Spotlight: Mornington glory

There's a photo that's always in my kitchen, faded by sun and decades. It's of my dad – long gone now – sitting on the chairlift that climbs to Arthur's Seat, a beauty spot with views over the Mornington Peninsula.

In the '70s, the chairlift was a chain of open-air metal seats with a safety bar that you pulled down over your waist. On his lap, he's casually dandling my youngest brother, no more than 10 months old. My other brother, age five, is on the seat beside him, thongs dangling precariously. With no foot rests and no floor, the chairlift claimed many solo thongs.

You can still catch a chairlift up Arthur's Seat, only now it's a far safer carrier in a more precarious world. The new Eagle gondolas still skim the top of the eucalypts. You can still spy kangaroos, and hear the birds calling to each other in the state forest below. I always wanted to live in one of the houses hidden among the trees, but I was never homeless on the peninsula. My young mum took me on my first holiday here, at our family's beach house on Safety Beach. Later, Mum reclaimed the area's old name for the beach house, and whenever I limped back to Australia – broke, homeless, jobless and partnerless – "Shark Bay" was always waiting.

My grandfather built the house from old packing crates in what's now the Peninsula's fading shack style: tilt-edged roof and a footprint that let you add rooms as the family grew. Everyone had a flaking caravan in the backyard, wheels picked off and bogged in the sandy soil. The vans harboured waves of teenage boys, devising stealth attacks on the local drive-in.

Dromana's drive-in survives, screening doubles on summer nights. You'll spy the huge screens, blue and flickering in the night, as you drive along the new motorway that connects what once were villages – past Mount Martha, on to Dromana, through Rosebud with its summer fairground. Then there's Rye and swanky Sorrento – renowned still for its vanilla slices. The end of the line is Portsea, where prime ministers, newspaper moguls and transport billionaires still hide among the tea trees, down sandy lanes that will never smell bitumen.

Mum's also gone: it's my beach house now. There's no need for more extensions, the caravan's disappeared, thrown on the bonfire one New Year's Eve before we all skinny-dipped in the cold water at midnight, boys howling as marine flares slashed the sky. But there's a new caravan at the end of the street. The reassuringly garish, candy-pink Café del Sol serves turmeric lattes and cacao treats to dog walkers and yoga-goers, who gather to salute the sun and the bay. And there's two decent supermarkets selling antipasti and salami.

The old generation, who recall the outdoor dunnies and desolate, windswept winters, are fading away now. The peninsula's schools are full and there's life year-round. We buy bottles of cold rosato from Gary Crittenden's vineyard on the old highway, and in Dromana's flood of beach-facing cafes we argue about which shop has its fish-and-chips mojo on this summer, and curse the council too insipid to ban jet-skis. Now shining with five-star hotels, feted wineries and hatted restaurants, the peninsula of my childhood has woken up. But the dolphins still coast the waves, rays flutter in the shallows, and our children still pat shell-studded sandcastles, moulded into their own little kingdoms that are dashed back into the sea at the end of every day.

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