It is a wholesome thing to walk the length of the Broulee spit after a southerly buster and take an inventory of what the ocean has rejected. Men spend their lives managing accounts in rented rooms, content to admire the foam from afar without once inquiring what the tide has brought to market.

Here, cast up upon the ribbed sand between the high-water mark and the dunes, lies the true commerce of the globe. A square inch of cork, a tangle of bull-kelp resembling the sinews of an ox, three plastic fragments worn as smooth and impersonal as beach-pebbles, and a section of turpentine-pile gnawed by the teredo worm until it is as porous as bread.

The political economist tells us of supply and demand, but he has never stood knee-deep in the wash to observe how thriftily the sea disposes of its refuse. Yet the plastic fragments were rounded by the surf; their account was not therefore settled. Every stick of drift-timber has its history; every shell is a house whose tenant paid no rent to the crown. I measured a cedar log cast up near the granite rocks—twenty feet of sound timber, salt-seasoned and stripped of bark by the friction of the shoals. It might have come down the Clyde; the salt had left me no address. Now it lies here, waiting for no man’s sawmill, serving merely as a seat for a solitary cormorant drying its wings against the wind.

A man may walk these sands for five miles and purchase more genuine philosophy for the price of a pair of wet boots than he can carry away from the custom-house at Moruya.

To survey a piece of land is to draw lines across the earth’s rough skin and pretend you have captured its essence, but the salt-marsh behind the Tomakin headland mocks the surveyor’s chain.

I spent an hour yesterday setting my eye along the margin where the fresh soak from the tea-tree swamp meets the tidal salt. The surveyor’s rod sinks six inches into grey ooze before it finds a bottom of decomposed banksia roots and ancient shell-grit. Here is a boundary no title-deed can fence: a fluid frontier governed by the shifting play of tide, river-water, and the bar.

The glasswort grows right up to the edge of the bitter water, turning the color of dried blood under the autumn sun, while the mangrove sends up its blunt, wooden breathing-tubes through the mud like a multitude of tiny sentinels reporting upon the state of the underworld. They pay no taxes to the shire council. They neither buy nor sell, yet they maintain their holdings against every gale that drives across the bight.

We are all of us land-surveyors by trade, dividing our lives into rectangular lots of thirty years each, fencing our thoughts against our neighbors and building breakwaters of legislation against the tide. Yet a spring tide erases the pegs; the title remains in town.

To sit upon a granite boulder at the edge of the marsh, with a crust of bread in your pocket and no compass in your hand, is to discover that you own nothing at all—and to suspect that your title is all the better for the reminder.

From the edge of the coastal scrub, where the salt-spray has pruned the banksias into flat-topped umbrellas, I heard today the dry, metallic stroke of an ax.

Some settler up the creek was clearing a patch of stringybark for fence-posts, the blows coming across the water at irregular intervals—clack, pause, clack—like the heartbeat of a reluctant machine. Across the bay, the ocean answered with its deeper, unhurried percussion against the bar, two rhythms keeping time in a universe that cares nothing for either of them.

We are perpetually apologizing for our industry. We cut down the forest to build houses, and then we write poetry about the loneliness of the rooms inside them. We harness the river to drive our timber-mills, and then we walk down to the mouth to marvel at the pristine wildness of the bar.

Yet the tree knows nothing of our poetry, and the surf knows nothing of our timber. The ax-man can know whose land he cuts, what the posts are for, and what will remain when the slope is cleared. The tide need keep no account of him. That does not discharge his own.

As the sun went down behind the ridge, turning the estuary to the color of beaten copper, the ax fell silent. The cormorants flew low across the water in a single black string toward the islands. The tide turned, slipping back through the gut with a faint, gurgling murmur, leaving the world to its own nocturnal economy.

A man does well to keep his accounts in order; he should not suppose that the returning tide has settled them.