A rock sticks out from the sea up the beach a bit from where I spent my youth.
Shag Rock, we always called it.
Cormorants, also known as shags, regularly perch together on the rock for their ritual plumage-drying, with wings extended, after diving for their dinner.
Homes in south-west Victoria were destroyed when the sea reclaimed the land.Credit: Courtesy of the Vern McCallum Collection
Somehow Google got the idea – perhaps from a well-intentioned tourism booster – that the feature is called Mermaid Rock, and that’s the dreamy name it has been given on Google Maps.
A very long time before Google Maps came along, however, Shag Rock held an important place in my family’s history.
The old people in the 1800s used it as a guide to the tides.
They had a farm on the south-west Victorian coast which required them, whenever they took an excursion along the beach by horse-drawn buggy or wagon into the only town thereabouts, to cross a river where it flowed into the sea.
In the absence of a bridge, the river mouth was impassable at high tide, but could be forded with relative ease when the tide was low and the seawater did not flood in.
And so, when they were done visiting friends or shopping in town, my ancestors took great interest in Shag Rock as they plodded homewards.
We’ll be stuck like shags on a rock when sea levels really surge
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12.01.2024
A rock sticks out from the sea up the beach a bit from where I spent my youth.
Shag Rock, we always called it.
Cormorants, also known as shags, regularly perch together on the rock for their ritual plumage-drying, with wings extended, after diving for their dinner.
Homes in south-west Victoria were destroyed when........
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