Stifling heat, ocean swims and caravan parks: The best things about summer

The ocean speaks to us more strongly somewhere between the last showering of spring and the first slam of summer heat.

Gold Coast beach. Picture: Nigel Hallett

To the sea, to the sea. Around this time of year the ocean calls to us, beckoning its sons and daughters into its salty embrace.

I do not know what it is about the ocean that speaks to us, I only know the call gets stronger somewhere between the last showering of spring and the first slam of summer heat.

Beneath the hum of an airconditioner, or the spinning blades of a fan, we lie in the heat and dream of the water.

Why I’m so glad I’m not a teenager today: Frances Whiting

‘I have finally found my people’: Frances Whiting on the Dull Women’s Club

And if we are lucky, we clock off for the holidays; we pack our cars with beach bags and coolers, strap the boards to the roof and join the exodus along Australia’s highways and byways to the beach we each claim as our own.

Again, if we are lucky, we have that one beach, that one stretch of shoreline we went to as a kid, and now go with our own families, or our own friends who have become family to claim our spot on the sand.

When I was a kid, that spot was Palm Beach on Queensland’s Gold Coast, staying at the same, brick, six-pack unit block each year. It had a sweeping lawn at the back, its grass meeting the Palm Beach sand and it was heaven.

We’d go once a year for one week and think we were millionaires. We weren’t – not by a long shot – and that six-pack block is long gone, probably knocked down by someone who actually was building their seaside mansion.

But my memories of our annual summers there remain strong – mostly in the shape of my Dad, also long gone after a long battle with Alzheimer's.

But I don’t see him as he was in the last few years of his life, I see him in the breakers.

Frances Whiting. Picture: David Kelly

I see him as he was on our annual summer holiday, walnut brown and happy, diving between the waves, holding my hand to keep me safe.

My husband John’s family had a caravan in the same spot at Burleigh Heads for years – his memory is of that caravan park, of the stifling heat lying in his bunk at night, of riding bikes and fishing off the rocks, of gangs of kids roaming the dunes and surfing Burleigh’s famous breakers.

We’ve all got our summer stories – and one the best ones I’ve ever heard was told
to me by television host Larry Emdur.

He said that when he was a scrappy kid growing up in North Bondi, the local KFC had a promotion where, if you bought a bucket of chicken, you could buy a foam surfboard (with Colonel Sanders’ face on it) for a dollar.

That summer, Larry said the north corner of Bondi was absolutely heaving with kids on their one dollar KFC foamies with swollen bellies from eating all that chicken and angry red rashes on their chests because, as Larry reflected, “those boards were shit”.

But what a memory, and I hope that this summer, you get to make a few of your own.

This is our last magazine for the year as we head into our holidays.

I want to thank you all for your letters this year. I have absolutely loved receiving them from all corners of our sunburnt country. Merry Christmas.

Originally published as Stifling heat, ocean swims and caravan parks: The best things about summer