Sunrise Serenity at Mayfield Bay

Sal was awake before it was light and went down to the beach on her own.

Mayfield Bay had been a late arrival the night before, chosen off the app in failing light, and we had gone to sleep without any real sense of where we were. The surf had run all night, close and steady, the sort of noise that stops registering as noise.

The beach was empty. It usually is at that hour, but it still feels like a private arrangement. The sky came up pink over the water, then orange, and the sun lifted out of the sea to the north-east with Freycinet standing black against it, the Hazards in silhouette. She had been on that headland the previous morning looking down at Wineglass Bay. Now it was a shape on the horizon, twenty-odd kilometres up the coast, already behind us.

The sun does not get high in Tasmania in late May. It comes up at a shallow angle, tracks low, and puts everything sideways. But there was warmth in it, the first proper warmth in days, and she stood in it for a while.

By the time she came back up, Anth was awake and the bus was full of that flat early light that comes in through the eastern windows and lands on everything.

We were gone within the hour. There was no reason to stay and every reason to move: Hobart was a day or so off, Sal's friends were flying in, and the calendar had teeth again for the first time in a fortnight. Mayfield went on the list of places worth a proper stop next time.

We were there for about fourteen hours, and it was enough.Read more