Alas, out of sight has lost the battle to out of mind. Preservation from access couldn’t ensure preservation from progress. Bluebird’s quest to be Nowhere has been surrendered. Nouveaux Bluebirders—expat English bankers, locals made good, adventurers from the far side of the harbour, blue-chipsters and craft beer barons, rock royalty, fashion designers, self-styled purveyors of digital-age culture—and they call me a parvenu?—have scorched this earth. From its ashes arise mirrored shrines for maximally magnified self-reflection.

And here come the daytrippers. Ugh. Sunlight bounces off windscreens in the bottom car park on the flat between the surf club and the electrical substation. Families insert into overflow parking in the grass lot beside the firehouse. Nippers parents are bickering about how much space between cars is really necessary. Having deposited their children in the care of the surf club—Sunday morning babysitting service—they queue for early-opening caffeine at the Beach Cafe. I own that. Hate me if you will, Bluebird, but I own you too.

Out on the water, surfers jostle for the main break. The day’s first threats echo with the first birdsquawk. Hello, friends! Less combative surfers filter out to the sub-premium take-offs. Council lifeguards, erect Desert Foxes in their beach buggies, plant red-and-yellow patrol flags and chequerboard buffer zone lollipops, and megaphone border-force instructions to surfcraft riders: ‘Attention in the water!’

When was paradise lost: an hour, a decade, two centuries ago? Even I miss Old Bluebird, and I wasn’t there. I have contracted the local infection: crippling nostalgia.

I tilt my wings away from this scene to the sea, from human faces to cliff faces. Try as it may, all that restless meat cannot spoil Bluebird’s native glory. A claw of sandstone clasps its jewels: surf club, ocean bath, open-air public shower, refoliated dunes, alpha to omega told by one smile of golden sand and a drenching of scents: salt, wrack, sandstone, Norfolk Island pine resin. Not just a beach, but the idea of a beach. Everything in its right place.

At some point, each new arrival will ask the Bluebird question. Surfers and swimmers gazing from the warm water, walkers and waders, bakers and bathers, even tough old birds like me ponder the houses and unit blocks cascading at illegal angles down the cliff faces, the six-storey apartment tower teetering on pillars shrouded in scaffolding for concrete cancer surgeons to cut out the corruption of bygone bad habits.

How did they get away with that?

We ask it of the rough-as-guts males barnacled to the rocks, the melanoma farmers practising their military surf club march-past on the sand, the hard men out on their big boards, working-class relics in a high-end landscape.

How do they keep getting away with it?