You Are Here: Little Bay

Editorial Assistant Vanessa Bland ruminates on where she grew up in Little Bay and how it has since changed, but the ghost of its past lives on in those who remember.

When I was a kid, my sister and I used to write letters to the boogeyman.

He lived behind a door at Prince Henry Hospital, hidden behind filing cabinets in the medical records department, permanently locked and completely irresistible. Our mum worked evening shifts there and we’d spend hours drawing, playing hide and seek, and sliding notes under that door. We told him our secrets. We warned him not to come out. We never got replies.

Prince Henry is gone now. The door is gone too. I sometimes wonder if anyone found those letters when the buildings were stripped back and rebuilt into something far more expensive.

Little Bay has a way of making the past feel unfinished.

The hospital once dominated this headland, built to isolate disease and keep it well away from the city. People arrived here at the edges of their lives: patients, nurses, families waiting for news. When it closed in the early 2000s, it didn’t disappear so much as change its purpose. Wards became townhouses. Balconies now face the ocean where beds once did. People walk their dogs along footpaths that used to lead somewhere far more serious.

For five years in my 30s, I lived there too.

It was a quiet place, surprisingly social in small, suburban ways. Neighbours stopped to talk. People recognised dogs before names. My dog Georgie built an entire social circle—Frankie, Ziggy, Beau, Bonnie, Sidney, and Doug—a loose alliance held together by routine walks and mutual sniffing. It all felt very normal, which was weird given the ground we were standing on.

The beach at Little Bay still feels slightly tucked away. When the hospital was still operating, few people went down there. These days, summer crowds fill the streets and towels spread quickly across the sand, but the bay remains contained—cliffs on either side, water calmer than you expect, the city held at arm’s length. 

Walking the streets above the beach can be unsettling if you let yourself think about it for too long. Former wards have been polished into modern homes. Sandstone walls remain but their purpose has softened. Somewhere beneath new floors and fresh paint are rooms where people waited, recovered, deteriorated, or didn’t leave at all.

Before I was born, my grandfather died at Prince Henry. He was young. Living there years later, walking those same paths with my dog, that knowledge sat quietly with me—not frightening, just unresolved. I never got to meet him.

I once joined the Spirits of Prince Henry twilight tour, following a guide through the grounds at dusk as stories of strange sounds and sightings accumulated in the dark. It wasn’t the ghost stories that stayed with me so much as the scale of it all–how many lives had passed through here, and how efficiently they’d been absorbed into redevelopment plans and tasteful landscaping.

Little Bay is full of those unfinished things. Ordinary lives layered over extraordinary history. Children playing, swimmers floating in the shallows, dogs racing along the grass, the past staying just close enough to feel if you slow down.

The ocean keeps moving. The headland holds its shape. And somewhere, buried beneath concrete and memory, I like to imagine a few folded letters still waiting behind a door that no longer exists.