Surfer's Paradise

Some almost-travel writing about a land down under

‘Miles ahead of us, blurred in the milky air, I see a dream city: its cream, its silver, its turquoise towers thrust in a cluster from a distant spit.
“What - is that Brisbane?”
“No,” says my mother. "That's Surfers.”’ - Helen Garner, Postcards from Surfers

Lo’ and I are met by our closest and oldest friends at Brisbane airport, holding a scribbled sign and grinning. They’d arrived in Australia that same morning, from Barcelona, carrying the mania of unnatural travel. We drove to M.’s house in the car she’d learnt to drive in and, before entering a long tunnel, saw palm trees and felt the sticky tropic air. Finally, we were somewhere else.

~

That afternoon we’d driven the hour from Melbourne’s CBD to its second, tiny, airport, where we’d been assaulted by unrelenting, inescapable musak. I drank non-alcoholic beers from the single bar and ate Cheese Twisties, which are horrible. Large airports are localised expressions of capitalist rampage and are fun. Small airports are the same everywhere and are dire.

The evening before we’d eaten chicken in the countryside just outside Melbourne, had watched kangaroos hop past the window, feet wet from the wet grass, and had been a little cold. They are so strange to watch - buoyant, graceless but efficient. Standing still they look like men spoiling for a fight – chests born high, arms akimbo, faces watchful. I could not kill one – anyone who hunts so human a thing for sport has something integral missing, some basic empathy.

I liked it here. What I’d seen of Southern Victoria - chilly, green, woody - reminded me of an England remembered and recreated by someone confused and old, who hadn’t lived there since early childhood. A place of woodsmoke, heavy with the potential of rain, with different trees and the cooing of woodpigeons replaced by the warble of Australian magpies. Theirs is a birdsong of unbridled joy and now my favourite. They look like Eurasian magpies, hence the name, but are only distantly related. Spookily, however, I was told they had the traits - avarice, spite - that make the Eurasian magpie so special. They too steal shiny things and will eat a lamb’s eyes. But they aren’t as clever and are more aggressive, hating cyclists - who wear special helmets to protect themselves from diving magpies - most of all.

~

M.’s family house looked over a swimming pool and the sprawl of Brisbane, which ended in the tall glitter of the city. At night the garden sounded with the terrifying hisses of possums playing in the trees and running across the roof. The air made me think of Rio but the place was quiet. I imagined (wrongly) that the sea lay just beyond the city, and believed I could feel its presence - big and still and endless.

We drive South to Gold Coast. I’d learnt through error that it’s not called The Gold Coast - it isn’t an expanse of coast - but simply Gold Coast - a city, a single entity. For short it's Goldy or GC. GC is my favourite of its names, and I’d enjoyed shocking haughty Melbournians by saying I was off to GC, Like a G6 echoing in my head. I’d hoped for jungle on the journey, but instead there was motorway and suburban sprawl, strip malls and big box stores. The people of Queensland have a special affection for fancy-dress shops, and these are often looked upon by the serious alcoholic visage of Dan Murphy, the eponymous founder of Australia’s premier bottle shop. Nobody Beats Dan Murphy. It was a shame that I’d never tasted his various nectar and wouldn’t be ordering a middy, schooner, pot or pint anywhere low-down and dirty. A part of being sober is visiting places you’ve never drunk in and so feeling like you’ve not quite visited the place at all.

The sun was very bright and it was warm. My skin was slick with suncream and I had on big black sunglasses. Though it had been cold in Victoria, I’d been warned - by everyone - about the Australian sun’s strength and had barely taken off my Nicks cap. I’d gotten it at JFK that August, and had developed quite an affection for it, but left it on the plane. We’d taken to shouting no hat no play - the dictum each Australian child must live by - each time we left the house. My hatlessness worried me.

GC was flat - long streets called Mermaid and Seashell, lined with big cars and bigger houses, all new, all brash, the footpaths peopled by hairless muscled men and women in athleisurewear - jogging, walking, filming. Anywhere else they’d seem like extras, but here they made me feel an interloper. I sucked in my stomach and pulled back my shoulders. I felt pathetic.

The sea was invisible from the street - hidden behind the mcmansions, in various states of seaside modernism, all horrible and some amazing. I knew it was there from the shells on doors, from the street names, but otherwise it might have been days away. The grass beside the path was not-quite green, harsh and spiky, unlike any grass I’d met before - bred to survive the subtropics and angry at this fate. I touch it - boar bristles. Googling Queensland grass I find a Reddit thread which claims this grass will pop a balloon - repliers say it's the same in New Mexico and Nevada. Here more than anywhere else I think of displacement.

A word commonly used by the first colonists in Australia to describe the landscape was park-like. The legal foundation of Australia is terra nullius - a land over which no sovereignty had been exercised - claimed from God by enterprising English and Scotsmen. Within this lurks the lie, at first glance harmless, even complimentary, but with only a little thought insidious, that the aboriginal people lived in an Eden-like state of nature, in harmony. It was said they made little of the land and let it go to seed. Like animals.

“Betwixt them Lawns, or level Downs, and flocks
Grasing the tender herb, were interpos’d
Or palmie hillock, or the flourie lap
Of som irriguous Valley spread her store,” (Milton, Paradise Lost).

