The hammock swings & the tide goes out but what really changes?

Wet togs, sandy dogs and multiple generations gathered under one roof true blue symptoms of the great Aussie beach holiday.

Other nations have their own seasonal templates for the coastal holiday. The French boast their five star campsites and the Brits still manage some seedy bed-and-breakfasts.

Australia as we know isn’t just lucky to be blessed with high rankings in any number of global quality of life indices it is also overloaded by many beaut beaches and sunshine.

We’ve rented the same seaside home for seven consecutive years complete with its reassuring consistencies and a few less-welcome changes.

This summer the weather remains charmingly unpredictable and the forest still echoes with the birds’ same deafening dawn chorus.

Large sit-down breakfasts and dinners get eaten progressively later each day and carefree kangaroos scratch themselves with even greater eagerness.

The fibro shacks are also replaced one by one in this secluded NSW South Coast hamlet with far grand, less simple and perhaps unsuitable edifices.

But there’s another annual change that’s harder to ignore and almost too obvious to say: we are all one year older and all to often showing it.

Perhaps it’s the cohorts of babies, kids, teenagers, new parents, older parents, empty nesters and grandparents crammed into their temporary abodes.

It’s all about generations living together and sharing meals, work and fun ( and even death) as families used to do all year round and not so long ago.

Seeing old photos may put the passage of time into some perspective (“My how they have grown!”) but there’s no substitute to catching up with family and friends in the flesh.

Perhaps it’s the revelation of so much (too much?) swim and active wear showing that while age does not necessarily weary everyone it certainly can take its toll.

There’s the implicit change wrought school-leavers pulling at the leash predicting with their actions and words that this may be their last family holiday for a while.

It might be any number of relationships, ambitions, desires and plain hard truths being mulled over in a lazy hammock which suggest things might not be the same again next year.

Maybe the grandparents mightn’t be able to make the long drive down again unaided. It could be one of the couples, who seemed so loving, just mightn’t be together next time.

Given their sometimes unknowable nature the destinies of kids, spouses, relatives, jobs and one’s own health tumble through the drowsy mind. It is after all hot.

And thankfully the everyday vagaries of superannuation, health insurance and pension plans do not intrude unduly into these rare and special reflections.

The humid afternoon breeze rocks the hammock and the dreamer, despite their apprehension of change and lack of control, slips into a shallow slumber.

Maybe that’s the joy of these great seaside holidays. Everything in the outside world will change but here more things seem to stay the same.

And even if that’s an illusion it tends to be the way we like it.