IT WAS LATE JUNE when Manly Beach disappeared… or a large swathe of it, anyway.

Previous days had brought a high tide and big swell — good news to local surfers, perhaps, but not so good for those who had taken the ferry from the city to take a dip in Manly’s clear, clean waters.

Looking south along the beach, or along what had been the beach, the scale of the erosion can be seen. The building atop the esplanade is a restaurant, once the old tourism centre. The apartments at the far end of the beach stand on the headland above the surf club.

Classic northern beach – a place in history

Manly beach, just a 15 minute walk from where I live, is one of those classic Sydney northern beaches… a long crescent of sand that starts down by the surf club under the headland to the south, and extends in a golden arc all the way to Queenscliff in the north.

That’s a few kilometres of sand and cascading Pacific swells that expend their energy as lines of foaming, white froth. It’s this that brings the tourists from the less favoured, drier parts of the city, places that are deprived of the simultaneously calming and exciting sound of crashing surf.

Significantly, Manly is also the place where surfing is believed to have been born in Australia. In 1915, a Hawaiian known as Duke Kahanamoku rose from his heavy, timber board to spark the imagination of those with an adventurous mindset and to start something new in this country. According to Surfsearch, a local, Snowy McAlister, ” …saw Duke Kahanamoku in 1915, and soon after began surfing on his mother’s pine ironing board.”

The cut made by the swell excavated the beach quite close to the seawall. Council was quick to erect a barrier along the top of the seawall so careless tourists would not lose their balance and topple onto the rocks below and, probably, to protect themselves from law suits had this happened.

Sand comes, sand goes, the beach comes again

Disappearing sand is a small loss to the beach because this is the way things have always been. The beach is a dynamic zone… forever changing but always the same (thanks to G Wayne Thomas for that phrase). Sooner, rather than later, the currents that ply the turquoise waters will replenish that missing sand that is now located offshore as new sandbars and drifts.

So it is with the ocean – what is taken is returned. A disappearing beach is just one, temporary, phenomenon in those mysterious, cyclic processes by which nature restores itself and, in so doing, restores our sense of wonder about the world.

The erosive energy of the sea is clearly visible in this image. It has undercut the steps and eroded right up to the seawall. Fortunately, the steps suffered no structural damage.

Postscript: Within a couple weeks the beach had returned. The council barriers were removed and once again put into storage. Tourists paddled and splashed in the breaks again; locals and visitors rode the swells as they have  done for a century. The rocks disappeared below the sands.

Then, in late July, it happened again. Away went the beach and up went the barriers as the rocks reappeared where ever so recently sand had covered them. The great Sea God had again reached out to borrow some fill but, as he has done these thousands of years, he will return them for the pleasure of us humans, as if to stimulate a curiousity at the forces he commands.. and restore our sense of wonder about the world.

Attribution: The phrase “forever changing but always the same”; G Wayne Thomas from his song Day Comes, from Morning of the Earth.

The long view, looking north. You can see the original height of the beach from the embankment that has been cut close to the esplanade. That’s a lot of sand that was scooped out and carried off by the swirling, crashing waters. It is as if the Sea God had moved its great hand to take back what it had lent to the land. The rocks that litter the foreground had been dumped there by Manly Council 20 or so years ago to stabilise the beach against events such as this. They dissipate the sea’s energy as it crashes and swirls around them, reducing its erosive power. Apparently, the idea worked.