I have returned to Melbourne after six weeks spent in the sun, sand, surf and dust. I have travelled thousands of kilometres by rail, road and air and swam in the Southern and Pacific Oceans. I am utterly exhausted but it’s a good exhaustion like one gets from working out muscles one is unused to exercising.
I flew up to Bris-vegas on the twentieth of December where I was picked up by my little sister, Nadia, at seven in the morning. Nadia sacrificed her customary Saturday morning sleep-in to pick up her big brother. We met my brother for lunch with a half dozen other people at the Paddo Tavern. I haven’t been to the Paddo for over ten years and it is nearly unrecognisable. When I first moved to Brisbane as a teenager, it was one of the first bars I ever went to – saddles on the walls and by the bar and a drinking trough with a bare wooden dance floor, looking much more like the barn its saddles were intended for. Now it resembles a modern pub with two massive bars, swirling red, green and blue carpeting, a functions area, dining tables a metre and a half high and plasma TVs on the walls.
A few days later I was driving up with my mother from the Gold Coast, back to Brisbane to visit my grandfather who I hadn’t seen in nearly thirty years. I grew up with my father in Bundaberg as a child and Pop didn’t have much to do with the family over the years we celebrated gatherings with my mother at Christmas time. He would generally have gone fishing. At eighty-three, the old fella still has his vital senses. His hearing has gone a bit hard but he is switched on, still driving car and boat. Over lunch, he told me a couple of tales about my father, keen as he was for smoko on a job they worked on together, and that after the Second World War, Pop joined the army and lived in Occupied Japan for two years. After lunch at the RSL (Pop had three pots of XXXX Gold and I had the feeling he could have easily knocked a few more back), we drove past the house he built where he and my grandmother had raised my mother and her three sisters. Still standing strong over fifty years later. As we were leaving his house, he said to me, “I’ll see you in another ten years time,” half-joking and half-inviting another visit. An easy space with Pop.
Christmas day we spent at Ray’s sister’s house. Beautiful home they have, swimming pool and air-conditioning. Ray cranked the Weber BBQ and roasted the meat in the tradition of Donnie (R.I.P.), his father. First Christmas without Donnie and he wasn’t remembered in a melancholic mournful manner for the duration of the day but, as he would have wanted it, over a cold beer and a full plate of roast meats and cold cuts. My sister Kim poured the gifts onto me: macchiato cups with Asian prints, Turkish-style drinking glasses, and a platter dish, all very practical and aesthetic.
For my part I paid for half her ticket to Woodford folk festival that Saturday. I travelled up early on the train from Nerang on the Gold Coast to Caboolture bordering on the sunshine Coast where my good friend Guy, picked me up. It was Boxing Day. He and his girlfriend Estelle had already largely set up the camp where a half dozen of us would be camping on-site, right next to a dam which was not fit for swimming (something about snakes and poisons) but the large body of water did cool the heat – somewhat. There were thousands of people and when the festival was in full swing, the campsite stretched for kilometres over gullies and hills. The music was phenomenal and my sister had a great day: it was the first time she had felt she had actually gotten away from her everyday life all year. You could wander around every night and you would be guaranteed to find music to please and rock your Dionysian soul. Two bands stood out for me: Doch – covering “traditional” Roma music from Romania – and Kafka – a jazz fusion band. We ate every day at The Common Ground restaurant, a Christian religious group who resemble Amish people. Every year they transport their two-storeyed wooden building from Sydney to Woodford and serve delicious scrambled eggs and Amazonian jungle juice and pamphlets and newspapers explaining their philosophy of kindness towards mankind. Of course, Lee rightly observed their women are trapped under the Christian patriarchy.
I stayed for a week and picked up a lift with Nicola back to the Gold Coast a day early – the heat was becoming too much and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to sit in air-conditioning for two hours. The sun was burning hot, sweat pouring from my body as I dismantled the tent at nine in the morning. My mother had the air-conditioning cranked when I arrived back at her home at Broadbeach Waters, my “base-of-operations.” I had a day to recoup, swim in the lake bordering the backyard not twenty metres behind the house, wash clothes and sleep in a queen-sized bed before getting on a train to Brisbane the next day.
