Millionaire's Row

We left Evercreech in rain, the dirt roads through the forest slick enough to keep the speed down and the wipers going. St Helens was an hour east, and by the time we reached it the rain had eased and the coast was close enough to smell. We split the errands the way we had started to split them: Sal took the supermarket, Anth emptied the bins, refilled the camp stove gas, and came back to the bus carrying pool noodles. The pool noodles were for the awning. One of the support arms had a habit of pooling rainwater until the fabric sagged, and Anth had worked out that a noodle wedged along the rail would fix the angle. It was not an elegant solution. It worked.

At a water stop on the way out of town we met a young Belgian woman travelling alone in a Nissan, covering Tasmania at her own pace. We talked for ten minutes, swapped recommendations, and parted ways. The encounters had become a rhythm now: brief, warm, genuine, each one confirming that the road was not as solitary as it looked from the outside.

Swimcart Beach sits at the southern end of the Bay of Fires, and the campsites along the dune line are known among travellers as Millionaire's Row. Beachfront, free, first-come-first-served. We had timed it for a Tuesday, hoping to beat the weekend traffic, and it paid off. Two prime sites were open, right on the sand, with the bay stretching north in a long curve of white beach and orange lichen-covered granite that gives the place its name.

The first day was rough. Onshore wind, big swell, the kind of coast that looks spectacular and feels like being shouted at. By the second morning the wind had swung offshore and the bay settled into something entirely different: clear water, gentle break, the kind of beach that makes you wonder how the same stretch of sand can change so completely overnight.

We stayed a week. The days divided themselves between the beach and the laptops without needing a schedule, the online work done in the mornings while the light was flat, the afternoons given over to walking the sand or sitting in the dunes watching the water do its slow, repetitive work. It was the first camp since Penstock that made leaving feel like a mistake, the first place on the coast that held us the way the highlands had held us above.

But Grammy was arriving in Launceston in a few days, ready to travel with us for three weeks in her own vehicle, and the diary would not stretch. We packed up knowing we would be back. Swimcart had announced itself clearly enough, and we were learning to trust the places that did that.Read more