My Beach, 1955

Artwork by Cathi Ogden

It was the fourth day of my misery. My two sisters felt the same. Why had our parents done this to us? They had taken us from our friends, Peter the English boy, who lived next door; Charlie and Doris, the Maltese kids from a few houses down the crescent; and my special friend Marina, a young Russian girl. Everyone talked about Marina’s mother in hushed tones, she was a “white” Russian, not a “red” one. Marina’s mother looked normal to me, so I wondered what a “Red” Russian looked like.

Our parents had moved the family from a terrace house in Sir John Young Crescent, Woolloomooloo, to Sydney Avenue in Umina. The front room of our terrace had been converted into a shop sometime in the past. Mum, never one to miss an opportunity to make money, would open the shop at 6am, selling cups of tea to the prostitutes as they headed home from work. Wharfies, on their way to work, bought bottles of Coke to help with their hangovers.

Woolloomooloo was familiar and had everything I wanted. St Mary’s Cathedral’s bells chimed on a Sunday morning, and The Domain, the biggest park in Sydney, was across the road from our home. Mum would take us girls across the park to David Jones Department Store to shop. I noticed “Eternity” written in chalk on the footpath; Mum explained that it was written by a man who had become religious and was spreading the word. I had been taken from this lively cosmopolitan city to live miles away in an unlined fibro cabin on the back of a sandy block in a track surrounded by bush.

By the fourth day of our relocation, Mum had had enough of our sulking and decided to show us the reason we had come to this desolate uncivilised outpost.

We walked a hundred metres down the road to a huge sand dune. She led us up to the top of the dune and stopped. Before us was a beautiful crescent-shaped beach. Gentle waves lapped the shore; Lion Island sat proudly in the bay, an age-old sentinel. To our right, the salt water at the headland mingled with the fresh water pouring into the ocean from the lagoon. To our left was a long stretch of beach, and at its end the flow of Brisbane Water met the currents of Broken Bay in a great churning battle of mother nature’s power.

I fell in love with Umina Beach that day, nearly 70 years ago. Now, it still has a hold on me. I have thanked my Mum and Dad a thousand times over.