Each year I insist we visit the same beach. Repetition tricks the mind into thinking a thing will last for ever | Jenny Sinclair

You never step into the same river twice. But you can step into the same ocean, or so it seems, each January when we take that first swim: ducking our heads under a wave to feel the rush of cold and the sting of salt, shaking like dogs when we emerge, washed clean of the year just gone.

When I was a child, it was Phillip Island: a green canvas tent in my grandfather’s back yard; a chipped foam surfboard rasping against my skin as I lay on it, just floating in the channel between the island and the mainland, never daring to go into the actual surf. It was the acrid smoke of mozzie coils and the oily texture of the battered flake from the fish and chip shop. Showers under the tank stand; the sun burning our skin until it peeled.

Now, for my kid, it’s Point Roadknight beach, Anglesea, Victoria: the broad strand of the beach at low tide, pockmarked with lukewarm, ankle-deep paddling pools; the hot sand turning cool underfoot as the track home enters the band of trees between the beach and the car park; a flat, wide rock platform jutting out beyond the point, appearing and vanishing under sheets of foaming water.

No canvas tent for him; instead, a succession of rented beach houses, rebooked the moment we departed (or, as one after another was sold for increasingly prohibitive prices, found in a desperate online hunt for a place on the “right” side of the Great Ocean Road). No peeling skin either, with the slip-slop-slap, long-sleeve rashies and shade tents. But always the same beach, the same routine, the same half-hearted attempts to Do Something Today, relapsing into walks and reading and takeaway for dinner – again.

The blurring together of those seven days in any given January week seems like the point; a blurring of details and dates that becomes the blurring of years into each other, creating an overarching sense of a single summer going on all through childhood. That’s how Phillip Island feels in my memory: as if, each year, a door opened and we stepped through it into a place where parents were always around, the sun was always shining and getting dressed meant putting on a T-shirt. As if that place was everlasting, ever-present, and all we had to do was decide to visit; as if even now, we could.

It ended when my grandfather died. His house was sold and part of the money went towards the only overseas holiday of my childhood: two weeks in a campervan in New Zealand, where us kids bickered and punched each other and I read books and refused to look at mountains. I was maybe 11 or 12 then, so perhaps I would have lost interest in family beach holidays soon anyway. Perhaps it was that abrupt end that fixed the island in my memory, turned it into one looping summer’s day, playing like a home projector movie in the back of my mind.

Those memories, I know, are why I love the idea of going back and back again to just one place; why I insist on the same beach, year in, year out. I want to give my kids that familiarity and repetition that tricks the human mind into thinking a thing will last for ever. Part of me hopes that my older child, a young man really, who wouldn’t go to the beach now if you paid him, has a corner of his soul where ripples refract over yellow sand, tiny crabs are miracles and ice-creams before dinner are not only allowed, they are encouraged.

His little brother still loves it, and is young enough to be unaware that things will change: that the adults who move around him like so many constellations in an evening summer sky will not always be there; that there will be many days that are not good.

So we go back, and back, hoping to construct for him an inner landscape, just beyond a door that memory can open any time: a place where everyone is together, nothing is wanting and life’s essence is sun on his skin, wind over water and the moment when he dives, hot and tired, from dry land into elemental water.