Beachcombing’s a real lure for many folks living near the beaches around Geelong. You’ll always find someone rambling among the rocks, across the sandy stretches, beneath the ragged ochre cliffs.
Blazing sun, bitter chilly sou’westerlies, belting rain, we’re a bit touched I think, nothing seems to stop our beachside OCD. Didn’t realise my own addiction, just thought I was walking the sausage dog, until I started thinking about the Breamlea rhinoceros during a mild gale on at Torquay’s Whites Beach.
The long-haired sausage dog is a mess by time she’s finished at the beach but that’s nothing on the poor old rhino shipwrecked when the zoo ship, Bancoora, foundered at what’s now named Bancoora while en route from Calcutta in 1891.
Which got me thinking how the beach is such an evocative kind of distraction. Can’t seem to help but be immersed in all sorts of cerebral meanderings.
At Torquay, I wonder what the story was behind the extensive underground bunkers dug out near the town’s northern dunes a decade or so back.
At 13th Beach, I chuckle about MPs Mick Crutchfield and Tim Holding diving illegally on the wreck of the Canberra while it was off-limits for safety reasons. And getting sprung. Dills. And the old sunken wreck, the Charlemont, is down there somewhere, too. It’s been remembered by name in a new estate on reclaimed flood-prone land. Has to be some irony there.
At Point Lonsdale, an old wooden oar was once found which 19th century reports said pre-dated William Buckley by many moons. An Aboriginal claimed yellow men brought it. Pre-Euro explorers are a constant source of fascination to this scribbler. Some folks reckon the Portuguese were also hanging about in Corio Bay in the 1520s.
Queenscliff has no end of beachside tales: buried torpedo boat, mystery skull, pirates and pilots, forts and cannon, lighthouses. Is it really possible Buckley was a witness to Benito burying his treasure at Swan Bay? Did Kerosene Jack really have the treasure map tattooed on his arse?
Trudge around to Indented Head and you’ll find where John Batman’s mob first pulled up before heading off to settle old Bearbrass, nowadays Melbourne. There’s the wreck of the Ozone jutting out of the water, a host of TV’s Seachange sites, Aboriginal sites and land so low you’ll probably notice rising sea levels there before anywhere else.
I’ve found shearwaters by the thousand dead in their tracks after exhausting migratory flights at the Narrows, hang-gliders pirouetting and wahooing in furious winds at Southside, and nudists and rotting whale carcasses at Point Addis. I think I prefer the carcasses. If I’d looked underwater I’d have seen giant kelp forests near The Rip.
Point is, this is just scratching the old grey matter as Winnie the weiner dog and I traipse along these beaches. Innumerable stories and musings inhabit the songscape.
Cathedral Rock throws up a blue whale tale; the skeleton wound up in the Melbourne Museum, by way of Werribee’s sewerage farm. Lorne has a sad grave for two kids drowned in quicksand way back when. I can picture the black and white photos of biplanes on its foreshore close to a century ago.
Aireys Inlet and Fairhaven offer a repository of dreamy diversions for the beachcomber: kids TV shows, shark attacks, mad fictional hotels and a patron saint of eels (google Greg Day), and bushfire memories.
Whip back to Geelong and the lime kilns and trapshooting detritus of Limeburners Point behind the Eastern Park Golf Club speak to forgotten enterprises and sports of yore. As do the asbestos-riddled industrial cliffs around North Geelong. The birds around Moolap hail from Japan and faraway Siberia. As the salt lagoons that sustained their journeys cede way to plans for a marina megalopolis, the old brainbox boggles a little.
But it’s impossible for me to tramp around the east coast of Geelong without thinking of developer Dennis Moore’s harbour project at Curlewis, excavated and executed without any planning approvals at all. Walking along the coast there, I can only wonder what he was thinking — but I suspect it was something less than complimentary about City Hall’s planning department. My sausage dog concurs.
An edited version of this article appeared in The Weekly Review 28 April 2016
