It is easy to forget, watching the breakers roll in past the island at Tomakin, that the fault lines do not care about property values. By October the wind has a specific, dry thinness to it, rattling the dry banksias and bringing up the smell of salt and old creosote from the bridge piles at the river mouth.

One tends to notice the small, unaddressed things here: the rusted hinges on the stormwater drain, the way the bitumen buckles near the caravan park, the local notices pinned to the library board about water restrictions that no one quite believes will happen until the tanks are empty. There is a prevailing illusion along this coast that if you keep your accounts in order and paint your weatherboards every three years, the ocean will somehow respect the boundary line.

It never does, of course.

I sat on the low concrete wall by the boat ramp on a Tuesday morning, watching an old man hose down an aluminium dinghy while his dog—a small, sandy terrier with a nervous eye—barked mechanically at the wash. Nobody was speaking. In places like this, people develop a kind of defensive taciturnity, as if silence could act as a breakwater against whatever is coming up from the south. You can see it in the way they look at the horizon: not with romantic awe, but with the steady, calculating squint of people who know that the geography they are standing on is fundamentally provisional.

The radio in the truck was playing static interspersed with fragments of a shipping forecast—gale warnings off the Eden grounds, southerly busters moving north at thirty knots. Nobody turned it down. They just watched the water turn that peculiar, slate-gray shade that precedes a change in the weather, waiting for the exact moment when the salt spray hits the windshield and the town folds up its camp for another season.

It is an immaculate form of self-deception, this belief that a concrete boat ramp or a municipal boundary can hold back an advancing front. Yet everyone participates in it. They sweep the veranda; they check the tie-downs on the caravan annex; they look out over the bar and pretend that tomorrow will be identical to yesterday, right up until the wind shifts and the sea reclaims the margin.