Sometimes, if a man has the fortune, he will be touring through Ulladulla when a big east swell has poured through the gap in the Continental Shelf down by that way and has lit up all the local points and reefs.
Unlike Sydney, so flash and bragging and richly tiresome, Ulladulla has always been a home of the more modest of us.
Fish eaters and walkers to work.
Families pushed to the colder south in the hope of a poorer home with a more charitable landlord.
Younger men, beaten men, looking for the purer air of acceptance that is the sometime gift of the older towns, and their older folk.
Churchgoers and the sober statutory of the town’s walkways.
Newcomers; these purists, these cave dwellers, hypnoids, weed eaters and foresters.
Silly girls come sober and pale faced men on another type of release.
Ragged young men with old and yellowed twin fins who come sliding out of the wilderness behind the dunes and out of the dark hills in the hour before dawn as some local reef breaks a smokey and handsome width down all of it’s length.
Shack and van dwellers, fishermen and fossickers, idyllists.
Townsfolk, carers, veterans, drunks and villains.
Fishermen.
Surfers.
Everything is for sale down south; Homes and units and plots and flats and farms and businesses. Headlands and swamp, foreshores and lagoons.
A measureless indictment of a coast trackless beyond measure, which itself is the repository of a history of an ancient and untaught settlement.
A ragged coastline that has measured the endurance of seamen driven ashore and counted lost too soon by wives and insurers.
The wretched track from Ninety-mile in Gippsland to Wattamolla south of Sydney that claimed the lives of the fourteen men from The Sydney Cove, lost north of Tasmania in 1797.
The survivors, two English and one Lascar, walked the 600 kilometers to safety and yet no school in this nation dares to interrupt their syllabi to recount this epic –
