We walk along the road past the boarding-houses and the chalky cliffs laced with grass. Below us is the sea. Above our heads gulls circle ceaselessly; shiny bull-ants scamper at our feet. We climb jerkily down the slope, past the crooked pines and the shelter shed where yesterday my mother and I read True Confessions in the rain. We take our shoes off, for we have reached the sand, and I am conscious that the man lying on his stomach with the peeled skin map on his back has turned his head to look at Reece.

I am glad when we round the corner and come to the first cave. And pass it; erect the beach-umbrella.

Nan and Reece and my mother rest while I clamber the shallow steps of a limestone terrace. I have a secret place here: a gritty throne beside a twisted thorn-bush that shades me from the sun. I search in the limestone crevices for buried treasure, but find only lolly papers and a fretwork of initials. I creep up the hump of a rock, and eavesdrop, hearing voices. I determine to find lovers, like those I saw under the willows, but am disappointed — it is only a family party the same as ours.

And if, in the long summer days that are all alike, we do not stab our beach-umbrella into the sand near my limestone throne, we go further afield to the sand-dunes.

They are in the other direction: away from the caves and the sun-bathers; past the jetty. Here.

Here, in the haunt of seagulls with red bills and redder feet, we camp. My mother unsheathes the Kodak Brownie, and immortalizes us all with her finger.

(We were still there twenty years later: Reece, sitting like an Egyptian statue on a rock, toes turned in — massive. My grandmother, sprawled careless on the sand, her silver hair curling, her red lips smiling, a handkerchief in her hand. I, amongst sea-rocket and spinifex, in a dress that is too short; kneeling like St. Francis in a fairy-ring of blurred specks that are birds.)

Here grows the she-oak, the pandanus, and the tea-tree. I find little low creeping things as in the hills: variable groundsel, small-leaved clematis, magenta noon-flower that Nan calls pig’s-face. There are sand-flowers and tissue-paper sea-violets, cat’s ears and pussy tails that I take home to paint — and forget. There are sand-hoppers that whirr, bleached cuttlebones and breadcrumb sponge, bird skeletons, fish bones, and everywhere the mumble of the sea.

The sea is so big.

Sometimes I turn from its vastness and seek a space of my own. I creep over the low rocks. I am an Indian; I am a tiger. In and out of shadow and light I creep, sunburned and dappled. Over a honeycomb of rocks that look like islands of bone.

Far away is the steely sea I shun, falling in stripes on the sand. Before me is the world I seek.

I am the Indian; I am the tiger. I am Gulliver.