It was a scene worth savouring, because it will pass.

It was the giant rocky breakwater protecting the mouth of the Clarence River estuary that put me in mind of sunken Alexandria, the great marbled harbour, second only to Rome in its day. Enjoying a pale ale and watching the trawlers put out to sea, I wondered how much of that heavy engineering would survive the rising sea levels and increasingly ferocious storms of the next 100 years.

Maybe all of it. Those stones look as big as camper vans from the back deck of the Pacific and it would probably take a tsunami to smash them apart. But the relentless creep of rising sea levels? That will do fine for making an archeological ruin of this place. It will submerge those rocks, flood the riverine hinterland and excavate the sandy hillsides where the pub and the lighthouse and streets full of simple holiday homes currently enjoy such booming ocean views. And on current projections it will do it all in one human lifetime.

Yamba's Pacific Hotel, perched above the surf club. Credit:Bryce Ellis

Perhaps this is the way to think about the global catastrophe of climate change. Not globally, but locally. It’s hard to imagine vast oceans rising to swallow us whole. That’s a Hollywood movie. It happens somewhere else to people we don’t know. Easy though to think of the floods that sometimes submerge this place and towns like it, coming one day and just never going away. Hard to imagine all of civilisation laid waste. Easier to think of those trawlers laid up and rotting because the prawn beds and fishing grounds have disappeared.