Arriving at Manley Beach by ferry means being in a parade of people emerging from the ferry building, down a broad brick pedestrian’s esplanade lined with shops and decorated with rows of small water gouts the children love.

Benches; Sunshine; the smell of fried fish, and grilled meat; shops offering hats, smoothies, candy, t-shirts, bathing suits; dry arriving surfers in t-shirts and shorts, carrying their covered boards under their arms, their eyes fixed on the blue emptiness straight ahead; damp surfers walking in the opposite direction, barefoot in sandy, half-pulled down wetsuits, carrying their uncovered boards under their arms, pausing to talk in slightly self-important looking knots of two or three; children running from parents and being called back; smiling elderly couples; the women in brightly flowered blouses, the men in polo shirts and Khaki shorts, moving slowly.

Finally the beach at the end of the bricks, a gorgeous curve of white sand and green curling water, surfers tiny with distance in their black rubber suits floating just behind the waves like patient water birds, one occasionally paddling forward and rising for a few seconds to ride upright before tumbling into the white froth. Children splashing around in the shallows while their parents watched from beach chairs and towels.

A few were building sand castles. One little boy was visible only from the waist up and was using not a hand trowel but a miniature gardening shovel, tossing the clumps over his shoulder, his face set as grimly as a grave-digger. Far, far down the beach, we could see the water dotted with swimmers and surfers and a faint mist of foam over it all.

Almost everyone was either much younger or much older than we are, but we did get a comforting glimpse of surfers about our age, standing wet and slightly sand encrusted, holding their boards, one a gray haired, broad chested, flat stomached fellow, another wiry with white, wind-swept hair and what I think of as a “typical” Aussie” face, (probably because of a girlhood crush on Bruce Spence) — slightly long, elfin, and wrinkled. Between them a high cheek-boned woman with damaged gray hair and crows-feet.

All three of them seem to have been dried, hardened, and fixed in at least the same general shapes they were thirty years ago.