The sweet curve of golden sand reaching out to meet the gentle swell of a sparkling Southern Ocean kissed turquoise by an unhindered summer sun is an image replicated again and again on Instagram. Rye, Woolamai, Torquay, Lorne—the influencers all talk salt vibes, harmony and the unwavering belief that magic will happen. It’s where surfers hang out the back dreaming of a point break, and tourists film Reels capturing the squeals of delight—or nerve-tingling shock—when the icy chill of foaming saltwater hits bare ankles. Either way, the message is clear: nothing bad can happen under such a clear cerulean sky.
Further down the coast at Kooramook—a far less photographed beach—local businesses are celebrating the sudden interest in their sleepy hamlet. When AFL legend Jacko Sampson bought the old Hewitt farm, the locals thought that might make nights at the pub a bit more interesting. But it’s his wife, Isobel, and her social media skills that are putting Kooramook firmly on the map with adorable TikToks of their blond tousle-haired children excitedly exploring rockpools, riding high on their father’s broad shoulders, or snuggling into her lap. They garner ‘likes’ in the tens of thousands.
With sentiments such as feeling blessed and family glue, cashed-up PFMs—people from Melbourne—are flocking to the district, wanting to replicate the wholesome family fun. The local real estate agent is busier than she’s ever been and is dreaming of tripling her commission within the year.
But a storm is about to break over Kooramook. It won’t come in the form of violent waves crashing over sooty volcanic rock and tearing at Neptune’s lace, or wind-blasted rain driving into the tussocky seagrass valiantly holding the sand dunes in place. It won’t come in the form of a raging geometric storm where the night sky dances wildly in vivid pinks a.nd greens evoking awe-inspiring beauty.
Instead, this storm slides in silently, accompanying the soft peach and pink streaks of dawn, as gentle waves deposit a body on a tiny patch of sand nestled between the rockpools.
Cecilia Cilento—CC to everyone unless she was in trouble—squinted into the summer glare as she navigated her car west along the C176. The plan had been to leave Geelong by four to avoid a sun-dazzling three-hour drive and the risk of hitting dusk-drawn wildlife. But her job as a registrar at the hospital meant plans were always fluid. Even so, she’d been particularly hopeful that today was the day everything would fall into place, and it had, right up until three thirty. The baby who went into foetal distress obviously hadn’t received the memo that this was CC’s precious weekend away. By four o’clock she’d been assisting with an emergency caesarean section.
Now, as she turned right at Woolsthorpe, Taylor Swift was rudely interrupted by the sound of cascading bells. CC pressed the ‘answer call’ button on the dashboard screen. ‘Hi, Mum.’
‘Hello, darling. All settled in?’ Anji said.
‘No, I got away late, but I should be there by eight.’ Her stomach rumbled. ‘I’m hoping one of the cuzzies has cooked.’
‘You’re taking something?’
CC swallowed the reply ‘As if I couldn’t with you and Nonna constantly in my head’. Their words that had kept her up until midnight baking instead of sleeping. ‘I made torta caprese and I’ve got two bottles of Prosecco.’
‘Are you sure that’s enough?’
Anji’s anxiety bounced from the car speakers both familiar and annoying. It had been a constant presence in CC’s life but always seemed heightened whenever she was visiting Kooramook and the Friend family’s holiday house affectionately known as the shack. It had made some sense when CC was small and heading off on summer holidays without her mother. Back then Anji had worried that CC would miss her and not miss her enough. She’d also worried that CC might do something that would jeopardise the standing summer invitation, which was the solution to Anji’s school-holiday childcare. As insurance, and in good Italian style, she had always sent CC loaded down with gifts. But these days Anji’s Kooramook anxiety was long past its usefulness or relevance.
‘Mum, it’s plenty. I promise that neither of us will be haunted by Nonna or Rosa. Besides, the cuzzies were raised by Julia so the fact I’m arriving with home-baked goods gives me automatic rockstar status.’
CC was related to the Friends—James, Ollie, Lily and Felix—by their sharing of great-great-grandparents. The Friends’ grandmother, Rosa, and CC’s grandmother, Maria, were first cousins, making CC and the four Friends third cousins. However, CC felt far more Italian than the Friends, probably because Rosa had devastated her rural Italian family by not only marrying a ‘ten-pound Pom’, Bert, whom she met in the migrant hostel in Australia, but by the more horrifying fact that he was Anglican. The shock waves had hit the Rizzuto family with the strength of a Sicilian earthquake.
