Sydney's secret beach retreat, where time completely stands still

The jumping off point for the most rustic of holiday destinations is ironically one of the nation's poshest suburbs. Palm Beach, on Sydney's northern beaches, 40 kilometres from the CBD, has long been a summer playground for the well-heeled and famous. A-listers like Nicole Kidman and Mick Jagger, and even royalty, the now Queen Mary of Denmark, have holidayed here. It also has a double life, known for decades now as Summer Bay, the setting of the soapie Home and Away,

But we're at Palm Beach pier and about to jump on the Myra, a vintage-style river ferry which will take us away from all this, over Pittwater estuary to what feels like another world: Currawong Beach Cottages. Surely the spirits of families past are travelling with us, for they've been coming here for holidays since the 1950s ... and they would have no trouble recognising the place now. It has barely changed.

Currawong was purchased by the Labor Council of NSW in 1949, and transformed into the Currawong Workers' Holiday Camp, a collection of nine fibro cottages set amid native bushland with a sandstone escarpment rising sharply at their backs, up and over into Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park.

We're staying in the original, an absolute beachfront cottage which sits only metres from the pier. It was called Kenny's Cabin, after the union official who drove the Labor Council's purchase of the waterfront arcadia so working families could vacation in the sort of playground typically frequented by wealthier people.

These days, the two-bedroom cottage is called Blue Tongue, and it is a retro treasure - painted pale blue on its timber-clad outside, and recently restored on the inside in a way that allows its 1950s heritage to keep shining through.

I love the porthole-style window in the front door, which perfectly encircles a view of the jetty and the ferry that comes and goes on the hour. Two vintage leather armchairs sit expectantly before a wood-fired heater. The living area's bank of windows provides a constant eyeful of Pittwater by day, and at night, the twinkling lights of Palm Beach's squillion-dollar real estate.

On this side of the divide, there are no shops or restaurants or cafes - you must bring all your own supplies over the water, which is the only way to get here. There is mobile phone reception but no TVs. We make our own bed with the supplied linen, and must pop outside the back door to access the loo, which in Blue Tongue's case is nonetheless attached to the house, part of a spacious modern bathroom (its one amenity is a hotel-sized pat of designer soap).

As we wander the pathway up through the rest of the camp, we notice a couple of the cottages still have a detached outdoor dunny, a scenario that might be a bit too retro for some. Regardless of their plumbing situation, all the cabins are named for native animals, like Platypus, Wallaby and Echidna. There's also the original farming homestead Midholme, a low-slung, verandah-wrapped beauty built in the 1910s by the Stiles family who kept dairy cows and grew vegetables. It now sleeps up to 16 people.

It's no wonder Currawong is heritage listed, since 2008, for reasons which include it being the "most intact remaining example of a mid-20th century, union-organised workers' holiday camp" - in NSW and probably all of Australia. You can imagine in a moment the memories made here by countless families.

As well as bushwalks and the beach, there's a tennis court, a beach volleyball court, and an eccentric golf course that twists back and forth on itself, wooden arrows pointing the way around holes with names like Whacko, Easy Tiger and Esky.

But it took a long and intense fight to wrest Currawong from the controversial clutches of developers, who had bought it from the unions in 2007. Its history plays out on the walls of the games room, where there's a ping-pong table, and golf clubs and tennis racquets stacked in the corner. Just outside is a tub full of cricket bats.

It's in here I learn that actor Shane Withington - northern beaches resident and star of A Country Practice in the 1980s and, more latterly, Home and Away - led the crusade by the Friends of Currawong to keep the 20-hectare, beach-meets-bush idyll for the people. He described it as a "beautiful snapshot of egalitarian Australia". Its future was at last secured when the NSW government bought it in 2011, and it's now managed by the Northern Beaches Council.

On our first day, we sit on our big verandah in the dying afternoon light, eating cheese and drinking wine, and watching distant yacht races on Pittwater, the periodic thump of wind filling spinnakers carrying all the way over to Blue Tongue.

There's another sound, much closer, which proves a soothing constant: minuscule waves lapping the sand just metres away. The lack of any traffic within cooee - or even human traffic, given it's midweek and there's barely anyone else here - brings out the small noises. And the creatures, too. When I awaken next day and head straight to the veranda, just to make sure the whole, delicious scene is still there, I'm greeted by a swamp wallaby who's in no hurry to hop away.

The on-site managers, Adam and Cathie Oliver, holidayed here for 20 years with their kids and a band of other families. When we reluctantly catch Myra back to Palm Beach after our two-night stay, Cathie is on the ferry, too, heading off for a girls' weekend. "This is exactly what we wanted to do," she says of their Currawong role. And who wouldn't be jealous that she gets to come straight back.

The writer was a guest of Currawong Beach Cottages