My family has been coming to the same beach for 50 years. Now, everyone else is too

The last time I was well and truly sunburnt, I was simply too pregnant to fit into a one-piece swimsuit. So I bared my belly to the sun, toasting it a rosy red on the sands of the Mornington Peninsula’s Safety Beach, as my mum’s friends – Greeks, Italians, even a Uruguayan – guessed at the baby’s gender.

Nicoletta led the pack, heavy gold ring twirling on a necklace over my belly.

“It’s a boy!” she declared in her heavy, Italian-accented English, and everyone agreed that the ring had swung back and forth, rather than circling around to suggest I’d be bringing a baby girl into the world. Imagine the surprise when, a few months later, I took my six-week-old daughter down to the beach to meet the grandmothers on her first Mornington Peninsula holiday.

I was simply repeating a family tradition; my mum did the same when she was pregnant with me and my siblings, and my grandmother with her last three babies. Four generations, one beach.

The peninsula and its memories are imprinted onto my family: Rosebud carnival, where a teenage aunt, an unwilling babysitter, would drag me along to Fleetwood Mac cover bands playing from the back of a flat-bed truck. Where another aunt would flee with cigarettes, chocolate and her motorbike to nurse a wounded heart after a lover’s tiff, tears streaming as she dropped the bike on the hairpin bends of Arthurs Seat. Cousins in the tiny house further down our street. My mum’s first job, making rigid milkshakes at the long-gone milk bar on the corner. My wedding was even the first at the Safety Beach Sailing Club.

To backtrack, in the early 1950s, my grandfather bought a few blocks of land around the sparsely populated peninsula, selling them off as each new baby came along and money was needed. By the time the ninth and final child arrived, he’d banged up a beach shack at Safety Beach – one bedroom for the parents, another for the littlest ones in bunks, tents and caravans for the rest of the tribe and their tag-alongs of miscellaneous friends and cousins.

I can still remember creeping down the back to the outdoor loo, guarded by blackberries, and the fanfare when the indoor toilet – so fancy! – was added.

Under the cover of darkness, the Dromana Drive-in was fair game. With countless aunts, uncles and cousins to hand, my grandmother’s green Holden station wagon would be packed full of kids; I confess a few were stashed beneath blankets or hidden in the boot if we took the sedan, to erupt from the Tardis-like car as the movie started.

I saw Superman III by first creeping through marshy paddocks cloaked in blackberries, past an irate bull and wiggling beneath the chain fence at the back of the drive-in with my brother and sister to sit, ears glued to the car speakers, as the Man of Steel triumphed. Totally worth it, we all agreed.

It was my mum, who first made the beach house a permanent home, cladding the fibro shack and hanging the timber sign “Shark Bay” out front. While it was gazetted Safety Beach, the little bay enjoyed a few decades’ infamy for the sharks that roamed its waters, lured by the blood and guts washed down the creeks from the nearby abattoir.

My grandfather never bought a bathing box as the house was too close to the beach to justify the expense, and his army of children could drag the little sailboats down to the beach on their quests to sail across the bay to Williamstown. In hindsight, when I see the million-dollar price tag on the beach boxes, I secretly wish he could have realised how Melbourne would finally wake up to the peninsula’s beauty.

The frozen oranges and Sunny Boys have been replaced by Bass & Flinders gin distilled up in the industrial estate, and if I can get it, a bag of Little Rebel’s wholesale blend coffee named – you guessed it – Shark Bay.

These days, I enter via the front gate of the drive-in, buy the choc-tops from Shel’s Diner, snap a pic with the life-sized Blues Brothers, car packed with duvets, pillows and pyjama-clad girls, all declared and paid for.

On a perfect day, though, my car stays, unmoving, in the driveway. I walk to the beach for a morning swim, home for lunch, back to the beach until sunset when the crowds thin, the dogs arrive and the Spirit of Tasmania glides by on the horizon. I can’t do the vast tow-along carts of gear, and I certainly am not on Team Beach Gazebo or in the jet-ski brigade. Just a towel, water, umbrella and book.

Each year, I see the same faces – the vast Lebanese family with its shisha pipe and numerous eskies outnumbered by children; the Greek tribe sheltering under multiple adjoining umbrellas, the grandchildren of my mother’s friends, out of nappies, getting taller, braces off. Together, we are all building memories for the next generation at Safety Beach.