When the real estate of reminiscence becomes a little Riviera

In the manacled age of COVID, memories of travel come into sharper relief, and lost dwellings seem within arm’s reach.

Melissa Gray, with daughter Bella, 5, and son Paxton, 1, feed the seagulls at Scarborough on the Redcliffe peninsula, where small villages have been transformed into popular tourist destinations dotted with fish and chips shops, cafes and apartments along the foreshore. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

Through life, some houses you’ve lived in or been associated with sit permanently on a small street in your distant memory, like tokens on a Monopoly board, and rarely change despite the passage of time.

This real estate of reminiscence exists beyond the vagaries of the market, can never be built out and has title deeds bearing your signature for as long as you can recall.

In the manacled age of COVID, these memories of travel come into sharper relief, and lost dwellings seem within arm’s reach.

For me, one such house is a small fibro shack in the suburb of Scarborough on the northern tip of the Redcliffe peninsula, about 40km nor’-nor’-east of the Queensland capital, Brisbane.

That little shack, on a sandy thoroughfare called North Quay, with three red-painted concrete steps out front and out back a car port and shed stuffed with rods and reels, became a seminal landscape for me. I can close my eyes now and feel a briny breeze off Deception and Bramble bays that would slip in through open windows of the house’s closed-in front veranda, riffling the curtains. I can draw in the earthy scent of muddy mangroves and hear sea birds and the faint tinkling of boat rigging.

It was a place then for people who couldn’t afford the city, for fringe-dwellers, petty criminals, habitual anglers and eccentrics.

Today, Scarborough and the entire Redcliffe peninsula have been transformed. The salty village of my memory is now a modern cluster of apartment buildings, restaurants, cafes, fitness studios and even an anti-ageing clinic.

There are fish and chip shops galore, an oyster wholesaler and the Scarborough marina; its roots as a bayside hamlet awash in seafood are still there.

Who would have thought that Redcliffe and its surrounds (pop. 50,000), traditionally owned by the Ningy Ningy people, then selected by explorer John Oxley as the site of the first European settlement in Queensland in 1824 before being snubbed a year later for a more attractive location that would become Brisbane, would emerge almost two centuries later as the state capital’s little Riviera?

My family’s shack at North Quay is long gone, replaced by a featureless, single-level, chocolate-brick, 70s-style bungalow, bracketed by blocks of flats.

On a recent visit, the shoreline seemed much further away than I remembered but looking out to the bay towards Moreton Island as darkness fell, I could still see the pinpoint lights of boats and trawlers on the horizon, flickering like low stars. For a moment, I was 10 years old again.

That’s when you know everything has changed, and nothing.

Matthew Condon revisits his childhood in the travel issue of The Weekend Australian Magazine, out tomorrow