As a result, CC’s grandmother, Maria, was married by proxy in Palermo before being allowed to step foot on the boat to Australia to join Alfonzo, her Italian-born husband. Maria had arrived in far north Queensland—a strange land with a strange language, the blandest food on the planet and dishwater the Australians dared to call coffee—sixteen hundred kilometres away from where Rosa lived. Whether it was the distance or the long reach of familial disapproval, the cousins didn’t communicate or see each other again for almost forty years despite being each other’s only relative in a foreign land.
They did, however, share the reality of only having one child each; and CC’s mother, Anji, had continued the tradition by only having CC—although that may have had more to do with her husband vanishing than any undisclosed fertility issues. Anji never mentioned CC’s father and CC had stopped asking about him long ago. His absence in their lives also extended to his family, who refused any contact. With the death of Alfonzo in an accident on a sugarcane plantation when Anji was sixteen, CC’s immediate family was matriarchal, and her extended family, in a very un-Italian manner, was thin on the ground. It wasn’t until she turned five and was invited to the shack that she’d learned she had relatives in Australia.
‘Zia Rosa has invited you to spend summer at the beach with Nonna,’ Anji had told her, ‘and your cousins.’
The discovery of the Friend cousins had changed CC’s life. For five weeks every summer and again at Easter, their presence broke up the loneliness of being an only child. For years she had counted down the days from Easter to the next summer, and she would have gladly given up Christmas if it had meant bringing Boxing Day and her arrival at the shack forward.
Twenty-five years later, her gut still fizzed with excitement when she was on her way to Kooramook. Tonight there was an extra zing because it was the first time in years that all the cousins would be at the shack together.
‘Are they scattering Leo’s ashes this weekend?’ Anji’s question broke into CC’s thoughts. ‘Is that why they’re gathering at the shack?’
Leo, the cousins’ father, had died suddenly and unexpectedly at seventy-four from a brain bleed two months earlier.
‘I doubt it,’ CC said. ‘I mean, if that was the purpose of the weekend, why would I be invited? Anyway, Leo wasn’t the biggest fan of the shack. I’m going to ask if I can stay there for the three months I’m rostered to Port— Shit!’
She braked hard—a kangaroo had jumped in front of the car. ‘Mum, it’s dusk and I need to concentrate. Love you, talk soon.’ She cut the call.
As she turned south off the Princes Highway she was greeted by the vista of a tranquil ocean and her shoulders immediately dropped. She pulled over and wound down her window, breathing in deep lungfuls of warm, salt-tanged air. Not for the first time she reminded herself that the crazy hours she was working and the experience she was gaining would eventually enable her to live somewhere along this coast, where glimpsing the ocean every day would fortify her and help her balance the caregiving aspects of medicine with her own needs. Not that CC was naive about the nature of the ocean. She knew it only took a change in wind direction and a drop in barometric pressure to turn joyous serenity into roiling, foaming danger.
The driveway of the shack was easy to find, marked by a towering Norfolk pine, the only substantial tree in two kilometres. Salt-laden winds challenged even the most dedicated gardeners and most people didn’t try to grow anything beyond wattle, but Bert and Rosa had both grown up on islands and had been more than up for the task. Now, well-established acacia hedges took the brunt of the wind, creating an oasis for other plants to thrive including fruit trees and a once impressive vegetable garden.
As CC indicated to make the turn, memories roared back. Life at Kooramook had contrasted so dramatically with her home life that visiting always felt like living on another planet. Home was quiet and routine ruled—school, homework, chores and the occasional outing with her nonna and Anji. Whereas at Kooramook the only rule enforced by Bert and Rosa was that they be home in time for dinner.
Leo and Julia would occasionally swoop in and out like magpies—two days here, two days there—organising and directing, and treating them to trips to the old art deco cinema in Portland to see the latest blockbuster movie and fish and chips on the beach. But as fast as they arrived, the cousins’ parents departed and the halcyon unstructured summer days returned. Oh how CC had adored them. She still experienced a shot of loss whenever she recalled the summer she and Felix had finished high school and Leo had congratulated them on being adults before waxing lyrical about the ‘freedom of the young’. CC had been shocked to realise this speech meant that her thirteen years of summer holidays at Kooramook were over and she’d grieved the loss. Fortunately, Ollie and Lily continued to invite her to visit, and for that she was ever grateful.
The tetanus-waiting-to-happen gate was propped open and CC parked her old Subaru wagon between James’s Mercedes four-wheel drive and Ollie’s brand-new RAM 1500. She didn’t recognise the Tesla that was also parked there. Although it was the sort of car Lily might wish to drive, CC knew the cost was prohibitive for a woman who lived from one short-term contract to the next with decent gaps in-between. Perhaps it belonged to Felix and Bronte. Apart from a quick chat at Leo’s funeral, CC hadn’t seen her youngest cousin and his partner in over two years.
