To understand how the present sea impresses a record of its level on the coast is a prerequisite for reading the records of past sea levels. A first approximation for mean rates of coastal retrogradation since the Flandrian Transgression on the microtidal, open ocean, Meditrerranean‐ climate coast of Western victoria is: (1) Penultimate Glacial basalt 0 cm/yr (no change in gross geometry in spite of quarrying and channel formation). (2)Last Interglacial aeolianite 4 cm/yr. (3) Lower Cretaceous arkose 0.9 cm/yr (4) Lower Cretaceous siltstone 1.75 cm/yr. The rates are so divergent that the record of sea level changes is impressed quite differently on these respective lithologies.