This was untrue. The parklands - vast meadows, well-kept forest, plants that grew food, animals that could be hunted - were the result of careful land management developed over countless centuries. The Aboriginals used fire to govern the landscape – controlled burns led to new growth, flowering, renewal, midwifing the bizarre germination of the eucalypts. Mentions of parkland dry up after colonisation got into its genocidal swing - meadows were reclaimed by forest and scrub, and what seemed natural buckled, shook and became sick. For it was not nature at all. Within a century of colonisation cataclysmic bushfires had become common, the likes and frequency of which are not found in pre-colonial fossil records.

“… a fiery Deluge, fed With ever-burning Sulphur unconsum’d:
Such place Eternal Justice had prepar’d
For those rebellious, here their Prison ordain’d
In utter darkness, and their portion set
As far remov’d from God and light of Heav’n” (Milton, Paradise Lost)

There is so much more like this - an endless list of cruelty, unnecessary and self-destructive.

~

The house is on the beach, but before the sand is undergrowth which we are told not to walk in - snakes. It is dotted with the small holes in which they nest. Australian snakes are shy creatures - though the most venomous in the world, they kill fewer people than poisonous snakes elsewhere. They wish more than anything to be left alone and will run until cornered. The colonisation of Australia was and continues to be one long snake hunt. A friend’s grandmother in Victoria, a grand lady, beheads them and nails them to her fence. What other nuisance would we do this to? We still reel from the Fall.

I had promised Lo’ still, warm water, snorkelling and sea life when she had been cold in Victoria. Now by the sea, wind beaten, I saw folly. As we walked to the shore, shouting over the windsound, M. told us to stay between the lifeguard flags, never to go deeper than our chest, to be constantly alert to rips and to dive beneath the big cresting waves. In the water we joined a constant, watchful battle - terrific fun, but exhausting. And after a while dispiriting - for this sea seemed disgusted by our very presence, wishing only to drag us out and under and after to disgorge us upon the sand. It was a churning, living, angry thing - an adamantine sea. Only the surfers enjoyed it.

I knew surfers growing up in Devon, and each trip to the beach see them once again - jumping from foot to foot in their wetsuits, excited before they got in and freezing when they got out. They loved the sea and it loved them, but it loved the swimmers too, the bathers and the paddlers. Here it loves the surfers only. They are its magi, holding forbidden and secret knowledge. While we paddle between the flags, neurotic and watchful, they are shapes on the horizon, legs straddling their boards, a hand trailing in the water. We dive beneath the waves, they commune. Time is different out there. M.’s father, an Irishman, speaks of them with a reverence he does not reserve for priests. They know the sea, and more, know it is unknowable. They are of the few Australians whose life does not – solely – manifest a battle against nature.

At night there is an imbalance of light - on one side, the city, on the other, the sea. The sea is ever dark, churning. In Paradise Lost, Milton describes hellfire as emitting no light. Perhaps he meant this sea? Along the beach, to the south, a mass of skyscrapers - a mecca, an emerald city, so bright against the dark. It is Surfer’s Paradise –

“There stood a hill not far, whose grisly top
Belch’d fire and rolling smoke; the rest entire
Shown with glossy scurf; undoubted sign
That in his womb was hid metallic ore.” (Milton, Paradise Lost)

Surfer’s Paradise. We never visited, but M. said it was a place of low-down vice, squalid with frying fish and small gambling, slot machined, sticky-floored casinos. The vast tall buildings that appeared from our vantage burning centres of industry were hotels with sea views. M. did her schoolies there and did not wish to return. Schoolies are what Australian teens do after high school, before work or university - a week or so of unsupervised, tacitly endorsed under or just-over-aged drinking. When the Brits do a similar thing they journey to Spain, to ruinous resorts and desecrated islands. The Ozzies go to Surfer’s, party in pens on the beach and later fall from hotel balconies.

Walking on the beach at night, beside the dark sea, with Paradise shining on the horizon, I understand something new about beauty.

~

The morning after the storm, the sea has spewed marine life upon the sand: hundreds of tiny man o'wars and crustaceans with spiky white shells. More besides. I am exhausted and so sit inside as the others comb the beach for treasures. Lo’ is out two hours searching, head bowed and eyes wide. M. returns with a puffer fish - found dead - and as I sleep attempts to dissect it for its bladder. When dried these bladders turn glassy and jewellike, talismanic, mystic. Lo’ brings many shells and a cuttlefish with beardlike tentacles. I am so tired and I do not know why and in this exhaustion I am happy to lie and watch. When I make it down to the water the mess of the once-living but now flotsam sparkle in the sun. They dot the sand like stars, almost, form an unknown pattern.

On the last morning we see whales breaching. They are so large they cannot be real, and move with the grace of a snow drift - unstopping, unstoppable. Their stomachs are white. I know that they like to play, that they are clever, sentimental and feeling. They make one’s heart sore, they make one’s heart soar. Do they smile? They do sing. And we have been told you can hear this song underwater, so rush out and wade to where it is almost calm and take turns holding each other on our backs, so that our ears are beneath the water, but we can still breath. My nose and the back of my throat fill-up with salt and I cannot hear. I strain. I relax. And then I can, and it is not like the recordings, but instead is almost chirping, almost birdsong. It is reaching, it is calling, it is finding.