'Want to have the nostalgic beach getaway of your childhood? I know just the place.'

If you want to support independent women's media, become a Mamamia subscriber. Get an all-access pass to everything we make, including exclusive podcasts, articles, videos and our exercise app, MOVE.

The older I get, the more I realise that the beautiful simplicity of my own childhood experience is increasingly out of reach for my own children.

Screen time has stolen boredom, a loss of innocence (and parental access to true crime podcasts) has stolen their freedom to play alone in the street until dark, and an increasingly busy, insular society means riding a bike unannounced to a friend's house after school is no longer au fait.

And I know I sound like a reminiscing boomer, but perhaps it's why, these days, I gravitate towards family holidays that replicate some of those simpler times.

Earlier on in the gig, I became a little swept up in creating the types of family memories I thought we should have. Moments that could be neatly captured in the squares of an Instagram feed: picturesque hotel pools, theme parks, tours through wildlife parks.

And as grateful as we are for those experiences, my nervous system craves a more unstructured, authentic time these days.

Image: Supplied.

I'm less about fancy resorts with kid's clubs and waterslides, and much more in favour of rickety holiday rentals with cheesy art on the walls, dusty board games in the cupboards and family rounds of UNO on the deck, still salty from a day in the ocean.

In a world that increasingly seems too big, these little moments of joy mean all the more to me.

It's why, after bundling our three children up and driving them two-and-a-half hours south from the Gold Coast to the sleepy holiday village of Wooli, I felt myself exhale almost immediately.

Ringed by a dense national park, the road into Wooli unfurled like a dusty red carpet, flanked by towering eucalypt forest and farmland. And then, about 20 minutes off the highway, the thin, key-shaped spit of Wooli revealed itself.

With a river on one side, a beach on the other and hand-drawn signs announcing that the petrol station is also the general store, we could have just as easily been pulling up in the mid-nineties, Hanson blaring out of our car's CD player, Mambo teeshirts and boogie boards at the ready.

Because of the way the town is laid out along the skinny stretch of land, most of the village is only a few houses deep, with a rim of fishing cottages lining the glittering Wooli Wooli river on one side, and a row of ancient beach shacks nestled behind oceanfront dunes on the other.

Image: Supplied.

We unlocked the door to one of these beach shacks (most of them double as holiday rentals and long-held weekenders) and, in spite of the bone-aching July cold, a rush of warm nostalgia settled in.

A wooden gate out the back leads to a steep set of steps that took us up and over the dunes for a 180-degree view of the Coral Sea, the distant bump of the solitary islands just visible offshore.

We were the only people on the beach, which was strewn with treasures from the deep: cuttlefish as big as the kids' arms, shiny black stones pummelled smooth as Coke bottles by the surf, and tangled bits of sea sponge that the kids collected as if it were spun gold.

Back at the house, the contents of the games' cupboard were unceremoniously dumped on the lounge room floor. The kids whiled away another hour deep in the novelty of Other People's Stuff — a surefire winner every time — as my husband and I sat on the patio, hogging corn chips and guacamole.

Apart from the occasional punctuation from our dog — coughing up seawater from his own beach adventure before settling back down to lie at our feet — the only sound was that of the waves crashing behind the house.

Image: Supplied.

When dinnertime rolled around, we decided to meander 100 metres up the road to the local bowls club to check out the menu. To our deep delight, we discovered that it housed that pinnacle of all good regional towns: a Chinese restaurant.

Nothing ricochets me back into childhood family holidays like the sight of lumpy, golden prawn toast, glossy Mongolian lamb and impossibly-fluorescent sweet-and-sour pork.

I could write sonnets about the comfort of a — to coin a phrase — succulent Chinese meal, but suffice it to say that an hour-and-a-half later, every member of the family was full, drowsy and riding a sodium-and-grease high all the way back to our beds.

The following day, in spite of near-constant driving rain, we made our way up to land's end, where the jutting peninsula creates its own cul de sac just before the river mouth. Here, picnic huts and public barbecues dot the grassy patch before the sand, and water sluices off the towering sandstone cliffs to create a waterfall.

It's picturesque, even in this weather.

In Wooli, we're only about 40 minutes from Grafton — about the same distance from Coffs Harbour — and yet we may as well have been on a remote island. Down at the river mouth, three ancient locals sat in footy shorts and rain jackets, silently fishing in their camp chairs. They'd already landed two flatheads between them, and they nodded as we wandered past.

As quaint as this coastal village may be, it's not the place to go if you're looking for long, languid lunches at seaside cafés. But the beauty of its food offerings is in their simplicity.

An oyster shack — the outpost of an oyster farm stretched out into the river — doled out plump, freshly-shucked morsels. The petrol station did surprisingly good hot chips, heavy on the chicken salt. We cooked sausages on the backyard BBQ at our Airbnb, folding them into fresh white bread with thick butter and piling them with soggy onions.

By the end of our last day in town, it was hard to pinpoint a single 'activity' we'd done. Instead, the metrics of success for this getaway were different: 17 pieces of sea glass, housed in a ziploc bag that the kids have shared custody of. Three new words our five-year-old learned how to spell (poo, wee, bum) courtesy of Scrabble and her older brother. A shopping bag filled with sodden clothes after we got caught in a downfall before being treated to a spectacular rainbow.

I might not be able to recreate a nineties childhood for my Gen-alpha kids. But as Wooli faded in the rear-view mirror on our way out of town, I realised that I'd gifted them a little slice of it, if only for a long weekend.

Feature image: Supplied