My sleepy childhood holiday town is now a place for millionaires

Whenever I find myself enamoured by a destination, I tend to hover outside real estate windows, eyeing up available property and questioning whether I could see myself living there permanently. That little log cabin in the woods in the intriguingly named Story, Wyoming, almost had me; then there was that Juliet-balconied apartment overlooking a cobbled laneway in Bellagio, Lake Como.

For my father, temptation came in the form of a beachfront block at Hawks Nest on the NSW Mid-Coast, our family’s favourite summer holiday destination in the mid-1970s. During a scout around the newly developed Winda Woppa housing estate in 1976, he happened upon a beachfront block on The Boulevarde, overlooking the white sands of Jimmys Beach. It was for sale for the princely sum of $7000.

“Buy it, buy it!” we three kids shouted from the back seat of the Holden Premier, the potential transaction no more complicated than the purchase of a Paddle Pop. Even my mother seemed keen, visions of a glamorous seaside holiday home competing with her innate unpretentiousness.

My father, however, was a conservative man who believed that the bank was where money was wisely invested; property was a risky prospect best avoided. Although sorely tempted (and harangued by his children), he eventually declared the land too expensive, and not a safe enough financial bet.

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We never did forgive our father for this decision; and, 50 years on, my siblings and I still lament his lack of foresight, with waterfront properties in Hawks Nest now worth up to $3 million.

The concept of an annual holiday was a relatively new one for our family in 1973, when we first joined the queue for the dinky vehicle ferry that then putt-putted across the Myall River from Tea Gardens to the otherwise isolated peninsula of Hawks Nest that formed the northern entrance to Port Stephens.

The owner of a suburban newsagency, my father worked seven days a week, refusing to take time off for the first 15 years of marriage until my mother finally put her foot down in 1970 and booked a cruise to Fiji, followed by a second cruise in 1972. Workaholism finally contained, a week’s break each year then became mandatory, with short road trips beyond Newcastle to the golden shores of Hawks Nest a more realistic and achievable venture than overseas jaunts.

Not that we were slumming it by holidaying in our own backyard. Our accommodation of choice was a spiffing new motel, Hawks Nest Lodge, opened in 1972 and located just one block from the beach.

We thought we were pretty fancy-pants in our swish digs, lording it over kids we befriended from the caravan park across the road, who had to slum it in tents while we dive-bombed into a swimming pool metres from our room.

I recall we were the only kids staying in the Lodge that first year; and Dad soon regretted booking a poolside apartment, complaining that our noisy antics were ruining his chances of a sleep-in.

But the great Australian holiday is more about salt and sand than chlorine.