The weather, at least, was on my side. As the shopkeeper searched her memory for directions, the black storm clouds began to dissolve, with shafts of 8 P.M. sunlight now urging me onward. (At this extreme latitude, the summer days are endless.) "Maybe you'd better check in here on your way back," she called encouragingly as I slipped out. "Otherwise we'll think you've been swept off to the South bloody Pole."

A few minutes later, I was hiking through a maze of coastal bush while kookaburra birds cackled above, as if mocking my whole demented project. When the scrub finally parted, I was on the brink of a three-hundred-foot-high sea cliff, facing a sparkling blue horizon. To the east and west, a series of raw headlands dissolved into the distance.

This was the very edge of Australia—next stop, Antarctica—and the wind hitting my face seemed to come directly from the ice floes. A wooden sign informed me that Wreck Beach lay at the bottom of 366 steps. This being Australia, another sign screamed DANGER and warned me to descend only at low tide. The steps were slippery, it went on, and the cliff surfaces unstable, so beware of falling rocks. Oh, and because of hazardous currents, don't even think of swimming.

Sheesh, I thought. Why not just say ABANDON ALL HOPE? But nowhere else in the world can you be alone in such a landscape, so I took in a lungful of polar air and set off.

Down at the thundering surf line, the visuals were ravishing. Polished cowries the size of tennis balls lay half-buried at my feet. The sun hung low in the sky, giving everything a golden halo. Soon the sand thinned out over an ancient platform of granite, where orange hermit crabs scuttled for cover in crystal pools. And then I spotted a man-made object: a rusted anchor, embedded upright in the rock like a nautical Excalibur. Alongside it lay an age-blackened shaft with heavy cogs, unmistakably from the Industrial Age. I'd already done some homework: These fragments arrived here on the night of November 25, 1869, when the French schooner Marie Gabrielle ran aground. Around the headland lay the anchor of the Fiji, lost with all hands in 1891. Tragic, of course—but in this remote world, news of any wreck was met with something more like glee by local farmers, who were always desperate for supplies. When the Fiji went down, looters arrived in droves to break up the crates of liquor as they washed up onshore, and to cart off expensive European clothes, children's toys, and a couple of grand pianos. Accounts describe the scene as a raucous beach bacchanal. Even the schoolteacher in nearby Apollo Bay put on his "holiday clothes" and set off with the kids to join in the festivities. Legend has it that a customs officer who tried to stop the fun was tossed off a cliff by drunken revelers. Maybe this beach was the source of my childhood shipwreck "treasure."

By now, nothing made of wood endured; anchors are always the last survivors. I've seen dozens in maritime museums, but none seized my imagination like these lonely sentinels: They were up there with my old wood and teacup as skeleton keys to the past. But Wreck Beach is no place for extended reveries. As if to snap me back to the present, a wave crashed onto the ledge and icy water surged around my calves, nearly pulling me down. The tide had announced its turn and the sun was sinking, so I scurried like a startled crab to higher ground.