2 months ago
17
I haven’t been to South West Rocks for almost two decades but it’s sharp in my memory: 10 golden summers, sharing a holiday with another family, the kids the perfect age for a week at the beach.
For most of that time the children were somewhere between five and 12 years old. That’s old enough to play beach cricket but not so old that they hold their parents in contempt.
Oh, bliss.
Going away with the same family, to the same beach, allows traditions to develop. One couple enjoys the “princess suite” – the bigger bedroom. The other couple takes a turn the next year.
Stupid riddles, rhyming clues: Richard Glover and another father would devise treasure maps for their holidaying kids.Credit: Illustration: Matt Willis
There are charades on the first night; Pictionary on the second; Cranium on the third. Midweek, for 10 years running, we have lunch at the same all-you-can-eat Chinese restaurant, the chef, with every passing year, looking increasingly alarmed when we walk in. “Oh, this lot are back; throw in another 10-kilo bag of spring rolls.”
Friday night is takeaway, with a beer while we wait, or maybe two beers because every year there’s a longer wait for the hamburgers. No one, it seems, is more surprised than the owners of the local takeaway. In the middle of the summer holidays the customers will grow in number.
There’s no air-con in the house, so on blistering days we take a pack of cards down to the IGA and play a few games on the benches near the entrance. Mornings are spent at the surf end of the long crescent of sand – Horseshoe Bay Beach – then we spend our afternoons in the shallow bay of Arakoon. We search for tiny fish in the rockpools and crabs in the sand, like characters from Alison Lester’s Magic Beach. Visits to Trial Bay Gaol and Smoky Cape Lighthouse are fitted into each year’s schedule.
Even the annoyances are repeated. Why do kids always lose their sun hats, sometimes two hats in a single day? Why isn’t the house equipped with a saucepan big enough to boil pasta? And why do only two of the four hotplates work – and yet each year a different two?
On the last day we have a treasure hunt, complete with a pirate’s map. The other father and I work late into the night, composing rhyming clues and drawing them onto a sheet of cardboard. We go full pirate, with a skull and crossbones, a parrot and lots of “arrr, me hearties”. There are stupid riddles: “I can spin but I cannot move; I have one leg but many arms”. Answer: it’s the Hills Hoist, but the children will have to work that out.
X marks the spot: The young posse on a treasure hunt around South West Rocks.Credit: Photo: Annabelle Sheehan
And then, the final clue to locate the treasure (lollies): we add up the heights of the four children and hide the treasure 4.4 metres – or 4.8, or 5.2 metres – to the north: “The distance of your collective length shows where you will find the strength”. And so they must lie on their backs, making a long line, biggest to smallest. The head of the littlest one marks the spot.
The poetry is not Wordsworth; the drawings are quite poor. But, for some reason, I kept the maps.
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The other day, one of those children, now grown-up and living in America, came over. I fetched the maps, a folder full of creased and colourful newsagent’s cardboard. Once upon a time she was the littlest one. Now she sat at our kitchen table, reading the clues, laughing at the dumb riddles, a dreamy delight on her face as she time-travelled back to her childhood in Australia – to South West Rocks and those 10 golden summers.
The treasure was there all along.
Richard Glover is an author and Herald columnist.
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