Each day of our first COVID winter I left the warmth of our new home, meandered through sleepy streets, over the dunes, down to the same secluded stretch of sand that marks the threshold between shore and sea. I walked the vacant coastline then dove into the bracing cold to swim in the sea. Every day of that arduous winter, all ninety-two of them, I returned to the same place in search of something different. Once there, I sought to reconnect with that once familiar place.

In search of reassurance, I turned to lonely stretches of sand and wild oscillating weather. Immersing myself in frigid waters, I walked, and I watched. Then, with an old Polaroid camera found in a local junk shop, I photographed something of what is a beguiling place — a picture I would subsequently annotate by hand with a scrawled note or reflection. Those images – 92 inscribed portraits of place – form a diary of sorts, one that documents and reflects. A chronicle marking time spent at the beach during a winter of relentless disruption.

The shoreline I visited is a place of my childhood and adolescence, Cape Paterson’s Bay Beach, the unobtrusive shoreline of a quiet seaside village in the heart of Victoria’s Bass Coast. It’s a haunt I’ve known since birth, one that elicits fuzzy recollections of sunburnt skin, chapped zinc smeared lips, and dawdling fishing. It’s a place for discreet consideration – where one can sequester in tussocked dunes, take long walks, and while the afternoon away rockpooling. In summer, its waters provide respite from lingering heat – the tideline buzzes with kids and oldies. In the winter, it offers wild seas and deserted shores. Irrespective of the season, it is a swimming place, a walking place, a thinking place on the edge of the ocean. Returning after more than twenty years away it is a place that I wanted to reconnect with.

In times of extraordinary disruption – when the COVID pandemic has shadowed the firestorms and smouldering dirt of the summer before – it’s comforting to gravitate toward the familiar. We always look to the places and things we know so as a saltwater person, one born of this coast, I turned to the water and the sand in search of reassurance. At this bedrock place, I followed an impulse toward the icy embrace of the ocean and tried to make some sense of the grim new realities that face us all.

By reacquainting with that place – one that I had once known so well – I aimed to reconnect, to reorient. I hoped time spent in cold waters and on lonely sands would provide knowledge and insight. I hoped it would afford an avenue to see a particular place and the world, in a different light. I hoped that viewpoint would provide a counterpoint to ceaseless screen-time and anxious doom scrolling. I hoped it would calm thoughts of fire and plague. Under the pall of multiple existential threats, I sought solace and clarity of thought in the place of my childhood.