When I close my eyes and think of Bluebird, I picture it from above. I glide on the sea breeze, hold my position, and turn my salted beak upon them. Avian and condescending—they have called me worse. An outsider, I arrived with an innocent gaze to which they imputed evil character. I was a vulture waiting for my host to die before feeding on his flesh, which tribal magic turned into their own. I was predator, scavenger and judge, an unhappy triple threat.

They were wrong! I am but a gull drawing circles on this cloudless sky. Until I act, I watch. There below, a white van knifes into the last space in the top car park. Clothes are shrugged off, a wetsuit zipper fumbled in excitement. A square of wax grates over a surfboard, doors are locked and keys stashed in wheel well, footprints skip over the dune and down the sand. They float on the water as I float, without a wingbeat, upon my lighter element.

Over here, more. Latecomers who thought they were early risers discover what those in the know already knew. It’s going to be one of those days. You wouldn’t want to be caught napping. Earliness is the stamp of belonging.

A rustic signboard stands at the top of the dune path. When I arrived here, the visitors welcome sign had been burnt mute by persons unknown. Its charred cinders, trodden into the sand to form a foot-blackening compound to tattoo departing soles, represented honesty.

More recently, a newly-appointed deputy general manager of the local council declared that a new sign had to be erected. What, he asked in a printed leaflet, is a place without a sign? A public plebiscite (participation rate <20 percent), given three alternatives, settled on a new slogan: Bluebird. Like No Other. The popular favourite—Car Park Full—was not among the options.

Within hours of the sign’s erection, guerrilla graffitists vandalised, or corrected, it to Bluebird. LikeS No OtherS. And so it remains, like its burnt predecessor, eloquent in its defacement.

Bluebird whispers a history of self-concealment. If I cast my eyes to the smoggy horizon (no, I don’t go there either), I flinch from the high-rise nightmare of Ocean City, that beach camp of four million. In the old days, Bluebird was OC’s last secret, the land that public transport forgot. Old Bluebirders chose weatherboard obscurity, the pride in self-sacrifice, the decency of being overlooked by each property boom. Bluebird was OC’s blind spot, under-value its badge of honour. Any suggestions of a train link from OC to Bluebird were greeted by pitchforks.