On Saturday we awake in Augusta, 320km south of Perth and the last town before the cape where the winds have long risen up to sink ships. I hug the 14km coastline from Augusta to the southwestern tip of the continent, but it’s the middle of the day and the car park is overflowing; we’re not the only ones to reach our geographical boundary.

In the bottom left-hand corner of Australia, vineyards abound and two oceans kiss. Every weekend, hundreds of tourists pull up in the red gravel car park of Cape Leeuwin lighthouse, named after a mysterious Dutch ship that sailed the coast in the early seventeenth century. No logbook was ever found. The stiff-legged travellers pass through a white picket fence, walk to its rocky precipice, point to where the swirling Southern Ocean turns a corner, take a photo (preferably approaching sunset), have a cup of tea in the neat, English-style teahouse, and drive back north to Perth, perhaps, or sit in the car and re-consult the edges of their map.

Augusta is the end of the beautiful world. Clouds move in fast and low here, like a mist or a plague on a horror film set. On Sunday, I return to the lighthouse, but again I don’t get out of the car. It’s thirty-five in the shade, yet still freezing. I cut through the cape, through shrub and orange dirt tracks where wallabies bounce in circles, and return to the lean, white lighthouse, the tallest in Australia, unyielding, immovable; I can’t miss it if I try.

I can’t find a place to swim either, the Indian Ocean kissing the southerly swell and mashing fishing boats against schools of shy salmon taking refuge in paddies of kelp. I wait and wait by the edge of the world, in the middle of the day, in the dead hours, when the Australian light is most unimpressive, for nothing, and then I turn back towards my holiday home.

On the way back there, I get lost down a certain orange dirt track then resign myself to a walk along the peaceful Blackwood River as the winds smash the seaweed stench northward to my nostrils, the slippery green rocks ageing by the eon.

Nearby is Flinders Beach, an adjunct to a caravan park, and alone now I find a sandy, sheltered cove for a shadowy, cross-legged salute. The oceans are so close I can touch their silvery tentacles blowing bubbles on my toes. Three metres squared - give or take a rocky outcrop - is all I have to myself, between here and the Antarctic massive. Suddenly a man and a girl appear in the shallows, inches from the deep. It’s hot in the sun, but they are still rugged-up tight, fleece around the chest but barefoot, regulating the body like a dozing yogi at the temple door.

‘It’s me,’ says the man, removing his glasses and smiling, my wife’s sister-in-law’s brother. We met in Perth on my first Passover. He has a beach house 100km away in Yallingup, ‘where it’s bloody perfect compared to this,’ the wind knocking the words back into his mouth. I’m stunned we have found each other here. He tells me everything is two degrees of separation in Western Australia, a state far larger than Texas. He points out to sea where the whales might spurt water if I’m lucky, then smiles, shakes his head knowingly and steps back from the edge of the world.

Back in the living room - up on Trigg St, first to your right – my parents have landed from Geelong, a small city thousands of kilometres to the east. My in-laws arrive too, from Perth, all here to dote on a grandson fresher than the Chester Forest on a cold autumn morning when the light is blazing so hard you could strike it with a match, your heart running down your sleeve to the lens on your camera phone, the moment gone, the sun lost among the karri trees.

Sitting at the edge of the world, your pulse quickens and you pull yourself back from the brink. Your phone reads sunset and the caller ID rattles for your return. There’s time still, you think, to go swimming.

Havelin Bay is on the African side of the Cape Leeuwin National Park, a peaceful indent in the vast Indian Ocean. The horseshoe beach bends right, full to the horizon, yellow sand falling through the cracks in the cliffs like flakes of Parmesan cheese. Fishermen cast off, huddled in familial groups, kids cheering on their dad, squealing, kicking sand; Mum cheering herself up with a glossy panorama of her brood, a magazine losing its shine in the grey and grimy light.

I step off into the water and fall waist-deep then up to my neck. Giant pancake-shaped manta rays pulse at arm’s length. I swim the crawl for twenty strokes then panic, twenty strokes then panic, ten-stroke panic. I’m the furthest out by a metre, five metres from the shore. A tubby man pats his belly with puddles of salt water. I feel like shark bait and tell him as much. ‘You know, five great whites hit a boat out there, other day,’ he points and grins, all toothy. ‘Only three k, yeah. Just around the corner for those bastards.’

**

I hold on for two strange, slow days. The end of the world makes me restless in the feet. The winds have died down, and my baby son has stopped sleeping at night.  Exhausted, my father drives the next late morning. At noon, in the same nothing light, we pull up at the car park above Prevelly Beach.

The tourists from the lighthouse are not here, the end-of-the-worldly waves breaking two miles towards Madagascar. Fluorescent dots of surfers fall down the blue-green faces then rush towards the headland, arms waving in the air, whooping for the perfect life.  Two kayaks paddle beyond the line of human vision, around towards Redgate, to where two Japanese learn to surf in the teeth of a rip.

We have no boards, just a squeezed-out tube of sunscreen and one towel between two. Around the corner is a postcard of a river mouth, a secluded bay in flickering light. We shake off the chill and dive under the slurp that sucks us under, holding us way down south. We come up screaming then laughing, in the car going home. I read in the newspaper, last Sunday, how a father washed away while his son looked on, helpless. ‘A holiday gone horribly wrong’, it read, waiting by the edge of the world.