CONTINENTAL DRIFT

The tiniest treasure found on the shoreline can span the greatest of times and distances, writes RICHARD COOKE.

The tiniest treasure found on the shoreline can span the greatest of times and distances.

Ihave been beachcombing my whole life, and by now it has become more like an instinct than a hobby. My feet touch sand, and a moment later I am walking the tideline, head down, picking up the odd shell or stone for a closer look. I have never found a real treasure, but no expectations seems like a plus to me. When I beachcomb, any hard-to-find objects are a long way from my mind, instead of goals to covet or search for.

It’s a good way to explore new places, but I prefer familiar bits of coast, especially the South Coast of New South Wales. It isn’t very productive, and that sets the right conditions for luck.

Like many beachcombers I don’t bring much home – these years have not produced a collection of any size. Somewhere I have some pieces of sea glass, collected before I knew that was what it’s called. Some people call it

“drift glass”, which sounds appealing. Drift glass is made when saltwater rolls pieces of broken bottles over the ocean floor, as though rubbing them against sandpaper. These rounded, frosted shapes take decades to form, as long as a century. It has local variations as well – along the pebbly beaches of the Amalfi Coast, you can find ceramic shards, smoothed terracotta with colourful blue-and-white patterns on top, from long-discarded tiles or pottery work. I kept these, but was not upset when they disappeared.

There are hundreds of pieces of ceramic among the Positano beach pebbles, but it is rare elsewhere. That’s true of things like shark eggs as well – they cluster, and then disappear, sometimes over just a few kilometres. Large shells are rare everywhere. At a childhood holiday beach house, I used to read an old book about beachcombing, with a photo of a lavish tropical shell on the cover. The book had big pictures and not very many words, and I read it over and over. It said the most beautiful shells were very hard to find, and older people told me that they used to be more common, before poachers had access to scuba gear. There was only a slim chance I would find the nautilus shell I was looking for, the one that had journeyed a thousand kilometres south to meet me, but slim is not zero.

Instead, the things I found were beautiful but not rare. There were no conches or cone shells, though I had touched the ones my uncle had brought back from Papua New Guinea. I liked sea urchins where the spines had been plucked out by the weather (these are called “tests”, and their mouths are named “Aristotle’s lantern”). A coconut is good, if you are a long way from the tropics, because it has come a long way. Sometimes common finds are interesting en masse: a few strands of bluebottle jellyfish stinger don’t attract much attention (only enough to avoid stepping on them), but a whole beach neon with tentacles and Admiral’s Hats? That stays in your memory.

That book said a beachcomber’s greatest prize was a glass buoy, let loose from an old fishing net. I can picture this bauble immediately, wrapped in rope hatching, the colour not lustrous but rich, like it had taken on the tint of the sea (perhaps this blue-green was meant to be camouflage). The buoys, the book said, had not been made for a long time, and came from Japan.

For one to arrive in Australia, it would have to escape a spiralling current in the Pacific and drift across the waves for years. More valuable items can be found on beaches – ambergris, the whale vomit used to make perfume, is more costly than gold – but these mysterious curios have retained their appeal. There are whole books dedicated just to collecting them. I saw one of these buoys in a shop not long ago, but did not think about buying it. Not when there is one to be found somewhere, still cool with sand.