A letter from a reader

At 64, I had carried my husband's old backpack on every holiday for forty years, and I looked like I was off on school camp in every photo

The last thing I wrote by hand was a postcard from Bicheno to Jenny over the road, and it got home three days after we did. I am not a writer, and I have never thought it was my place to tell another woman what she ought to carry.

But three women asked me about a bag at an oyster shed in Tasmania last month, and one of them was Graham's cousin Gaye, who has not said a kind word about anybody's anything in thirty years. So I am writing it down once, properly, because it took me forty years to work out and it might take you less.

It started last Christmas. My granddaughter found the holiday photo albums in the bottom of the linen press and sat on the lounge room floor going through them, Port Macquarie, the Gold Coast, the Barrier Reef, Uluru, the lot. Then she held one up at me.

Nan, why are you always dressed for school camp?

I went and looked over her shoulder. Forty years of holidays, and in every single one of them I had Graham's old navy backpack on my shoulders. On the beach in a good summer dress. At the Opera House with my pearls on. In front of Uluru. Every time, the straps of that backpack and a face like I was about to lead a bushwalk.

And the back of every summer dress I owned had two damp stripes down it by eleven o'clock in the morning. I had just stopped noticing.

Why I always took the backpack

It was never because I wanted to. It was because when you go out for the whole day, there is a whole day of things to carry. Sun cream, hat, a cardigan for when the wind comes up, water, a bit of lunch, Graham's sunglasses, which he hands to me the minute he takes them off.

And there only ever seemed to be two kinds of bag for that. There was my good handbag, which holds a purse and a lipstick and not one thing more, and which I was not about to put down on the sand. Or there were the beach bags in the shops, which were either enormous bright things with a slogan across the front, made for a girl of twenty-five, or plastic things that looked like you had brought the kids' buckets and spades.

So I took the backpack. It held everything and it went with nothing, and for forty years I told myself nobody was looking at the bag.

Somebody was. My granddaughter was. She just took forty years to be old enough to say so.

Then Carol came to lunch

Carol was the practice nurse when I was on the front desk, and she has been my friend for thirty years. In September we met for lunch at the club in Epping, and she came in with a bag on her shoulder I had never seen. A soft cream and mushroom colour, with a pretty open pattern across the top half and a plain woven bottom, two wide handles, and a long tassel with little wooden beads hanging off one of them.

Out of it she took a cardigan, a bottle of water, her reading glasses, a paperback and a container of the lemon slice she had promised me. I said, Carol, you have brought your whole kitchen. She said, Di, that is the point.

She told me it was from Thompson Sydney, a small Australian boutique that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now, and that they had a whole collection of summer bags. I looked it up that night with my glasses on. There are twenty-seven of them in the collection, totes and woven ones and little crossbody ones, some plain, some with stripes, some with tassels. I went back to Carol's one three times.

It is called the Stacy. The top half is a diamond lattice pattern in a soft mushroom with fine cream lines through it, and a little scalloped trim along the top edge. The bottom is a smooth woven cream. Two wide flat woven handles that sit on your shoulder without cutting in, even with the day packed in it, and one long tassel threaded with wooden beads. It is about thirty-seven centimetres across and thirty high, and it is light before you put a thing in it.

Graham looked at it on the bed and asked where his sunglasses were going to go. I told him they would fit nicely in his own pocket.

What happened at Coles Bay

In October Graham and I had a week on the east coast of Tasmania. We stayed in a little cottage at Bicheno, and I did not pack the backpack. Graham noticed at the airport and did not say a word, which from Graham is a speech.

On the Thursday we drove down to Freycinet and did the walk up to the Wineglass Bay lookout, which is steeper than the brochure lets on. Then we went for lunch at the oyster shed on the water outside Coles Bay, where you sit at timber tables in the sun with the pink mountains across the bay and eat oysters straight off the plate, which is about my idea of heaven.

The woman at the next table asked first. She was up from Launceston with her sister, and she leaned over before I had even sat down and said, where is that from, love, I have been looking for one like that all summer. Then the young girl shucking the oysters behind the counter, who said she would be buying one for her mum for Christmas.

And then Gaye. Gaye is Graham's cousin, she lives at Swansea, and she drove over to meet us. She looked at the bag on the bench beside me for a long time while she ate her oysters, and then she put down her shell and said it.

Well, Di. You have finally stopped dressing like the tour guide.

Graham nearly choked. In thirty years, that is the nicest thing Gaye has ever said to me, and I intend to have it engraved somewhere.

Afterwards we walked along the foreshore at Coles Bay, and on the way back to Bicheno we stopped at the lookouts, and the bag came out of the car every time. Cardigan, water, sun cream, hat, and yes, Graham's sunglasses, because he handed them to me anyway. And it went with my white shirt, and then with my good navy dress at dinner that night, and I did not have to change a thing.

Three things I have learned since

One. The bag is part of the outfit. I spent forty years choosing a nice dress for the holiday and then strapping a navy backpack over the top of it as if the bag did not count. It counts. It is the thing in every photograph.

Two. There is a third kind of bag. I thought it was the little good handbag or the giant beach bag with a slogan on it. It was not. It was a bag that holds the whole day and still looks like it belongs with a summer dress.

Three. Nobody tells you, so you do not know. I am not cross with myself about the backpack. Nobody decides to look like a scout leader on holiday. It just happens, one sensible trip at a time, until a ten-year-old with a photo album points it out.

About the price

I sat on the other side of a lot of invoices in thirty years on the front desk, so I will tell you straight, the price made me suspicious.

The Stacy is $89.95. It was $169.00.

My first thought was that at that price the handles would give up before Tasmania. They did not. Up the lookout, along the beach, in and out of the hire car a dozen times a day, and it looks the same as the day it came out of the tissue.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so there is nobody in the middle taking a cut, and they run a sale to move the season's stock. I read the reviews before I ordered, the way I imagine you are doing now. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars. Not the suspiciously perfect five you see on some websites, which if anything made me trust it more. One woman from Scamander had written, “I bought it for a trip to see my daughter and I have used it every day since. My husband has started asking to put his things in it.” That was the one that decided it for me.

Jenny from over the road says she would have had the brown. I have pointed out that she has not bought either.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were out on the back verandah with a cuppa and you asked me, this is what I would say.

Go and find your last lot of holiday photos tonight, and look at your shoulders instead of your face. If there is a backpack, or a supermarket bag, or a handbag so small you are holding your sunglasses in your other hand, give it ten minutes of an evening. There are twenty-seven bags in the collection and you only need the one.

Not because a bag will change your life. It will not. But my granddaughter went through the Tasmania photos on my phone on Thursday at pickup, and she stopped at the one at the oyster shed and said, Nan, you look like you are on holiday in this one. I was more pleased about that than I have any right to be.

Two practical things. The sale is on now, and the Stacy comes in a light beige and a warm brown. With summer and the Christmas trips coming, I would not leave it too long.

Forty years of holiday photos in a backpack. Nobody ever asked me about that once.

Dianne