Four beaches of summer: Fairy Cove.

Immediately south of Duck Point (see Between Mountains, 1/12/20) looms Wilson’s Promontory, a collection of once-molten lava heads that bubbled out of the earth 350 million years ago, becoming part of a mountain range joining the mainland to Tasmania before the rising sea made it its own island. River-borne sediment gradually formed an isthmus and joined it back onto Victoria, where it remains mainland Australia’s most southernmost tip, albeit a confused one. We had left the house of half-completed artworks late morning, driven south and pulled in at the Darby River carpark. From there, a path disappears into the trees and continues under cover up and over the ridge.

We parked the car and disappeared into canopy. After twenty minutes of hard climbing, the path levelled. Suddenly the canopy peeled back like an Act Two curtain on a vast blue stage. A cavernous sky lidded a flat plane of laundry-blueing blue, impossibly deep, and innocently flecked with whatever white caps the breeze could muster. A plump green mass of an island, round like a bandstand, sat in the middle of the bay. We moved along the ridge and when the overhanging scrub opened up the island seemed to be rotating, swirling in stop-motion, as we ant-trailed around the arc of coast. Way down below a glistening white strip appeared, like a faraway washed-up surfboard bleaching in the sun: Fairy Cove. The path dropped again, curving steeply down; and twenty half-stumbling minutes later, we emerged from the last canopy into an arc of blinding sunlight shafting down into a cavern created, at each end of the beach, by boulders that had poured down from the mountain eons ago. The uncannily silent sea was snatching impotently at the sand.

Out in the deep-blued distance, the island, a few hundred treacherous metres away, sat round and high and fat in the water like a fortress in a moat. Alex asked me if you could swim to it. I shivered even though the sun was hot.