The things I hated about this beach town as a child are what I love now

April 30, 2026 — 5:00am

Here are the things I hated about Point Lonsdale when my family started visiting the Victorian seaside town in the 1980s ... tea-trees (scrubby, scratchy, not at all pretty). The walk up the hill and over the sand dune to the back beach (so steep for lazy teenage legs). How you had to line up at the phone box to make a trunk call to your friends in Melbourne on a Sunday evening (friends count more than family at that age; sorry Mum). And perhaps worst of all, how there was no pub in town, so you had to get a lift with older kids into nearby Queenscliff, armed with your fake ID, to drink, smoke and flirt with boys in a big old pub, then find someone to get a ride back home with again.

Now I look back on all those things as reasons to keep loving this tiny village on the tip of the Bellarine Peninsula. All that tea-tree and that steep dune meant there were no houses visible from the back beach, a long stretch of unruly sea with big wave sets and a hell of a rip, none of which stopped us from going out the back with Dad and learning how to body surf. He was of the Giorgio Armani school of sunbaking – that is, he had olive skin and saw a deep tan as a sign of rude health, not a cancer waiting to happen (I know, insanity).

We’d set off for the beach with our Esky full of sandwiches and cordial about 10am, and stay until the sun started to dip, swimming, surfing, reading, walking to the lighthouse and rock pools. Summer passed effortlessly by.

In his younger days, Dad ran along the beach from Point Lonsdale to Queenscliff in the morning, sometimes in the other direction towards Barwon Heads. He always returned happy; indeed, he was more relaxed there than he ever was in Melbourne. A chilled-out place will do that to a person. It did that to me, too, as I started appreciating the upside of a sleepy town that had none of the status of those on the other side of Port Phillip Bay, namely Portsea and Sorrento, and was all the better for it.

I loved watching the cargo ships leave Melbourne via The Rip, that slim, frothy strip of sea between Point Lonsdale and Point Nepean, on their way to other cities, other countries. The pilot boats that lead them out fascinated me, too, particularly the stories of peril, like the time a freak wave came and smashed the cabin door down, sinking the boat and its crew to the ocean floor.

We tried fishing off the pier, with lacklustre results, and once went out from Queenscliff on a fishing trawler. The seas were rough and we all got seasick, but there was no going back to shore early. I’ve hated being on boats ever since.

It’s the place where my brother won a surfboard with “Mmmm Big M” plastered across it, his lifelong love of the sport beginning with the embarrassment of having to tuck a walking billboard under his arm every time he wanted a surf. It’s the place my sister went after her daughter, Zoe, was stillborn, to scatter her ashes off the pier. None of us is religious, but that night the moon created the most incredible strip of light across the sea. A stairway to heaven.

It’s the place Dad’s ashes are, too, scattered on the back beach and off the pier, the remainder placed in a lovely little cemetery that, like so many lovely little cemeteries, is only a stone’s throw from the sea. I remember how thrilled Dad was when he bought plots there for him and Mum, long before they were needed. A tad preemptive, but I’m glad he’s not in a nondescript Melbourne crematorium I’d never get around to visiting.

Nowadays Point Lonsdale has a fabulous wine bar, Noble Rot, where the fish and chip shop used to be, and there are finally quite a few cafes that know how to make good coffee. Indeed, foodie options in the area abound, from the boat in Queenscliff that sells fresh fish, to the one in Portarlington selling mussels, to Jack Rabbit Vineyard, where you can eat lunch while gazing over vines towards Corio Bay.

In recent decades it was Easters, not summers, that I spent at Point Lonsdale. Then Dad died and Mum sold the place. This Easter, our phones lit up: the new owners had all but knocked our old house down, proof of life contained in the photos friends sent with the news flash. It was slightly confronting: was it really beyond redemption, this place we’d loved so much? But mostly, it was thrilling. A new family, preparing a new home in which to make new memories. The cycle of life. Indeed, the cycle of real estate.