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In Praise Of...

Lady Martins Beach

by Hannah-Rose Yee

The first thing you have to do is check the tides. I feel like an explorer— like someone who knows the names for various different knots—every time I log onto tides dot willyweather dot com dot au to find out if a trip to Lady Martins Beach in Point Piper, Sydney is on the cards. 


If you’re in luck and it’s low tide, this little skirting board of a harbour beach that hugs the very edge of Point Piper before it empties out into Rose Bay, will have a strip of sand wide enough for you to throw a towel upon. If you’re unlucky, and I’ve been unlucky so many times, you’ll misjudge your timing and it’ll be high tide. Waves so forceful they’ll give you a bit of a fright will come crashing all the way up to the walls of the houses that look down imperiously onto the water. If you’re not careful, you’ll be completely washed out. Beach bag sent floating into the sea, towel covered in sand and seaweed, phone, wallet, book—everything—soaked through. 


There is a thrill in all this. A trip to Lady Martins Beach is like a game of Russian Roulette. Are you going to find a beach or are you going to find nothing but water as far as the eye can see? Are you going to beat the tides or are you going to… not? There’s barely an amenity in sight: no public bathrooms, no shower, no coffee cart. You have to be prepared if you want to swim at Lady Martins. You have to BYO. You need to be a planner, a do-er, someone whose first thought when faced with a clear blue sky and a morning stretching out before you like a song is to check tides dot willyweather dot com dot au.


You need to be someone who understands that a good part of the joy of a beach day is in its stripped back simplicity. What you see at Lady Martins is absolutely what you get, and what you see is this: a beach like the dream of a beach, sun-kissed and serene and solitary. Even at its most heaving, on a blistering day when everyone in Sydney— everyone on the whole of Australia’s eastern seaboard—is by the water, you’ll probably be sharing this fifty metre marriage of sand and sea with about, oh, eight other people. Tide checkers, the lot of them. My sort of people.  

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