Village lost in time.

It was a warm day, two in the afternoon. Slightly overcast. Southerly breeze. I drove southwest out of Melbourne, but not too far out. I took the four-lane Geelong freeway to the C114 turnoff and instead of swinging in a big right arc back across the freeway to Lara like most of the traffic, I took a left turn down the long lonely road towards the coast. 

After a while, it became one lane for both directions so that you have to pull over when a vehicle comes from the other direction. Then the blacktop ended altogether, and the car crunched along gravel towards a leftwards sweep. A sign warned 'No passing on bridge' and the road narrowed even more. I rumbled over the bridge, swung back to the right, and the track stopped dead a few hundred yards farther along in a big careless patch of bitumen under a jumble of fishing boats and trailers. A slipway disappeared under a seaweedy stretch of water probably five miles across to a peninsula in the distance. Small semi-visible figures crouched in boats out on the water, rocking gently when a sudden flick indicated a cast line. A small swimming beach was off to the right of the slipway.

I parked off to the side of the bitumen and we walked east along the rocky shoreline. Land-side, a score of frame houses could barely be called a village or even a settlement. They were in various states of repair and shades of paint, some showing evidence of permanent occupation - letterboxes - and others obviously weekend or holiday fishing shacks. Sea artefact evidence everywhere; not the lurid starfish and lifesaving ring knick-knackery that decorates beach houses where no-one gets in a boat; but real, and mainly very old, bits and pieces; marine propellers propping up walls, torn nets over side fences, old rods strapped to roofs of tumbling sheds, upturned timber boats bleached by the decades in long grass. We - me, one teenager and one pre-teen - walked past the strip, eastwards, following a narrow dirt path that disappeared into a scrubby flat heathland hugging the coast. It seemed to wind aimlessly and eventually, after about forty minutes' tramping, we reached a rocky point where a lone fisherman was bent over his work, gutting a fish. Smoke drifted out of a densely packed partially buried ball of seaweed. Dinner smoking. 

I turned and gazed back at the distant line of huts on the big horizon. Beyond them, the bizarre dark sharpness of You Yangs cut the sky like shards of black glass. The wind had picked up and some of the fishing boats out on the water were running for home. We wound back around the heathland and the huts drew nearer again. Back at the swimming beach, some children were splashing around in the water. I set up my chair and read my book and the teenager and the pre-teen swam, cooling themselves after the hike. Later, food on the beach - sandwiches and fruit - from the cooler, a kind of impromptu fishing picnic without the fishing.

Less than sixty kilometres from Melbourne's CBD, there's another world that hardly anyone knows about or visits. The fishermen like it like that.