‘When we get there, you’ll have to put your head right under!’ My mother’s announcement scared me as we headed towards Frankston for my first beach holiday. For a shy five-year-old suspected of sookishness, there was to be no shilly-shallying about the rite of passage of learning to swim. Mine were phantom fears, it soon turned out—the initial self-ducking quickly achieved, I soon progressed to my uncle’s reward of sixpence for dog-paddling the yawning ten-yard gulf to where he stood. Thus began a lifetime of happy immersion. 

Several years on, roaming the same beach with my cousin during long weeks in January, we had two unfailing pastimes when out of the water: stalking love-making couples in the tea-tree dunes to induce coitus interruptus with sand-bombs (sand wrapped in newspaper), and trawling the beach for discarded cigarette packets. These were prized according to brand, my favourite being the exotic De Reske, which featured on its front an art-deco-style silhouette of a tuxedoed man in an armchair, elegantly flourishing a cigarette.