Down Under

by Bryson, Bill

  And so to Surfers Paradise, back on the Pacific Coast Highway and another hundred miles north. Surfers Paradise is just over the border in Queensland, and I was eager to dip a toe into that interesting and erratic state. In a country where states are both few and immense, the arrival in a new one is always an event. I wasn’t going to come this far and not at least slip over the border.

  One thing you find if you browse much through non-fiction works on Australia is that practically every book written about the country in the last forty years, possibly more, has in it somewhere an anecdote illustrating that Queenslanders are not like other people. In Australian Paradox, Jeanne MacKenzie relates the story of an American guest at a rural Queensland hotel in the 1950s who was presented at dinner with a plate of cold meat and potatoes. He stared with private disappointment at the offering for a moment, then diffidently enquired whether he might have a little salad with it.

  ‘The waitress’, Ms MacKenzie reports, ‘looked at him with astonishment and disdain and, turning to the other guests, remarked: “The bastard thinks it’s Christmas.”’

  Here’s another that I have seen twice. A visitor (French in one version, English in the other) is staying at a Queensland hotel during ‘the wet’, the rainy season that is a feature of life in northern Australia. The guest is startled, upon reaching his room, to discover that it is flooded to a depth of three or four inches. When he reports this at the front desk, the owner looks at him with pain and irritation and says: ‘Well, the bed’s dry, isn’t it?’

  All these stories have certain things in common. Generally they take place in the 1950s. Generally they involve a foreign visitor at a rural hotel. Generally they are presented as true. And always they make Queenslanders look like pricks. Most suggest that Queenslanders are just crazy, and the evidence does rather point in that direction. For almost two decades the state was under the control of Joh Bjelke-Peterson, an eccentric, right-wing state premier who at one time seriously entertained the notion of blowing up parts of the Great Barrier Reef with small atomic bombs to create shipping channels. Of late it had gained fame as the seat of a politician named Pauline Hanson, a fish-and-chip shop owner who had started a right-wing, anti-immigration party called One Nation, which had had a spell of striking success before it became evident even to her most ardent followers that Ms Hanson was a little, shall we say, cerebrally unpredictable. She wrote a book in which she suggested that Aborigines engaged in cannibalism, and produced an interestingly paranoid video which began: ‘Fellow Australians, if you are seeing me now it means I have been murdered.’ Her seat was the Brisbane suburb of Oxley, which inspired some genius to dub her the Oxley moron. In a word, Queensland has a reputation for being a place apart. I couldn’t wait to get there.

  In 1933 Elston, Queensland, was a remote and inconsequential seaside hamlet with an excellent beach, a few flimsy cottages, a popular but slightly raffish hotel and a couple of shops. Then the town fathers got a really good idea. Realizing that nobody was going to travel hundreds of miles to visit a place called Elston (and, more to the point, that nobody was travelling hundreds of miles to visit a place called Elston), they decided to give the place a peppier name, based on something novel and upbeat. Looking around, their gaze fell on the local hotel. It was called Surfers Paradise. The name had a certain ring. They decided to give it a try and see what happened. The town has never looked back.

  Today Surfers Paradise is famous, while its neighbouring resort communities – Broadbeach, Currumbin, Tugun, Kirra, Bilinga – are scarcely known outside Queensland. It hardly matters because they have all coalesced into a single unsightly sprawl stretching for thirty miles from the Queensland-New South Wales border almost to Brisbane. The whole is called the Gold Coast. This is Australia’s Florida.

  You see it long before you get to it – shimmering towers of glass and concrete rising beside the sea and snaking off down the coastline to a distant, hazy vanishing point. When Jeanne MacKenzie passed this way in 1959, not one bit of this glitziness existed. Surfers Paradise was still a low-key, low-rise, old-fashioned sort of place. In 1962 it got its first high-rise. Another followed a year or two later. By the end of the sixties, half a dozen ten- or twelve-storey buildings stood awkwardly and a little self-consciously along the front. Then in the early 1970s a development frenzy started. Where once there were just sandy quarter-acre plots, each holding a matchbox beach cottage, today stand hotels of Trump-like splendour, balconied apartment blocks, a domed casino, verdant golf courses, water parks, amusement parks, miniature golf courses, shopping malls and all the rest. Much of this, you are told in a confidential tone, was built and paid for with money of dubious pedigree. People outside Queensland will tell you that the Gold Coast is rife with unsavoury elements – Australian drug barons, Japanese yakuza, flashy linchpins of the Hong Kong triads. This is not, you are led to believe, a place to bump a Mercedes and start an argument.

