Sowing Memory Seeds

Thanks to all you who posted you photos on Remadee’s facebook page. All those amazing beach photos will become happy memories for generations of New Zealanders. Often the first thing I think of when I look back on my childhood are those amazing summer holidays at the beach with my family.

In the days when the whole of New Zealand closed for three weeks so that families could Karitane Beachget together for a break my family would make the trip to Karitane Beach, just North of Dunedin. A couple of days after Christmas we would pack the old Vangard car to the ceiling with Bags, enough food to feed the troops and children and Go. How we managed to fit 9 of us and all that stuff into that car I don’t know and how we managed to get all that up the Kilmog Hill on the road to Karitane I am even more perplexed, but we did it and we had loads of fun in the process.

Old carMy favourite memories are wave jumping on the main beach and avoiding the “shark” (A pointy rock that would just sit under the water level at high tide and cast a dark shadow that my older sisters would try to scare me with saying that it was a shark), collecting pipis in the estuary and fishing for mullet, watching the fishing boats come into the warf laden with their catch and buying freshly caught fish directly from the boat owner(This was in the days before fishing quotas), walking along the rocks to the left of the main beach at low tide, playing cards at night by candle light and cooking & boiling water on the coal Range (We didn’t have electricity in the cottage we stayed in). From memory the house we stayed in was an old fisherman’s cottage similar to the one in the picture below. 

Fishermans cottage

 Continuing the tradition of creating memories my wife Glenyss and I take our annual beach holiday at Whangamata. While we don’t get to enjoy the luxury of a coal range, cards by candle light or buy fish straight from the wharf, the beach, Clarke & Donut Islands, the estuary and harbour are becoming a sea or wonderful memories for us and our four children. I wonder what places will capture the memories of generations of my family to follow and I hope that you will all have a chance to sow some “memory seeds” at the holiday places you and your families gather at.

 

 

Sunset on Whangamata Estuary

Sunset on Whangamata Estuary

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