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When I watch the tiny waves moving across the sand and turn on the gravelly shore I always contemplate year eleven physics. Somehow, the observation of wave movement in a shallow pond and Port Phillip Bay always link up in my mind, though that the angle of antecedence is equal to the angle of refraction isn’t a piece of information I’ve ever felt very useful.

The waves roll at low tide on barely a foot of water the colour of mostly flat beer. It’s the colour of the sand underneath, patterned like the underside of a whale in that other bizarre scientific theory of the symmetry of chaos.

I try to avoid the pier gravity and walk along the sweep of beach. If it was somewhere warm and tropical it would be exotic, but as the breeze is cold, the water is freezing and scrub is tangled and dry without a palm tree in sight it’s more mundane. Even so the glare over exposes my eyes, I need to walk with the sun behind me as its falling over the west.

My shoes crack on long dead bi-valves, sprays of dried seaweed like deep fried parsley and kick at the oyster and mussel shells. It’s strangely peaceful, though there’s a muffled motorized drone from the freeway, whistles and chirps from birds in the scrub and the occasional flack of wing beats. Seagulls croak, quack, chortle, bleat and cluck covering their whole range of emotions from discontent to grumpy.

But the water seems to absorb all the sound, its as though I’ve gone deaf in one ear, no sound is traveling across the water. I’m beside an oratory sump, an unseen membrane between parallel worlds, only the soft hush of waves betrays its existance, the natural filter of an enormous fish tank.

The colours deceive. The water tones change suddenly, from the caramel foreground to a baby blue then a strip of cerulean much darker than the pale sky with its scuffy streaked puffs of cloud. The greens of the ti-tree and scrub and sharp grasses range from olive to cream. The inland hills of Arthur’s seat, the resident dead volcano, barely a mound, are navy in the moody shade of approaching rain, as are the pimples on the horizon across the water, the You Yangs. Only a haze lies to the north where distant Melbourne high-rises should be. And the sand is a mishmash of grit, mollusks and stones. Yet it all seems to blend seamlessly, as though a thread of blue in the psyche.

I walk back along the boardwalk, back into a human world, the hollow clunk of feet on wood and the burble of talk back radio from the car park, along with Italian, Greek and Vietnamese fishermen commiserating. Locals walk dogs, tourist take photos, children chase irritable hungry gulls.