  Nearly everyone you meet elsewhere in Australia will tell you: ‘Oh, you must see the Gold Coast. It’s awful.’

  ‘Really?’ you say, intrigued. ‘In what way?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly. I’ve never been there myself. Well, obviously. But it’s like – have you seen Muriel’s Wedding?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, it’s like that. Just like it. Apparently.’

  So I was interested on many levels to see the Gold Coast, and disappointed on nearly every one of them. To begin with, it wasn’t tacky at all. It was just another large, impersonal, well-provisioned international resort. I could have been in Marbella or Eilat or anywhere else developed in the last twenty-five years. The hotels were mostly big international names – Marriott, Radisson, Mercure – and of an unexceptionably respectable standard. I parked the car on a side street and walked along to the seafront. En route I passed stores of an unexpected glitziness – Prada, Hermès, Ralph Lauren. All perfectly fine. It just wasn’t very interesting. I didn’t need to travel 8,000 miles to look at Ralph Lauren bath towels.

  The beach, however, was exceedingly splendid – broad, clean, sunny, with lazy, manageable-sized waves rolling in from an almost painfully blue and bright sea. The air was filled with salt tang and the ozone-enriched shrieks of pleasure and children shouting and a sense of people having fun. I took a seat on a bench and just watched people enjoying themselves. I had read somewhere that the Gold Coast beaches are actually quite treacherous for rips. As it happened, drownings were much in the news lately. The Australian media cover beach mishaps the way American papers cover blizzards and hurricanes – as a seasonal event involving lots of comparative statistics. According to the papers, there had been thirty-four drownings already this year, more than most years, and the summer wasn’t yet half over. Much of it was blamed on tourists who didn’t know how to read the water for rips or to stay calm when they were caught in one. But a lot of it was just down to lunacy. The Sydney Morning Herald cited the case of a 52-year-old man at a place called North Avoca Beach, who had sternly cautioned people not to swim at a particular spot, then went in himself and drowned. Just that morning, while packing up at my motel, I had paused to watch a lifeguard from here at Surfers Paradise being interviewed on a breakfast television programme. He said that he himself had rescued 100 people the previous week, including one tourist whom he had saved twice.

  ‘Twice?’ said the interviewer.

  The lifeguard grinned at the ridiculousness of it. ‘Yip.’

  ‘What, you saved him and he went back in the water and you had to save him again?’

  The grin broadened. ‘Yip.’

  I scanned the water for troubled swimmers. I couldn’t imagine how any lifeguard could spot a drowning person among all the hundreds of happy, frolicking bodies, but they most assuredly do. Australian lifeguards are unquestionably the finest in the world. In the same period that thirty-four people drowned, more than 6,000 were saved – a commendable ratio, to say the very least.

  Eventually I stopped for a cup of coffee and then wander
ed through the business district, but Surfers Paradise was mostly just a succession of stores selling the same stuff – painted boomerangs and didgeridoos, cuddly toy koalas and kangaroos, postcards and souvenir books, rack upon rack of T-shirts. In one of the shops I bought a postcard that showed a kangaroo surfing, and asked the young lady who served me if she knew where the original Surfers Paradise Hotel was.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said and looked guilty, as if she had forgotten a secret with which she had been entrusted. ‘I haven’t been in the area very long,’ she added.

  I nodded that it didn’t matter and asked her where she was from.

  ‘ACT.’ Seeing my mind whirring to little effect, she added: ‘Australian Capital Territory. Canberra.’

  Of course. ‘So which is better,’ I asked, ‘Canberra or Surfers Paradise?’

  ‘Oh, Surfers by a mile.’

  I raised an eyebrow. ‘It’s that good, is it?’

