The Valley of Echoes & Saltwater

I grew up in a place that still feels like magic.

Stanwell Park.

A little coastal town with a big heart and salt in its bones. The kind of place where kids didn’t come home until the street lights buzzed alive, or until the sound of my father playing the bugle echoed across the valley like a call from a different world.

When Dad blew that bugle, every dog, child and half-wild creature within five streets came running.

We weren’t just free —
we were feral in the best possible way.

There were five kids in my year at school.
Five.
Sometimes seven if someone failed or someone’s parents moved down from the mountains.

Class photo day looked more like a family gathering than an education system.

Everyone had salt-crusted hair.
Everyone knew everyone’s business.
Everyone was someone’s cousin, or neighbour, or first kiss behind the dunes.

It was the 1970s, that golden era where life was simpler, looser, and every mother parented half the neighbourhood.

When I was five, we travelled around Australia in a motorhome, towing a mini moke behind us — which, in 1977, was as wild and adventurous as flying to the moon.

We were a budget circus.
A moving tribe.
No GPS.
Just paper maps, laughter, and the belief that everything was possible.

Mum and Dad had a stint running the beach kiosk. You could smell their deep fryer before you saw the ocean. I hear stories now about how they used to shove my brother and me under the counter with a BBQ chicken to keep us quiet when the tourists lined up.

We’d sit there happily, greasy hands, little faces, chomping away while surf lifesavers yelled orders for chips.

And then there was the day Mum had absolutely had enough and threw a meat pie at a customer.

It landed like a splat of hot gravy and pastry indignation.
The customer probably deserved it.
Or maybe they didn’t.
It doesn’t matter.
It was the 70s. Things were forgiven quicker.

We also had two Labrador babysitters. They knew us better than we knew ourselves. Whenever my brother and I escaped down the track to the beach, those dogs would come lumbering after us, catch us by the shirts, and herd us home.

Not a word spoken.
Just duty done.

The ocean raised me as much as my parents did. Stanwell Park was a childhood made of sunburn, sandy sheets, gravel scabs on knees, and freedom. We stayed out all day. We made cubby houses in the bush. We stole mulberries and came home stained purple.

It was a time when adventure didn’t need permission.

No phones.
No helmets.
No rules except: Be home by dark.

When I listened to Gina Chick tell her stories of the same era, something softened in me. A warmth. A validation.

Because there is a whole generation of us who were raised by saltwater, scrub, and a level of neglect that was actually care disguised as trust.

We survived.
We thrived.
We learned resilience without ever calling it that.

Sometimes I think my spirit of exploration began right there — a little girl on a beach with a dog at her side, sand between her toes, and a bugle echoing through the valley when the day was done.

If my life has been restless, it’s because it started on a coastline that never stopped moving.
The tide came in, the tide went out, and I learned that everything in life has a rhythm.

Even me.