In the mid 1970s newly married and before children, we all climbed into our friend’s old Land Rover after work one Friday and headed north along a 4WD dirt track to Wedge Island relying on our mate’s memory of how to get there. We arrived around 11 o’clock at night and stumbled around the squatters' and fishermens' shacks looking for ‘Mill’s Mansion’.
Typical of all the beach shacks it was made from whatever was at
hand, washed up timber and corrugated iron. A water-tank, gas camp stove, camp
stretchers, louvre windows, a bucket of water to throw down the outside loo, fishing
nets strung up and everything covered with a thin layer of beach sand,
completed the picture.
It
all looked better in the morning, and we felt like kings in our ‘mansion’ as we
cooked bacon and eggs, sand boarded down the sand hills on bits of scavenged cardboard,
caught fish off the beach, collected shells and went 4WD beach driving in the
Landie. I remember sitting in the Landie’s back ‘seat’ when the seat came to an
abrupt end when we hit a washaway on the beach. Those were the days.
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