‘We are custodians’: the fights to save Australia’s eroding beaches

Snaking conveyer belts of sand' are easily disrupted by human activities. Fixing them is no easy task

Graham Slade says Point Lonsdale front beach was a site of many firsts: he was four years old when he first walked on to it, seven years old when he was given his first surfboard and a teenager when he took his first steps into adulthood on its sand.

As you go through life, everything happened at Lonsdale first," Slade says. You went out to a lot of parties in your late teens, getting towards 20 years old, and sampled a few things.