Down Under (31 page)

I drove on the last couple of miles into Bingara (pop. 1,363), a hot and listless village with a dozing main street. It looked like a place that had once known prosperity, but most of the storefronts now were either empty or taken up with government enterprises – a health clinic, an employment advice centre, a tourist information office, police station, something called a ‘Senior Citizens Rest Centre’. An old and improbably large movie house still announced itself as the Roxy, but clearly had been shut for years. In the tourist information centre I was received by a pleasant-looking middle-aged lady who bobbed to her feet at the sight of a customer. I asked her if they had any information about the massacre, and she gave me a crestfallen look.

‘I’m afraid I don’t know much about that,’ she said.

‘Really?’ I said, surprised. The place was full of leaflets and books.

‘Well, it was a long time ago. I believe the children study about it in school, but I’m afraid it’s not something visitors ask about very often.’

‘How often? Just out of interest.’

‘Oh,’ she said and clasped her chin as if that was a real poser. She turned to a colleague who was just emerging from a back room. ‘Mary, when was the last time someone asked about Myall Creek?’

‘Oh,’ said the colleague, equally stumped. ‘I couldn’t say – no, wait, there was a man who asked about it maybe two months ago. I remember now. He had a little goatee. Looked a bit like Rolf Harris. I can’t remember the last time before that.’

‘Most visitors want to go fossicking,’ the first lady explained.

Fossicking is to hunt for precious minerals.

‘What do they find?’ I asked.

‘Oh, lots – gold, diamonds, sapphires. This used to be a big mining area.’

‘But you have nothing at all on the massacre?’

‘I’m afraid not.’ She seemed genuinely regretful. ‘I tell you who can help you and that’s Paulette Smith at the
Advocate.’

‘That’s the local paper,’ added the colleague.

‘She knows all about the massacre. She did some kind of study on it for college.’

‘If anybody can help you, Paulette can.’

I thanked them and went off to find the
Advocate.
Bingara was an oddly interesting little town. It was small and half dead and on a road to nowhere, yet it had not only a tourist office but also its own newspaper. At the
Advocate
office I was told that Paulette Smith had popped out and that I should try back in an hour. Slightly at a loss, I went into a café and ordered a sandwich and a coffee, and was mindlessly consuming both when a lady, red-haired, late-thirtyish and looking faintly breathless, abruptly slid onto the seat facing me.

‘I hear you’re looking for me,’ she said.

‘News travels fast here.’ I smiled.

She rolled her eyes ironically. ‘Small town.’

Paulette Smith was rather intense but with a sudden, disarming smile that would flash at odd moments, like a broken sign, and then be lost at once in the greater intensity of what she was telling me.

‘We didn’t learn anything about the massacre when I was growing up,’ she said. ‘We knew it had happened – you know, that a long time ago some Aborigines were killed out by the creek and that some white people were hanged for it. But that was about it. We weren’t taught about it in
school. We didn’t, you know, make school trips out there or anything.’ The smile came and went.

‘Did people talk about it?’

‘No. Never.’

I asked her where exactly it had happened. ‘Nobody knows. Somewhere on Myall Creek Station.’ (Station in the context means a farm or ranch.) ‘It’s all private property now, and they’re not real friendly to trespassers.’

‘So there’s never been any kind of archaeological dig or anything? You don’t get academics poking around?’

‘No, there’s not that kind of interest in it. Anyway, I don’t think they’d know where to look. It’s a big property.’

‘And there’s no memorial of any kind?’

‘Oh no.’

‘Isn’t that odd?’

‘No.’

‘But wouldn’t you expect the government to put up
something
?’

She considered for a moment. ‘Well, you’ve got to understand there was nothing all that special about Myall Creek. Aborigines were slaughtered all over the place. Three months before the Myall massacre 200 Aborigines were killed at Waterloo Creek, near Moree.’ Moree was sixty miles or so further west. ‘Nobody was ever punished for that. They didn’t even
try
to punish anybody for that.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

She nodded. ‘No reason why you should. Most people have never heard of it. All that was different about Myall Creek was that white people were punished for it. It didn’t stop them killing Aborigines. It just made them more circumspect. You know, they didn’t boast about it in the pub afterwards.’ Another flickering smile. ‘It’s kind of ironic when you think about it. Myall Creek’s not famous
for what happened to the blacks here, but for what happened to the whites. Anyway, you wouldn’t be able to move in this country for memorials if you tried to acknowledge them all.’

She stared dreamily for a moment at my notebook, then said abruptly: ‘I have to get back to work.’ She made an apologetic look. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t been much help.’

‘No, you’ve been a great help,’ I said, then I thought of another question.

‘Are there any Aborigines here now?’

‘Oh, no. They’re long gone from round here.’

I paid for my lunch and returned to the car. On the way out of town, I stopped again by the bridge and wandered a little way up an overgrown lane that led on to part of the station property. But there was nothing to see and I was a little afraid of snakes in the tall grass. So I returned to the car and retraced my route across the dusty plain and on towards the distant blue slopes of the Great Dividing Range.

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 wandered 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.