  ‘Oh no,’ she said emphatically, amazed that I had misread her. ‘Canberra’s that bad.’

  I smiled at her solemnity.

  She nodded with conviction. ‘I reckon if you were going to rank things for how much pleasure they give – you know? – Canberra would come somewhere below breaking your arm.’ I grinned and she grinned too. ‘Well, at least with a broken arm you know it’ll get better.’ She talked with the rising intonation common to young people in Australia, which turns every statement into a question. It drives older Australians crazy, but personally I find it endearing, and sometimes, as here, charmingly sexy.

  A supervisor-type person came over to make sure we weren’t enjoying ourselves too much. ‘Cahn I be of assistahnce?’ she said in an odd accent that suggested long devotion to a book entitled Elocution Self Taught. She held her head at an odd angle too, tilted back slightly as if she were afraid that her eyeballs might fall out.

  ‘I was looking for the original Surfers Paradise Hotel.’

  ‘Ah, that was torn down some years ago.’ She flashed a satisfied smile – it reminded me exactly of William F. Buckley – though whether the smile indicated that she was happy that it had been torn down or merely pleased to be able to convey disappointing news I couldn’t say. She showed me on the map in my guidebook where it had stood.

  I thanked them both and, clutching my directions, found my way to the site of the famous and now irretrievably lost Surfers Paradise Hotel. Today the spot is occupied by a shopping complex called the Paradise Centre, which was much more in keeping with the modern resort, in that it was ugly and filled with overpriced shit.

  In the Surfers Paradise book I had consulted in Adelaide, a photograph from the late 1940s had shown a delightfully ramshackle hotel – a place that looked as if it had been built in phases with whatever materials had come to hand – with a terrace bar on which sat many people soaking up sunshine and alcohol in careless volumes and looking awfully pleased to be there. I walked all the way around the block, then stood on the opposite corner and stared at the site for a long time, but it wasn’t possible to imagine it as it had been, any more than it was possible to imagine the Myall Creek massacre from its present peaceful situation. So I returned to the car and headed out of town through the dappled stripes of sun and shade created by the big hotels and lavish palm trees. At the edge of town I rejoined the Pacific Highway and headed south.

  I had a long drive to Sydney ahead of me. For the moment, my trip was over. But I would be back, of course. I wasn’t anywhere near finished with this place yet.

  Part Three

  AROUND THE EDGES

  ‘I just want you to know,’ said a voice in my ear as Qantas flight 406 popped cork-like out of a tower of monsoonal cumulo-nimbus, presenting the window passengers with a sudden view of emerald mountains rising almost sheer from a pewter sea, ‘that if it comes to it you may have all my urine.’

  I turned from the window to give this remark the attention it deserved and found myself staring at the solemn and rested countenance of Allan Sherwin, my friend and temporary travelling companion. It would be incorrect to say that I was surprised to find him sitting beside me because we had met in Sydney by design and boarded the flight together, but there was none the less a certain residual measure of unexpectedness – a kind of pinch-me quality – in finding him seated there. Ten days earlier in London, where I had stopped on my way back to America from my hike in the Middle East, I had met Allan to discuss some project he had in mind. (He is a television producer by profession; we had become friends while working together on a series for British television the previous year.) There, in a pub on the Old Brompton Road, I had told him of my experiences in Australia so far and mentioned my plans on the next trip to tackle the formidable desert regions alone and at ground level. In order to deepen his admiration for me, I had told him some vivid stories of travellers who had come unstuck in the unforgiving interior. One of these had pertained to an expedition in the 1850s led by a surveyor named Robert Austin, which grew so lost and short of water in the arid wastes beyond Mount Magnet in Western Australia that the members were reduced to drinking their own and their horses’ urine. The story had affected him so powerfully that he had announced at once the intention to accompany me through the most perilous parts of the present trip, in the role of driver and scout. I had, of course, tried to dissuade him, if only for his own safety, but he would have none of it. Clearly the story was still much on his mind, judging by his kind offer to keep me in urine.

  ‘Thank you,’ I replied now, ‘that’s very generous of you.’

  He gave me a nod that had a touch of the regal about it. ‘It’s what friends are for.’

