On the way to Wilson’s Promontory, I stopped at Inverloch, where I spent childhood summers - and some winter holidays - in a rambling Edwardian house on a few acres at the top of a big hill. It overlooked Anderson Inlet, and from the house you could see its waters twinkling and dancing way below in the sun. The bedrooms of the old house were cavernous and smelled like empty cedar wardrobes. The living room wore dusty holiday-house curtains and there was an ancient bookcase stocked with paperbacks, and unmatching sink-into chairs in which to read them on endless afternoons. The kitchen's fly-wire screen door banged onto a covered porch shading he north, east and west walls of the house. A windbreak of pine trees lined the front drive, and our short-cut to the beach was a steep track cut all the way down the hill. Or you could go out the front gate and follow several right angle turns, and cross the main street, a verandahed cluster of four or five shops, to the shore.
The house is long gone; and my childhood footsteps down the beach track buried under rows of lookalike grey apartments cascading down to the shoreline. The main street is a sea of cafes and restaurants and gift shops selling decorator driftwood that you could pick up a few hundred metres away. I found a park and walked through the throng, following Scarborough Street to Sandy Point Road and then into Venus Street. Like an apparition, I could almost see my nine year old feet pioneering the same path an eon ago. But which was the ghost? Those feet then, or the same ones now?
I reached the top. Anderson Inlet was dancing and twinkling way out beyond the white sandbar.
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