We couldn’t go to the beach, so a park became our holiday escape

January 22, 2026 — 5:00am

During my ’70s childhood, my sister and I had a pile of travel magazines – a short-lived title called Holiday, large-format and glossy like Life. We’d pore over the pages, imagining ourselves into the exotic locales within.

In our bedroom we kept wooden animals and beaded dolls from Africa, grass skirts from the South Pacific, and pendant necklaces with Mickey Mouse on them from Disneyland.

We had never been to Africa, nor the South Pacific, nor Disneyland. Our dad, who worked for the travel magazine, had. He brought these artefacts back for us, tokens from a world far larger than the one in which we lived.

We were that rare thing in 1970s suburban Victoria: children of divorce. Dad would breeze in with copies of his magazine, gifts from his roamings and promises to take us to Disneyland one day. Then he would return to his other life, and we to ours – barely leaving Ringwood, never leaving struggle street. Our gallivanting, philandering dad was terrible at paying alimony, leaving Mum with the mortgage and three of six kids, still young and at school, and so she was working shifts at the newly opened and nearby Dorset Gardens Hotel, including many nights.

Every summer our girlfriends disappeared to the Mornington Peninsula foreshore in caravans, or road-tripped to their little rental flats in Surfers Paradise. “Wish you were here” postcards arrived written in childish script. We stayed home: running under the sprinkler, making prank calls from the phone box around the corner, climbing trees while Mum worked to keep food on the table. Holidays to fancy places like the Gold Coast were completely off the table for us.

Then, one summer, a heatwave descended on Melbourne. Our flimsy weatherboard house with no insulation baked in the January sun. Out in Ringwood – a good 35 kilometres from the nearest beach – the heat was a thick, unmoving thing. Life slowed under it.

On a morning when the bitumen on Great Ryrie Street was shimmering by 9am, Mum announced to my sister and me, “Get dressed, we’re going out.”

She packed sandwiches, fruit, cordial in those beetle-shaped plastic school drink bottles from then-variety-store Coles, plus a blanket, books and a radio. We walked 15 minutes to Ringwood Station, caught a clackety Harris train to Flinders Street, then a rattling green tram up Collins Street, and finally landed in Fitzroy Gardens.

I didn’t know it then, but this was Mum’s version of a holiday – a staycation before staycationing was a thing.

We found a shady English elm near the pond and spread our blanket on the thick, cool grass. The temperature dropped what felt like 10 degrees under that canopy. We stayed there until the shadows were long and there was a chance our home had cooled a little.

We did this for several days in a row, riding out the heatwave in those 18th-century-landscaped grounds, which we had almost entirely to ourselves.

My sister and I would lie on our backs and count clouds. We’d wander off to marvel at Cook’s Cottage – how on Earth did it get there? We were flummoxed. We’d make wishes at the Fairies Tree and imagine ourselves walking the olde-worlde streets of the miniature Model Tudor Village. Then we’d return to the blanket to report everything to Mum, who listened as though we were telling her something precious.

What she was giving us was more precious than any souvenir.

The heatwave broke and summer reset itself. Our prank calls resumed (we knew exactly how to avoid putting money in at that phone box). Mum went back to the relentless cycle of work, home, dinner, sleep.

Over time, things improved. Mum got a better job and a better house. And I eventually travelled to Africa, the South Pacific and yes, Disneyland – three times so far.

But that summer in the Fitzroy Gardens still looms larger in my memory than some of the greatest travels of my life.

It only took us an hour or so to get there from Ringwood – an hour, but truly a world away. A reminder that escape doesn’t always require distance, just a shift in perspective.

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