Seashore

We escape from Adelaide as often as possible and come to this place on the Yorke Peninsula, to relish the simplicity. Here, there are only shacks; holiday homes that are a skeleton of their original selves. Mostly higgledy piggledy, they are Frankenstein's cottages, scabbed together from remnants of other lives. Old post-war fibro walls, random doors and mismatching windows, they crouch too close to the sand and sea, punch drunk from the wind, peppered by salt.

The colours are delicious; chartreuse ground cover creeping towards duck egg succulents. Dirty whites scrub up next to faded maritime blues. Invincible but rusty-grey rain water tanks hug every single shack, sometimes bigger than the homes themselves. They are not full these days. Water, water, everywhere, but not a drop to drink.

There are some new houses now, some of them two storey with roller garage doors to match. They gentrify the Shore Roads, but none of them are as quaint or as full of character as their stooped and aged predecessors.

The sunsets are magnificent. All the houses face west, making the summer evenings a paradoxical mixture of exquisite beauty and relentless fire.

It's this kind of wonder that plucks us from our fears and leaves them, insignificant, like shells on the shore. They are still there, those worries, but they don't seem so great next to the gilded sky or the unceasing undercurrents of the Bay.