BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL
The first time I visited the Northern Beaches, I didn’t get it. I was 19 and from country Victoria, and in what struck me as an arbitrary choice, my mum had selected Narrabeen as my family’s summer holiday destination that year. As we drove past the windswept, suburban-style condos and impervious warehouses that hem Pittwater Road, the main artery that runs from Manly in the south and Palm Beach in the north, I remember half-wishing we’d taken a wrong turn. We ended up having a great time – we always did on holiday – but I wasn’t heartbroken when it came time to leave.
In 2018, I moved from New York to Manly, via my home state of Victoria. This decision was slightly less arbitrary – I’d just landed a job at GQ magazine, and my boyfriend (also from Victoria) had taken a job in Sydney and moved up with a friend of ours six months prior. They’d settled in Manly, so I did too, on the assumption that as soon as the lease on their flat by the ferry wharf was up, we’d hightail it to the east or the inner west. I’d heard those areas were ‘cool’.
One frantic weekend of apartment hunting in the east was all it took for us to realise we were probably better suited to the relaxed pace of Manly. We signed the lease on a small unit with no exhaust fan in the bathroom and no rangehood in the kitchen, blinkered by the snippet of harbourage
