A document of great importance was released this week. No, not the Federal Budget. I’m too busy weeping into the deed of my investment property to talk about that right now. Won’t somebody think of the landlords?

But I digress. A far more culturally significant report landed in my inbox this week. It was Australian Traveller’s Australia’s 100 Best Towns to Visit in 2026 which piqued my interest because I love visiting towns.

At the top of the list was the delightful Tasmanian town of Bicheno which is situated in the Bay of Fires on the east coast. I’ve been there and the thing I remember the most is that I was dragged along to the Bicheno Motorcycle Museum, which if you’re into motorbikes is an afternoon well spent. But if you’re not, probably just go find some penguins.

There are predictable entries in the top 10: Byron Bay, Port Douglas, Broome and Noosa, but nestled at No.25 between Fremantle and Launceston is my little old hometown of Esperance.

I don’t mean to boast, but we (and by we, I mean the whole town of Esperance and me) polled higher than McLaren Vale, Cairns and Portsea.

Now, it’s worth noting that Australian Traveller didn’t specify what the criteria was for how visitable a town is.

I imagine it was just a doughnut-fuelled brainstorming meeting with a bunch of interns scribbling down every town they’d caught sight of on Instagram onto a big piece of butcher’s paper. Or something like that.

Which does not diminish Esperance’s glory one bit, but it does make you wonder how they compared say, Eagle Bay at No.8, where there are no shops or facilities, but there is a beautiful beach and wealth oozes out of the footpaths, and, for example, Broken Hill at No.23 where there’s . . . well, dirt. And the Royal Flying Doctor Outback Heritage Experience. Alternatively, you could trip over and hurt yourself and experience the real deal. You choose.

My point is, this list attempts to compare apples and piles of dirt and decide which is better. A tough gig.

But back to Esperance. I’m still regularly surprised to talk to people who have lived their entire lives in Western Australia and have never been to Esperance. They don’t know what they’re missing out on.

So as someone who grew up there, I can assuredly say this: you will never see better beaches. You will drive to a beach and think to yourself “this is the most beautiful beach I have ever seen” and then you will drive to the next one and think “no, THIS is the most beautiful beach I have ever seen” and so on and so forth until you can’t remember a time before pristine white sand and impossibly sapphire-coloured water.

The headline beach in Esperance is Lucky Bay in Cape Le Grand National Park, which also happened to be one of the beaches that we would frequent during my childhood as it was just down the road. It’s the one with the squeaky white sand and kangaroos that just hop along the sand like that’s a completely normal thing for kangaroos to do.

Once, when I was travelling in rural France, I was at first delighted to spy a large poster of Lucky Bay in a travel agency window, then outraged when I looked a little closer to see that it was advertising an airfare to Sydney. Sacre bleu.

But in the interests of transparency, you should know that if you’re walking along one of these glorious beaches, from Hellfire to Wharton to Twilight, and you decide to dive into that impossibly blue water, it’s freezing.

I know because I had to learn to swim in it when I was a wee tacker and I would finish my January classes with blue lips. Mum had to pack a thermos of strawberry Quik to warm us up. Only when we became sufficiently proficient at swimming were we allowed to do our classes at the heated pool. I’m still a terrible swimmer, possibly because I still associate it with hypothermia.

Also, Esperance is windy. Like, seriously windy. There are certain times of the year when it dies down, but that time is not Christmas when I’m usually visiting. The upside is you don’t have to worry about doing your hair. The downside is it can be hard to carry on a conversation with the person next to you.

But then again, you can be relatively confident that they’re saying: “This is the most beautiful beach I’ve ever seen!”