Something odd is happening up and down the coast. Beaches are looking more and more like Nicholas Harding’s work. The shift was hardly noticed at first in little details of hats and dogs and heaps of towels. Then as he hit his stride a few years ago, whole stretches of the coast began changing before our eyes. Even the colour of the sea is different now. What’s been milky blue all my life has turned Nicholas’s deep, streaky green.

His beaches are the ones we remember from up the coast. Now they’ve come to town. There’s space again. Sunbakers lie in their own patch of sand. The crowd is quieter, plainer and older than it once was down here in the city. No flirting. They sleep and read. Grandfathers ride the swell on inner tubes.

This is the world before melanoma. It’s late afternoon. The sun’s been beating down all day. The wind’s getting up. But people are still out. Those scrappy pandanus that seemed barely alive before Nicholas noticed them, are huge in the landscape now. Forget Norfolk Pines. He’s made pandanus the signature trees of the coast.

Up at the caravan park, everything’s neat as a pin. Caravans take on a slumbering formality. Boats wait between fishing trips. The men sleep. Women stand about. Only dogs are on the go. But there’s no rush and no need to rush. Tomorrow will be just the same. Hot early. Windy late. Glare all day.

We’re astonished to see here what’s been around us all our lives. That’s this painter’s magic: to make us pay attention to the railway line up the street, a branch of magnolia in winter, the unglamorous world of the beach that’s never gone away -  a place of sand and light where the business of doing nothing is taken perfectly seriously.

David Marr 2006