I grew up in a normal Australian family… at least to the degree that any Australian family can be considered normal.

It might be simple nostalgia – looking back from my forties while stuck in a wheelchair – but I had a truly wonderful childhood. In my mind, I see nothing but sunshine and endless bright-blue Sydney skies.

I honestly can’t recall much about going to school – nothing original or meaningful anyway – but I vividly remember playing in our backyard swimming pool, roller-skating, teaching my baby brother how to ride a skateboard, going on bushwalks through the nearby national park, and stuffing our tiny sunburned cheeks with juicy purple mulberries that grew by our back fence every spring.

Then just when I thought my life couldn’t possibly get any better, it did. When I was eight, my parents bought the Surfside Pie Shop in Newport, and our family moved to Bilgola Beach. We had all the cake we could eat and were walking distance to the ocean. Surfing soon became a huge part of my life – I went to bed almost every night with sea salt in my eyelashes. It was a child’s paradise.

If I close my eyes I see small bare feet running, always running, on grass, down summer-scorched footpaths and across white-gold sand. I focus on that exact moment when the clean dry sand meets the hightide mark, where the chirp-like squeak of each heel-strike becomes a wet-thud-drumming as I race to the water. It’s not a soundscape I was conscious of back then. But it is now.

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