The idea is announced at dinner the night before, which is a strategic error. It gives them too much time to object.
The children — aged somewhere between old enough to walk and old enough to be dramatic about it — receive the news of a pre-dawn family hike with the specific brand of silence that means they are already preparing their arguments. Dad tries to reframe it. It'll be an adventure. We'll see the sunrise. There's a view at the top. The family looks at him with the patience of people who have heard this before and are not convinced.
Nobody says anything. But nobody puts their phone down either.
This is, roughly speaking, the point. Dad has a theory — unproven, contested — that phones are making everyone soft and miserable, that fresh air and mild physical suffering build character, and that the memories that last are the ones that required some effort. The family has heard the theory. The family remains unconvinced. The family will come around. They always do, eventually.
The alarm goes at five-thirty.
The long car park, the sand hill, the beach
You drive out to the long car park in the dark, which in Hawks Nest means turning off the sealed road onto a corrugated track through the scrub that rattles the car and wakes up anyone who dozed off in the back seat. There are already three or four other cars here. Other families. Other dads with the same theory.
The sand hill down to the beach is steep enough to be fun even for people who are actively refusing to enjoy themselves. The kids run it — they can't help it — half-sliding, half-falling, arms out, sand spraying. Someone yells. It's not a complaining yell. The beach at the bottom is wide and empty and the light is just beginning to come up over the ocean, pale and pink and barely there.
The walk from the car park to the base of the mountain is five kilometres along the beach, and the offshore wind is doing its job — keeping the surface clean, the waves rearing up and peeling in that way they do when there's nothing pushing them onshore. Crystal blue water, the kind that looks cold from a distance but isn't. You can see the tailor schooling in the break, dark flickers in the face of the waves, turning and flashing. Someone makes a mental note: we have to go fishing tomorrow. This is the mental note that gets made every morning at this beach and acted on approximately never.
You make a mental note: we have to go fishing tomorrow. This is the mental note that gets made every morning at this beach and acted on approximately never.
Other families are out early, dogs sprinting after sticks, someone's fox red Labrador doing a full, accidental backflip into the surf after misjudging a wave — all four legs in the air, completely committed, completely wrong — and coming up shaking its head with an expression of injured dignity. The kids laugh. Properly laugh, not the polite kind. This is progress.
The sunrise hits just as you're halfway along the beach — brilliant and blinding, the sun coming straight up off the water with nothing between you and the horizon, and you have to shield your eyes to look at it. Someone says it's too bright. They are correct. Nobody moves away from it.
The rocks, and the start of the climb
The beach ends at a rocky headland and this is where the mountain begins — you can feel the mood shift as soon as you step off the sand. The rocks are the announcement that the easy part is over. The kids clock this. Dad pretends not to notice them clocking it.
The first section of the climb is in the shade of the gum trees, and after the exposed beach walk this feels like a reward. The track rises quickly and then levels out onto a ridge, the ground dry and sandy underfoot, the morning still cool enough that the climbing feels manageable. Kookaburras laugh from somewhere in the trees above you — that absurd, cascading call that sounds like they know something you don't. A wallaby erupts from the scrub about two metres to the left of the track and is gone before you've fully processed it was there. The kids freeze, then argue about how big it was.
Through the trees you start to get glimpses of the ocean — flashes of blue between the trunks, bigger as you gain height, the beach below getting longer and thinner. You wind through a patch of rainforest where the vegetation closes in and the air changes and it's darker and damper and there are ferns growing from the rock faces. Then the track opens up onto a small platform of bare rock and you're at the halfway mark and there's a view back toward Hawks Nest and Tea Gardens that stops everyone mid-complaint.
The family stands there for a moment. Nobody says anything. Below you: the Myall River mouth, the sand flats, the town, the estuary spreading out toward the sea. Tea Gardens on one side of the river. Hawks Nest on the other. The water between them the flat, brilliant blue of a cold clear morning. Someone takes a photo on their phone. Dad doesn't say anything about the irony of this.
The big climb
Then the ridge steepens and it stops being a hike and becomes something closer to climbing.
Four hundred metres, straight up. The track is more rock than path now, hands on knees on the steeper sections, the exposure growing on either side. The kids have stopped talking, which means they are genuinely working. This is, secretly, the best sign. The complaining stopped about two hundred metres below the summit and was replaced by breathing and the sound of boots on rock and occasional short, factual statements: this is steep. Yes it is. How much further. Not far. Is that far. No.
The last section is the hardest — a near-vertical scramble up to the trig station at the peak, where previous visitors have left padlocks on the structure in that tradition that has spread to every summit and bridge in the country and that nobody fully understands but everyone participates in. You reach it breathing hard, legs burning, and stand there for a moment just recovering.
The top — and a mild disappointment
There's a glimpse of Fingal Bay on the other side — a sliver of blue through the scrub on the eastern face. You've heard about it. You crane for it. It's fine. It's a glimpse.
But turn around and look back the way you came and the view to Hawks Nest and Tea Gardens is something else entirely — the whole sweep of it, the two towns and the river between them and the estuary and the lakes beyond and the ocean on the other side of the peninsula. You could stand here for an hour and keep finding new things in it. The paddocks. The channels. The sandbars at the river mouth, pale and shifting.
One of the kids says: I thought there'd be more.
You point them at the view to Hawks Nest.
A pause. Then: oh. That is actually pretty good.
This is, by any reasonable measure, a win.
The way down
Going down is faster and easier and the mood lifts noticeably with every hundred metres of descent. By the time you're back in the gum trees the kids are walking without being asked to keep moving, which is new. By the time you hit the rainforest section again someone is pointing out plants. By the time you reach the rocks at the bottom and step back onto the sand, everyone is ready for a swim.
They don't ask. They just go in. Shoes off, shirts off, straight into the water, which is exactly as warm as it looked from the mountain. You stand at the edge watching them and take one last look back up at the peak — it's harder to see now from this angle, the summit disappearing into the scrub — and feel something that isn't quite pride but is in the same postcode.
The walk back along the beach is easy. The offshore wind is still running. The tailor are still in the break. We really should go fishing tomorrow. The kids walk without complaint. Someone finds a sand dollar. Someone else picks up a shell and carries it the whole five kilometres back to the car park without really knowing why.
The Boathouse, the roll, the end
The Boathouse at Tea Gardens does a bacon and egg roll that is, in the specific context of having just climbed a mountain with children who did not want to, the best thing you have ever eaten. Soft white roll, streaky bacon, fried egg, barbecue sauce. A flat white. You sit outside and look at the river and the family eats in silence, which after this morning is a different kind of silence from last night's silence. This one is the good kind. The earned kind.
The kids finish first, as always. Someone puts their phone away without being asked. Someone else leans back in their chair and looks at the river for a while.
Dad doesn't say I told you so. He doesn't need to. The family knows. The family will pretend they don't know. But next time someone suggests Yacaaba at dinner, the resistance will be slightly softer, the silence slightly shorter, and somewhere under the performance of reluctance there will be, just barely, the beginning of a yes.
That's the memory. That's the whole point of it.