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On Victoria’ s Mornington Peninsula is a beach, my memories of which I guard closely. They return to me from time to time, whether I’ m drifting off to sleep or tootling along a highway. As a child, I went to this beach often. Just me, my mum and dad, my brothers and sisters. In university, a lecturer asked my class to write about‘ the landscape of our dreaming’. Descriptions of this beach filled the page before me. I have never been able to define why this humble stretch of southern Victorian coastline speaks to me and my childhood so vividly … but it does.

This beach is known as the Sorrento Back Beach. Sorrento itself sits, almost lazily, between Rosebud and Portsea. If you wish to take a ferry ride across Port Phillip Bay, Sorrento is your jumping-off point.

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