  ‘And you may have as much of mine as I can spare.’

  Another regal nod.

  The plan, to which he was now resolutely attached, was to accompany me first to northern Queensland, where we would relax for a day amid the fertile shoals of the Great Barrier Reef before setting off in a suitably sturdy vehicle along a bumpy track for Cooktown, a semi-ghost town in the jungle some way north of Cairns. This warm-up adventure completed, we would fly on to Darwin in the Northern Territory – the ‘Top End’ as it is fondly known to Australians – for the thousand-mile drive through the scorched red centre to Alice Springs and mighty Uluru. Having assisted me through the worst of the perils, the heroic Mr Sherwin would fly back to England from Alice, and leave me to continue on through the western deserts on my own. It wasn’t that he thought I would be ready for this by then – for he had no confidence whatever in my survival capabilities – but that ten days was all he had to spare. For my part, I had no greater confidence in him, but I was glad of the company.

  ‘You know,’ I added reassuringly, ‘I don’t suppose it will actually be necessary to drink urine on this trip. The infrastructure of the arid regions is much improved since the 1850s. I understand they have Coca-Cola now.’

  ‘Still, the offer is there.’

  ‘And much appreciated, too.’

  Another exchange of regal nods, and then I returned my gaze to the exotic verdure below our waggling wingtip. If you needed convincing that Australia is an exceptional part of the world, then tropical Queensland would be the place to come. Of the 500 or so sites on the planet that qualify for World Heritage status, only thirteen satisfy all four of UNESCO’s criteria for listing, and of these thirteen special places, four – almost a third – are to be found in Australia. Moreover, two of these, the Great Barrier Reef and the wet tropics of Queensland, were right here. It is the only place in the world, I believe, where two such consummate environments adjoin.

  We were lucky to be there at all. They were having a terrible wet season in the north. Cyclone Rona had recently buzzsawed along the coast, causing $300 million of havoc, and lesser storms had been teasing the region for weeks, disrupting travel. Only the day before all flights had been cancelled. It was evident from the dips and wobbles of our approach into Cairns that a lot of assertive weather was still about. The view as we came in was of palm trees, golf cours
es, seaside marinas, some big beachside hotels and lots and lots of red-roofed houses poking out of abundant foliage. Weather apart, it all looked very promising.

  It is remarkable now, when over two million people a year come to the Great Barrier Reef and it is universally esteemed as a treasure, how long it took the tourism industry to discover it. In Rum Jungle, an account of a tour through northern Australia in the 1950s, the historian Alan Moorehead made venturing into northern Queensland sound like a journey to the headwaters of the Orinoco. Then, Cairns was a small, muggy coastal outpost hundreds of miles up a jungle road and occupied mostly by eccentric dropouts of a fugitive disposition. Today it is a bustling mini-metropolis of 60,000 inhabitants, indistinguishable from any community of similar size in Australia except for the humidity that falls over you like a hot towel when you emerge from the airport terminal and a certain hale devotion to the tourist dollar. It has become a hugely popular stopoff point for backpackers and other young travellers for whom it has a certain reputation for tropical liveliness. On this day the whole was pressed under an oppressive weight of low grey skies of the sort that threatened rain in volume at any moment. We took a cab into town through a long, unbecoming sprawl of motels, petrol stations and fast food establishments. Central Cairns was somewhat snugger, but it had the feel of a place that had been built only recently, in haste. Every second business offered reef cruises or snorkelling expeditions, and most of the rest sold T-shirts and postcards.

  We went first to pick up our hire car. Because I had been hiking in the Middle East, I had left the arrangements to a travel agent, and I was mildly surprised to find that the agent had plumped for an obscure local firm – Crocodile Car Hire or something similarly improbable and unpromising – whose office was little more than a bare counter on a side street. The young man in charge had a certain chirpy cockiness that was ineffably irritating, but he dealt with the paperwork in a brisk and efficient manner, chattering throughout about the weather. It was the worst wet in thirty years, he told us proudly. Then he led us out to the pavement and presented us with our vehicle – an aged Commodore Holden estate car that seemed to have a decided sag about the axles.