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‘Memories-on-sea: Revisiting Port Macquarie, my childhood holiday destination’

Mar 29, 2020

Port Macquarie is a beautiful coastal destination north of Sydney in New South Wales. Source: Getty Images

Staring through the panoramic window of our cliff-top apartment, Port Macquarie was unrecognisable. We were somewhere close to where I had spent weeks as a kid, from about ages nine to 16, but it was impossible to say where exactly, so many small cottages had been pulled down, so many towering apartment blocks erected. Most of them, it seemed, in the very places where I had run and jumped and hidden and schemed in my childhood.

I have no idea how big (or small) Port Macquarie was in those days, probably no more than a few thousand people, I guess, but now, I was reminded by a legion of boosters, that it was already closing on 50,000 with the probability of passing the tonne sometime in the next decade. Whatever its limitations were in the mid-1950s, Port (as we called it) had a very important place in my life.

My mother was a tough woman who brooked no rebellion and her definition of rebellion was always extensive. And elastic. Thinking of her, I see that in many ways she was a victim of her own times and of a very narrow upbringing. Indeed, it is hard not to feel compassion for someone whose rigidity was such a barrier to unimaginable horizons of experience and pleasure.

Now, irksome that her authoritarianism might have been to children growing up 30 years later, there was one thing her own childhood did validate, releasing her a smidgen from the stringency of her own parenting style, and that was the annual summer vacation at the seaside.

My mother’s father, my maternal grandfather, that is, was, by all accounts, a similarly tough character. He was a school inspector and a harsh disciplinarian in that Protestant chapel mould of South Wales pilloried so mercilessly in the 1939 John Ford movie How Green Was My Valley. Yet, he was willing to let the strap slip when he carted his (very large) family to Rottnest Island, off Perth, every January; and thus legitimised my mother’s parental decisions a generation later.

Because the most astonishing thing when I cast my mind back, was that the heavy shackles under which my sister and I had laboured for the preceding 50 weeks, were instantly unfastened once we reached this coastal spot 400 kliks north of Sydney, usually on Boxing Day.

From dawn to dusk we were free to roam wherever the mood or our robotic feet took us. I could bury my head in the latest Champion Annual if I preferred, and my sister in her endless supply of ‘penny dreadfuls’. We swam everywhere, ocean, river and estuary, made friends with the local children of our own ages, hiked up and down the coast. I even encountered a man in the surf who I was convinced was Adolf Hitler on the run, until I learned that Paraguay had no ocean frontage.

I wonder how either of us was not spirited away by a paedophile or torn apart by a bull shark, such was our mindless sucking on this blissful draught of freedom. Such was our ignorance of the real world and its dangers.

My father, ever the international man of mystery, took to this sudden licence to live by disappearing before dawn every day to drive to a fishing hamlet up the Hastings River where he sat in a rowboat or on a jetty for hours on end. Using only a hand line (no fancy Shimano rod for him), he brought home regularly the biggest flathead I have ever seen, until I saw the monsters that congregate under jetties around Narooma’s Wagonga Inlet on the NSW Far South Coast.

For 50 weeks of the year, fish was banned in our house. My mother refused to touch it, scale it, gut it, let alone cook it. But for those two weeks at Port Macquarie she happily (?) fried, baked and grilled these lamb chops de la mer night after night. Perhaps it was a matter of home economics — I just don’t know. Much as I have no idea what she did herself during the day, and there were 14 of them in the blazing summer sun to be endured by someone who had never swum in the ocean since she left Rottnest Island about 30 years before. I regret never having asked her.

Looking back on it now, it is quite unfathomable to me that such stitched-up persons as they could be so relaxed as to let their kids run riot without regard for the consequences. For I never recall a single instance of the interrogation that used to greet me right up until I left home at 21: Where have you been? What time did you get in? Who were you with? Phew!

However, there was one piece of fruit that was to remain forbidden: Under no circumstances was I to go to ‘Shantytown’, as their petit bourgeois (to quote a sociologist) sensibilities described the vast congregations of tents that were pitched in the sandy wastes beside the Hastings River breakwall. It must have seemed like Sodom and Gomorrah to them.

Well, tell a kid not to do something and don’t complain when … One night, I managed to slip out of the flat undetected, weaved my way through scrub and nettles hugging the side of the cliff and entered Sodom and Gomorrah. I don’t know what I expected to find, but the two most enduring memories are the noise — a cacophony of shouting and laughter — and the smell. The intoxicating odour of fried onions — the Satanic enemy, along with garlic, dirt under the fingernails and grime behind the ears, of our middle-class sensibilities.

But to me, it was the fragrance of nectar and ambrosia and to this day it never fails to excite my tastebuds whenever the new mistress of my household turns on the hotplate.

In truth, I have to say that the half-hour I spent with sand between my toes (having flung away my expensive sandals), sidling past rows of tents, peeking in, envying the sheer vivacity I saw within, imagining that when those kids returned to Sydney (everyone came from Sydney in my child’s imagination), they would never, ever, be confronted with a peremptory frown or scowl or demand to fess up.

And the echo of that shouting and laughter has stayed with me every day of my life since.