As she stepped out of the car she heard the chatter of children and saw Lily playing pied piper, leading her nieces and nephews through the dunes up from the beach. CC waved.
‘You’re here!’ Lily enveloped her in a wet, sandy hug.
‘I am. Sorry I’m late, there was an—’
‘God, it’s good to see you.’ Lily pulled back without pausing for breath. ‘It’s been too long. I’m so glad you’re here. I need you here. We nee—’
‘Jesus, Lily!’ James’s frustration cut through the fast-fading light. ‘The kids are supposed to use the outdoor shower before coming inside. Now they’ve tramped sand everywhere.’ He stopped and squinted into the fading light. ‘Is that CC?’
‘Sure is,’ CC said.
He gave her a tight smile. ‘I didn’t know you were coming.’
A ripple of surprise ran through her—not at his directness because that was just James, but at the fact he didn’t know that Ollie had invited her. She was about to tell him, but James was saying, ‘Good to see you,’ and leaning in to kiss her briefly on the cheek.
Lily suddenly roared like a lion and chased Ollie’s youngest kid, Archie, into the house. His squeals of delight shook the old fibro walls.
James rubbed his temples. ‘God! I need a drink.’
‘I’ve brought Prosecco,’ CC said.
He gave her an indulgent look—one that said, of course you did. He always seemed entertained when she showed her Italian tastes, which she found odd as they both had Italian nonnas.
‘I’ve just opened a Coonawarra red, but Gretel will happily join you with bubbles.’ James hefted CC’s overnight bag from the boot, then stood still.
‘What?’ she said.
He grimaced. ‘You’ve still got time to back out.’
‘Back out from what?’
‘Utter chaos. It’s a zoo in there. Kids, who’d have ’em.’
She laughed. ‘Lily will have exhausted them at the beach, Ollie and Paige will soothe them with polpette, and Felix and Bronte will ignore them. In twenty minutes they’ll all be in a food coma and collapsed in front of a movie.’
‘Hmm, maybe. Mine are getting a bit old to fall for that trick.’
James ushered her inside and the familiarity of the shack circled her. It was the ultimate retro experience: a mix of the sixties, eighties and early 2000s. Bert had bought the block in 1966 and over the course of a couple of years had built the now iconic fibro-cement beach house with its distinctive angled roofline. Although it was now double its original size—and that wasn’t saying much—it still only had one bathroom and the outhouse added a second toilet. When the grandchildren had arrived, Bert built in the back porch with flywire screens and it became affectionately known as the ‘sleep-out’. It was where the boys had slept, and when CC had first arrived at Kooramook her older cousins had declared it a girl-free zone. By the time they were seventeen, that rule no longer applied and more than once CC had seen girls slip in and out under the white haze of moonlight, the bang and squeak of the screen door drowned out by the crash and roar of the surf.
Not a lot had changed over the years. The large living room was still filled with a mismatched selection of comfy couches circa 1990 and vinyl beanbags. Two dozen boxes of board games—everything from Monopoly to the more recent addition of Catan and Azul—were stacked on bookshelves, along with an eclectic selection of paperbacks that were either Christmas gifts or had been purchased from the second-hand book stall at the Kooramook market. The only real nod to the modern world was a small flatscreen television, which didn’t receive a signal but had a DVD player attached to it. CC remembered the video player that had preceded it and the drama that had unfolded when the well-worn copy of Toy Story broke.
Beyond the living room, the kids sat at the solid blackwood table that Bert had made. CC wondered how many meals had been eaten at that table over the years. She took in the familiar kitchen—pale green wooden cupboards with angled silver handles, grey and white patterned lino flooring, and the brown, yellow and orange wallpaper pattern of coffee percolators, cups, baskets of fruit and pepper grinders. A set of green and cream Bakelite cannisters, their contents labelled in cursive script, sat on the mantelpiece above the stove as they’d always done.
James spoke over the babble of voices. ‘CC’s here.’
Ollie turned from the stove, a wide grin on his face and a large spoon in his hand. CC got a flash of Rosa serving generous portions of polpette and pasta to starving teenagers after a day of surfing.
‘Cuzzie!’ Ollie set down the spoon and crossed the room in long strides before wrapping her in a hug. ‘It’s been too long. Thanks for making time,’ he said softly in her ear. ‘You need to be here.’
Surprised at the unusual seriousness of his words, she pulled back and tried reading his expression, but he’d already turned away and was talking to the kids.
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