Anglesea to Addis

I wouldn’t mind a dollar for every time I’ve walked from Anglesea to Point Addis. Or from Point Addis to Anglesea. Or both in one hit.

No doubt I covered the distance in my mother’s arms as a nine-month-old baby, during my first visit to Australia - a visit commemorated for me by a rare baby photo of a chubby tot being held by my smiling Granny outside the door of our beach house which is aptly named ‘The Hut’.

The first time I actually remember doing the Addis walk I was five, at the end of 1964, which was also the year I learned to swim in the deeper pools of the Anglesea River. Mum and my sister and I were accompanied by assorted aunts uncles and cousins, who holidayed there together every year. With us we took all the paraphernalia of what we still then quaintly called a ‘chop picnic’.

The gang of us walked the five miles from home to the Anglesea River and further east along the magnificent beaches to Point Addis with its soft sand that is so hard to wade through and its steeply shelving beach where you’d be crazy to swim, but there's usually a fisherman or two with their long poles stuck in the sand, watching and waiting.

Once we arrived, someone planted a sizeable stick at the water’s edge and we set a little fire and cooked our chops. There may have been sandwiches as well, probably a thermos of tea.

The grown ups kept an eye on that stick to see when the tide was starting to turn. Because there is a trick to the Addis walk; the point closest to Anglesea is the only one that is completely cut off at high tide. You have to be careful with your timing; if you get caught on those beaches with their magnificent but steeply inaccessible cliffs, you’re sunk, no pun intended.

I sometimes wonder if tides are higher almost half a century on, as it’s rarely easy to get there and back these days. When in doubt, we use the path on the top of the cliff, which is gorgeous in a completely different way.

It seems remarkable now that my family would head off, five-year-old in tow, for a sixteen kilometre round trip. Maybe that’s when I developed my passion for walking. I have a clear recollection of the endless beach ahead and my weary little legs. As mum told it, I was dragging my feet, refusing to go any further and skinny Uncle George was looking anxious, wondering if he would have to carry me all the way home, when my sister had the brilliant idea of appealing to my imagination. She recreated a vivid scene from the Mary Grant Bruce Billabong books that she adored, and I happily mustered cattle all the way back to the Hut.

I recall our oldest in a backpack on her dad’s shoulders when we mistimed an Addis Walk and had to backtrack and take a slightly scary cliff scramble. Later, when we had a troop of four, we would coax them all the way with the reward of a minty at each of the three rocky points between Anglesea and Addis. Then their dad would jog home and get the car.

These days, with our all but empty nest, Alistair and I tag team it; he jogs one way and the dog and I meet him the other end with the car and walk back. Occasionally, if I am preoccupied with some anxiety or other, I have to remind myself to look around and be amazed anew at the majesty of the views. Every year some more of the cliff has broken off and crumbled to the beach below; last week I saw there had been a major landslide which had brought with it grass which was growing happily on the wet sand, something I had never seen there before.

Each time I’m there, I marvel that six generations of women in my family have walked that route. Great-grandmother Elizabeth Heyer, an immigrant from Alsace, grand-mother Clara Heyer then Paton, mum Frances Paton then Boyd, my sister and I and our daughters, and the next generation too, as all my cousins have grand-daughters themselves.

Mum is buried at Bellbrae cemetery, not far from Anglesea, even closer to Addis. Maybe when I die, I’ll get my kids to scatter some of my ashes on the bush block that surrounds the Hut and the rest on the beaches between Addis and Anglesea.

Comments

[Finlay]

We're out hear listening, Clare, sometimes siliently, but always listening. Love it (and you!) Finlay

[Tess]

So many happy memories along that stretch of sand and cliffs!