The great ice age had chilled the oceans, making the water contract and storing billions of tons of fresh water in the ice caps, smothering Europe and north America under ice and stealing water from the sea. The shoreline we know is only a few thousand years old and has shown significant changes in the lifetime of any adult, emphasising the dynamism of the margin and the power of the ocean when it grinds against the land. Sea levels have been steadily rising since records were first kept in Australia. Of course there is some sinking of the land as sediments settle naturally but there is the alarming link between the build up of carbon dioxide in the air and the rise of global temperatures. Human activity has amplified the processes of nature that warms the earth and we are the agents of rising sea levels.
Memory is an amazing force.
I was back in the littoral rainforest which grew along the beach between Crowdy Bay and Diamond Head. It was destroyed all those years ago by sandmining but in my mind it still exists. There were the Bird's Nest ferns and the Elk Horn and Stag Horn ferns on the tree trunks. Behind me was a great knobby paperbark that was a marker on the sulky track leading back across the swampy plain to the old family house. Byron Bay had vanished, replaced by childhood memories.