On Somers Beach.

The steep shaded path from the road down to the beach was as it had been all those years ago, winding under a ti-tree canopy and levelling out before opening suddenly on blinding sand and sea. One difference: the path was shorter now, the relentless circular wash of the bay having eaten into the foreshore over time. They were always building groynes and piling up rocks and trucking in sand, but the cruel sea just swept them all away again.

It was a humid Sunday, early afternoon. We had driven across the peninsula from the carnival side, past vineyards and through forested valleys where knots of brown ponies carrying school children can sometimes be glimpsed through the trees, like questing hobbits. Half an hour later a Westernport Bay slideshow had appeared from behind the crest of a hill.

Somers sits on a lip of the peninsula midway between quiet southern seaside towns with hedges as clipped as their accents, and a naval base and deep-sea harbour at Hastings to the north. At low tide on Somers beach children pick over the crawling shelled treasures in the rockpools; and at night you can see the reflected lights of Philip Island dancing on the inky water.

On those endless 1970s summers my parents rented a rambling timber homestead set in a sea of pine needles beneath a stand of massive old pines, the remains of a windbreak. The old farmhouse still had a wood-fired water heater, outside the kitchen, into which I threw pine cones and fallen pine branches each morning. Of course, they burned in minutes.