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Please help find book title and author:

I remember reading this book in late 80s or early 90s in Australia. I think it had the word Bay cove or Beach in the title.

It was set on the beach and the main character is a girl who often walks to the cove or bay and eventually discovers mermaids there.

This family moves into a house that they are looking after or have inherited from or something. It’s built half on land and half into the ocean on massive stilts. The kids notice there's this weird trapdoor built into the floor of the middle of the house, and when they open it, it opens to the sea below.

This trapdoor was used to winch mermaids and mermen up and out of the water. I believe they also used this trapdoor to feed the mermaids/men with fish. I can't remember how the book ends, only that when this family moves in to the house they discover that they have also inherited a bunch of mermaids they have to try and help.

The ending is when they are worried about the development of the area bringing more people in and destroying the natural beauty and the mermaids will have nowhere to go.

It’s not "My sister Sif" or any others that come up- I have searched extensively and AI can’t find it so please don’t bother doing those searches, it has to be REMEMBERED by someone.

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    Is this the same book you asked about here? Commented 2 days ago
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    Telling people not to search seems counter productive. There are many here whose search-fu is very strong, I don't think you want them to bypass your question. Plus, they might just think of a different way of wording the search that ends up being successful. Commented 2 days ago
  • Have you searched it in another language than English? In my experience, if a novel you can't remember has been translated in another or several other languages, it might be a fruitful avenue to find it again, even though there's of course no guarantee. Commented 2 days ago
  • It might be worth looking through the respective Australian Literature over [year] on Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_in_Australian_literature Just change the year in the URL to get a specific year. Commented 2 days ago
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    If you can edit your question to elaborate on why The Secret of Shelter Bay doesn't match, that would be very helpful. Wrong answers are great for that, e.g. "I know it's not Bay Bye Baby because there was a talking sea urchin that was a major part of the plot, and I'm certain there wasn't a love triangle involving the crusty lobster trapper." Commented 14 hours ago

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Possibly The Secret of Shelter Bay by Madeline Rose. It was published in 1982 by the Australian publisher Angus & Robertson. Summary retrieved from Google books:

The house and private beach entrusted to Andrew by a distant relative is also the home of the Merpeople and playground of the dolphins. When Andrew's father decides he must turn the area into a camping ground these two groups frighten away the developers and give the children treasure from a sunken wreck to solve Mr. Arden's financial problems and to preserve the privacy and safety of the bay.

A photograph of a couple of pages available on ebay shows kids exploring their new house and peering through a "big trap-door":

Tony and Lisa ran from room to room, exploring and exclaiming. They marvelled over the shells and peered with interest through the big trap-door.

The National Library of Australia notes the book is "For children".

The Charles Sturt University Library classifies it in the category "Nature conservation -- Juvenile fiction", echoing your description about an environmental theme.

Here is its record on isfdb, and its cover:

Cover of the book, with a picture showing three children by the sea. The cover is annotated with the text "A nice place for a holiday... but curious things keep happening... THE SECRET OF SHELTER BAY A family adventure by Madeline Rose, author of Witch Over the Water"

It seems difficult to find a digitized or paper copy, however it is available at the National Library of Australia (see previous link) and at a few other libraries in Australia and New Zealand, as you can see on Worldcat. If you live in Australia but live too far away from those libraries to check if it's this book you were looking for, it's also possible to order a copy of a few pages on the National Library of Australia website, after registration.

I found the book by exploring the mermaids tag on isfdb, filtering by date, type, language, and then looking at the titles and other tags. Then I found the rest by looking for "The Secret of Shelter Bay" in various search engines.

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  • Thanks and well done because it sounds like it, but I don’t think that’s it. Commented yesterday
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    @Amanda I found some photographs of a few pages from the book on ebay, the house includes a "big trap-door" inside, it sounds like it is the scene you're describing. I added it to the answer. That would be a really big coincidence if two books shared all these exact features ("bay" in the title, a book for children, the publication date, publication location in Australia, includes mermaids, includes a family moving in a new inherited house, problems related to development, a trap-door inside the house), or if not a coincidence possibly one book that plagiarized the other. Commented 20 hours ago

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