Borrowers at the beach

Beach toy library at Sisters Beach, Tasmania

These beachside innovations are not only putting smiles on tiny faces, they’re saving toys from landfills.

If you’ve ever packed for a family beach holiday – especially one in a destination you need to fly to – you’ll know three things to be fact: CoolCabanas are not overhead compartment-friendly; beach towels are space hogs; and it’s hard to justify buckets and bodyboards over other holiday essentials. Like that novel you still plan to read this summer.

I’ve developed a few new packing hacks since becoming a mum and not all of them revolve around snacks. I call my top hack “leave it at home”. When touching down in a new place, our family usually makes a beeline to the closest op-shop to pick up a few books and perhaps a small toy. When it comes to beach destinations, packing can be trickier (water-safety vests, goggles, wetsuits et al multiplied by number of kids equals a quick ticket to excess baggage charges). Alas, on an odyssey to the Ningaloo coast last year, our two under-fives ended up blissfully playing on the beaches of Cape Range National Park with two empty coffee cups and a discarded vitamin container. We also picked up a pool noodle at the op-shop, which we returned before our flight out.

This summer, we opted for a short break at one of our favourite Aussie beach towns, Sawtell, and this time we left everything at home on purpose. Sources on the ground had let us in on a little local secret. A new toy library had sprung up on the lawn in front of the surf club since our last visit, with a bunch of toys to take onto the sand. It’s one of many toy libraries I’ve discovered along our coastline during the past two years while researching my new book, Ultimate Beaches Australia (Hardie Grant, out May 2025), and I’ve got nothing but praise for the caring locals behind them.

Inspired by street libraries – 4500 registered in Australia – and similar toy library concepts in the US and UK, these beach toy libraries range from simple milk crates stuffed with buckets and spades to extensive collections with trucks, diggers and skim boards. On shores spanning First Bay in Coolum on the Sunshine Coast to the sleepy seaside town of Wooli in NSW, South Australia’s Henley Beach and Sisters Beach on Tasmania’s north coast, handy locals have hammered and nailed hardy structures to store donated beach toys, and encourage visitors to “Borrow, Play, Return”.

>This story first appeared in Escape, 2 February 2025. Continue reading on the PDF or online here.