Under this Morton Bay Fig tree at Balmoral Beach we have picnicked between its gnarled root systems, and beyond it lie memories of learning to sail Pipi, our old $300 sailing dingy.

I think I must have surfed over 30 beaches but here is Kilcare and Putty beach below, above which must be

 

84 Manly View Road while bush tracks wind past Tallow Beach to Box Head.

 

At Avoca Beach above you can see five rips forming and, orange coloured, the network of inland lagoons. Terrigal Beach, in the photo below, wraps around from The Skillion to Wamberal Lagoon above which is Rebecca’s new house.

 

  Bullimah. I had dropped Shivaji to school and, as the clouds were lifting, I decided to re-revisit some Central Coast beaches on the way home. At Avoca, Copacabana, McMasters and Kilcare there are now more and bigger houses straggling downhill, but the Bullimah trail was, once my memory maps went into restore mode, unchanged. Squeezing between rocks the size of small houses, I passed the “pregnant angophera” to the rocky point high above  Bullimah beach, where Rosie and Sophie once rolled on the grass to flatted down squares they called living, bedroom and kitchen in a “house” that was still there, I remember, three months later. Today, looking right is the golden sweep of Kilcare beach. The photo is taken from a rock where Kate and I once painted a sunrise weaving its feisty colours into the sky’s pale blue fabric. Looking left, Maitland Bay is clenched between the cliffs that hold these swirls of sandstone in the two photos above.

Above these rocks the tops of sinewy coastal shrubs are flattened by the winds and swept uphill as if by some giant oceanic hairdresser. In the days when we drove the old Holden looking for land up here we would stop and by vegies from an old couple living on the corner of a street appropriately named “Abundance Street”. And they would tell us of times past when hardly any cars passed their little farm on the red dirt main road.

Blackfellows Point. The satellite photo shows, from left to right, windswept Potato Head,  Potato Beach, Little Beach where we watched a kindergarten of baby fish playing in the shallows while the adult fish cruised protectively further offshore, and then Blackfellows Beach stretching past the campsite and the exposed sand of Tuross Lake at low tide. Top left is the lake containing Horse Island, from which emus, not horses, once escaped and can still be seen enjoying their freedom on the edge of the camp site.

The aerial picture shows our summer holiday campsite for nearly all of the last 33 years. The forest along the beach is slowly regenerating since it was swept out to sea by storm and flood, at the same time removing half the camping area. Joan would have camped there as a baby when Robert Hogan was the teacher at Eurobodalla School to the north and, to the north-west, beyond rugged Larry’s Mountain, lies the little town after which Araluen is named. We hope to continue to go camping at this magic place but, these days, we need to get the pressure in our air beds exactly right.