Ah, summer. So ready for this after a waterlogged year

I hit the sand and a serenity washes through me. Picture: iStock

The season of sand is upon us – can you smell it? In your mind perhaps, or, if you’re lucky enough, in reality. Bring on that heady scent of air laden with salt and sun; the tang of surf as you round a bend and head to the thump and roar. Bring on all the memories of Australian summers past sand holds for us. Recently that distinct scent of seasonal sunscreen was smelt in the air after a long, sodden winter, when for a moment the world seemed to dry out and I spined myself up in a long exhalation of ah, summer at last. So ready for this after the waterlogged wet of 2022.

Bring on that season of sand. Its hurting glare on days of high heat. The squeak of it as bare soles slide sideways against granules. The yelping rush across hotness as feet ouch their way to a towel’s relief. Bring on sand heaped high in castles and dug out into moats and sculpted into backrests.

What a beautiful throb of life a summer beach is with its glorious rhythms of Aussie holidays. Don’t we all love the sea? Its cleansing, pounding, exhilarating muscularity. Have you heard the sand sing perhaps? Fallen asleep upon it, addled by heat? Felt its sting in hard wind, the bite of puny grains as if flung by a giant’s hand?

But sand isn’t puny at all, of course. Its collective might is engulfing, swallowing, ever-changing. What are our shifting beaches telling us about how greedily we live now? We can’t completely tame the dynamic restlessness of this wily compound. Sand is constantly moving, reshaping our beaches and in some places – alarmingly now – contributing to the bringing down of seawalls and swimming pools and houses’ edges; sand that was boulder once, broken down to rock then pebble then speck.

And what does it bury? The sand that swallows house keys and jewellery, shipwrecks and bones. Feet, too, if we stand near the water line long enough, staring at somersaulting waves tumbling seaweed and boards and kids. And under the cram of our summery activities lie hidden middens, wonderpits of shells and bones and tools. In Weipa some are a magnificent 16 metres high, 70 metres across.

And now the season of sand is upon us with its clinginess that wheedles in everywhere. Sand in our scalps and cracks under our toes, sand heavy in towels and itchy in cossies, sand rampant over floorboards and wily in sheets. The umbrellas have changed on our beaches. Circular once, in strong gusts they would lethally cartwheel their demented spikes; now they are square and held down in corners by yet more sand, and not moving sometimes from morning ’til night; umbrella as house. Sand is also the best exercise, a truth horse trainers know. Feel creaky muscles shifting into gear as you walk or run on it, muscles unused to the unpredictability.

I love the shifting dynamic of a beach’s sand, that bowing to nature’s powerful and unstoppable rhythms. Can we hold back nature? Tame a beach’s restlessness? Attempts are usually expensive and fractiously disputed and hideously ugly; just look at latest efforts by homeowners and local authorities in Collaroy, in Sydney’s north. Yet the sand on our beaches gives us a great, democratic sense of belonging; it’s a smorgasbord of cultures mixing amiably and how lovely it is to watch the passing parade. We are one, we are Australian, all enjoying the free wonder that is the Australian beach in summer.

I hit the sand and a serenity washes through me. The dream for my dying days is to live full-on to the fierce beauty of sea and sand, shirtfronting the majesty and power, those lulling rhythms that fold you back into the wonders of our extraordinary planet. Lucky you if you can hear the ocean’s breath exhaling and inhaling upon the sand that breaks it over and over; lucky you if you can hear the mighty sea as you fall into sleep at night. I don’t. I wish. And suspect a lot of us do.