my dream holiday spot remains this Aussie town

May 21, 2026 — 5:00am

Everyone has a beach holiday happy place. Mine isn’t particularly different or remarkable but it’s special because it’s my beach happy place. Each year my mother, younger sister and I would pile into our 1980s white Volvo with its distinctive box shape and comforting engine purr to drive from Canberra to a modest house in the NSW north coast town of Corindi Beach. We didn’t really go anywhere else on holidays other than a trip to Sydney for Christmas most years. Holidays and travel were synonymous with seeing family. Family either came to you or you went to family. The ’80s were easy like that.

Back then Corindi Beach was not much more than a two-street affair, one called Pacific Street as is required by Australian place-naming legislation, and those two streets really just served as connecting lines between the bump of the Pacific Highway as it curved and swerved away from Coffs Harbour and inland towards Grafton. It wasn’t a town so much as a village but it felt as big as the sky that opened up across the ocean at the end of Pacific Street.

The journey typically followed the same route – an early morning departure from Canberra, first stop Cowra, lunch in the park at Dubbo before stopping for the night at Coonabarabran (always the Country Comfort Motel). Day two was another early start passing through Tamworth and Armidale before a sharp turn at Dorrigo and down the mountain to Coffs Harbour when we knew the sight of the Big Banana out of the car window meant we were on the home stretch. It was years before we ever got out of the car to see the Big Banana. Now I wish we had a year-on-year comparison of family members standing next to the giant piece of fruit. A couple of times we drove up the coast but it never felt quite right.

Our grandparents’ house was unassuming – a tiny two-bedroom affair with combined kitchen, living room and dining room and an outdoor shower rigged up by my grandfather to wash off the day’s sand. In that galley-style kitchen my grandmother served all the hallmark dishes of an ’80s childhood – apricot chicken, chops (always lamb) and veg and a take on stroganoff which we referred to as “special mince” because its core ingredients were mince (always beef), a tin of Edgells’ mushrooms in butter sauce and some cream.

After breakfast we crossed what seemed like the huge garden down to the road, turned right and headed for the beach, a 10-minute walk that took us past the shop, through the caravan park and onto the sand where we would stay until the direction of the sun told us it was time for lunch. There were no flags, let alone lifeguards; instead we were left to exercise caution while splashing about in that wide expanse of ocean. When my father was still alive he would tell us about the time he got stung by jellyfish and show us the ragged tracks they left up the inside of his arm or the day he took a dinghy and got washed out to sea before managing to row back in well after nightfall. Adventures seemed to happen – but only ones that ended well.

Sometimes we played tennis with rackets with wooden handles and now seem like a relic of days closer to the era of the Famous Five and Narnia books we read after lunch while “waiting for our lunch to go down”. If it was summer rather than spring then long, blissful afternoons in front of the TV were allowed because the Australian Open would be on and we could while away the hot afternoons watching Steffi Graf, Pete Sampras and Pat Cash. My grandfather would tell us about the time he once took a game off Ken Rosewall and it only recently occurred to me that he probably meant literally just one game. I wish I’d checked that with him while I had the chance.

I don’t remember ever seeing anyone else on the beach. In my mind it has morphed from a small coastal town to my own private beach, patrolled not by lifeguards but by my memories. Today the beach is surrounded by more streets and more houses – there’s even a pub – and it’s a commuter town for Coffs Harbour. The caravan park is still there, as are the tennis courts. My grandparents’ house isn’t. I thought about and wrote this piece just a couple of weeks after a wonderful trip to France with my own family, a trip that would have been no more in reach to me when I was the age my children are now than a trip to the moon. And yet, glorious as our French idyll was, if I had to choose, I know the choice would be 10 days on Corindi Beach with my sister, mother and grandparents.