A string of beaches

With the youngsters visiting extended family for the school holidays, I took some leave and my APs and headed up the East Coast for a few days of R&R.

On the first full day we headed north from Bicheno, visiting just about every beach that it was possible to pop into. They are all very pretty beaches, and I took lots of pretty photos, but I am struggling to remember which one is which. Here are the APs standing on one of them.

There was some lovely coastal vegetation, including banksia and a massive gum tree …

And then another beach.

Further north we came across the idyllic hamlet of Four Mile Creek, where a lagoon sometimes meets the sea and is bordered by an extensive swamp of grassy reeds …

which surpassed me in height and made for some interesting patterns and textures.

Although “one swallow does not a summer make”, the presence of two on a glorious October day must be a bit of a harbinger.

Just south of Scamander we came across the Winifred Curtis Reserve where we walked through some of the native vegetation out to the water’s edge and got to see just a little of the 75 hectare area of coastal bushland set aside in honour of Tasmania’s pre-eminent botanist.

As we headed towards Binalong Bay we revisited some places we’d seen over four years ago on another East Coast excursion. Here were granite boulders in abundance, and interesting light effects amongst the trees.

Our final stop was at Diana’s Basin, near St Helens, where there is a lovely wide beach with wind ripples in the sand, and another dammed lagoon giving the illusion of a desert landscape (the thin dark line between the sand and the sky in the last photo is actually the ocean, largely obscured by the slight hill of sand between the lagoon and the sea that acts as the dam).