I scored a lift to Childers, a half hour from Bundaberg and three and a half hours from Brisbane, with Scott and Jose with whom I had been partying with at Woodford. It so happened they were driving to Woodgate for a week and they were kind enough to offer me a lift as far as the turnoff at Childers where my father could drive down to and pick me up. I jammed myself and my backpack into the back seat of the two-door hatchback, as snug as a lug. The rain came down all the way from Brisbane to Bundaberg which wasn’t a promising start for a holiday up the coast. The sun came out a day later fortunately, as I camped for six days next to Dad and Jeanette’s caravan at Nielsen’s Park, a caravan park next to Bargara beach, fifteen minutes from the town of Bundaberg. My father and Jeanette come here every year and I can see why they love this dream holiday. We had a sabai time, eating our fill of fruit and cake, beer and wine, playing scrabble and periodically refreshing ourselves in the surf nearby. On my last night, as we walked back from dinner at KayCee’s in Bargara (lousy service and a barramundi dish you had to saw through), a turtle came up to the beach and laid eggs in the sand over a good hour and a half and then took twenty minutes crawling in stops and starts over the sand to make it back into the water. The park ranger told us (half the caravan park was there to witness this act of creation) the turtle doesn’t eat for a month before she lays, hence the sluggish pace. The poor beast was assaulted several times with flashes from cameras to boot, undoubtedly addling the starved creature’s senses.
On the tilt train back to Brisbane, I continued swimming and laughing through Infinite Jest, a novel by David Foster Wallace (R.I.P). At nearly a thousand pages long and almost four hundred footnotes, the novel was my holiday reading. Set in the near future, this novel is a dark look at the extremes of modern society. The film, Infinite Jest, is being sought by a terrorist group called the Wheelchair Assassins. Filled with anecdotes and rambling prose on substances and their abuse, tennis, family, friendships and film, this is some kind of cultural studies textbook rolled into a sprawling work of profound fiction. The daunting size and attention to detail requires wading through at times (400 footnotes!) but the waves of laughter carried this reader through.
I spent the final week at Ray and Mum’s sanctuary on the Bronze Coast, making a train trip north to Bris-Vegas to commune with old friends on my last weekend, re-entering the river of my past to find fresh water and the easy ride that comes with company you are well-comfortable with. We saw contemporary artwork at an exhibition called Optimism and we watched the cinematic meditation, Doubt and the entertaining new Bond film, Quantum of Solace, at new cineplexes. We shared dinner and visited the organic markets in New Farm. I left my mother on the verge of tears at the Nerang train station on the afternoon of the fourteenth of January to make the six hour trip (including a three hour stopover at Brisbane airport) back to Melbourne. A splendicious sunset at the airport train stop in Brisbane. A moment of confusion when I forgot which airport/city/state I was in but the plane was delayed – no rush. Arrival back in Melbourne after midnight, local time.
A couple of days later I was on the train and bus again, heading south for Point Roadnight near Anglesea along the Great Ocean Road. My arrival down the Victorian coast was well-timed – summer had only just begun down under. I spent a few days with my pen pal (we share, amongst other subject-matters, a love for the ancient Greek mythos) sleeping in a tent in the backyard of a house near the beach. After weeks of warmer climes, my body endured the cold waters of the Southern Ocean long enough for several quick baptisms before sunbathing in (eventually) over thirty degree weather. I met surfers and architects, nurses and musicians, all celebrating the spirited freedoms and beatific tragedies of life as only creators and artists can, in the eternal comedy of existence. I was taken to the world’s greatest beer garden at Ayre’s Point near Lorne for a birthday dinner, atop a hillside, a perfect spot to pay witness to the sun setting in reds and oranges over the hills by the headland covered in a mist. Until squadrons of mosquitoes attacked.
O divinity of sky, and swift-winged winds, and leaping streams, O countless laughter of the sea’s waves, O Earth, mother of all life! On you, and on the all-seeing circle of the sun, I call: See what is done by gods to me, a god! Aeschylus
I have been swept away, travelling like a nomad, camping in a tent for days, close to the elements. I have been pulled from my home to journey by my friends (Guy has been trying to get me to attend Woodford for seven years). The culture shock of returning home to Brunswick is a continuation of the stranger, returning all bronzed and ebullient and slightly bruised and burnt, skin peeling, I have had such dreams from my travels. Upon my return from Point Roadnight, I dreamed Mum, Ray and I had gone to a fair. Wandering through the arcades I lost them and found a set of stairs near a fire exit. Atop the stairs were switches for lights and fans. The stairwell was deep and wide. Along the descending wall, a plasma screen covered the area, a console hanging from a socket. The game console twisted in my hands: rotating the left side moved the body while the right side turned the head. My pen pal from Anglesea came down the stairwell behind me while I was absorbed in the game and startled me, thinking she was an enemy from the game but, in reality, she turned out to be a friendly. Grateful and humbled from the time and love I shared with my family and friends, the dream is now over and work has begun, back at SRC, until the next wave takes me travelling back to the beach, Bargara, Broadbeach and beyond, overseas.
good to have you back