Ten Pound Pom Read Online Free PDF Page A

smiling face. A few pints and then the ferry over to the city, all bigger but all smaller thanI recall. Really needing sleep by now. There’s the old post office, from where my parents used to ring relatives in Britain; a queue for the phone then a long wait for the connection and then a seven second delay on the line, that’s what it used to be like. Now, of course, I text my girlfriend and the words bounce around the planet and reach her in seconds. The time that separates these two methods of communication is, really, too short. How fast we move. Are moving. Too fast, perhaps.
    The main street is pedestrianised, now. In a cinema that used to stand here we went, as a family, to see Jaws . Blearily I recall a conversation with my sister outside the cinema after the film:
    SISTER: That shark ate all them people.
    ME: Yes.
    SISTER: That first lady, there was only her top half left.
    ME: Yes.
    SISTER: That means the shark ate her bum. And there would’ve been poo in her bum. So that means the shark ate the poo.
    Another bar, and Higgy tells us that he’s been diagnosed with leukaemia, but it’s now in remission, thanks, largely, to a new orally-administered drug. I’m shocked by this news, but he certainly looks healthy enough. Says he feels it, too. Tony’s almost asleep on the table, as am I. Finding energy from some hitherto untapped well we drift around Brisbane in a daze then drive to the Gold Coast, Surfer’s Paradise, and I fall asleep in the car and wake up in Alicante. Or what looks like Alicante. This was once a scruffy caravan park where we briefly holidayed and where I saw a UFO, us children outside at night, a huge blue-white ball trailing vapour between clouds. No longer; this is all tall tacky condos and traffic and tourism.Some shacks still stand on the beach with sky scrapers in their back gardens; poor settlers bought these ramshackle dwellings some decades ago and are now multi-millionaires. We want to build a giant, tasteless tower in your back garden. Here’s several million dollars. This isn’t the Oz you once knew, blue.
    We find a hotel suite. About ten floors up. I open the doors out onto the balcony and collapse onto the bed and am immediately deeply asleep until about 5:30 a.m., at which point I’m woken by the strangest dawn chorus I’ve ever heard, birds making noises that birds shouldn’t be able to make, all falling whoops and rising shrieks and Swannee whistles and five-note airs, odd and alien and wondrous. I smoke a breakfast fag out on the balcony and stand smiling in the noises and watch the sun rise between the skyscrapers and over the blue sea behind them then I go back inside and wrap myself up in blankets and sleep some more. Wake happy. Move lodgings into Higgy’s unit, which he shares, and which we had to wait to be vacated. We explore the Gold Coast, and I very, very quickly grow to loathe the place. It might not look , anymore, like 1970s Queensland, but Jeez it acts like it. See, in the seventies, Queensland was ruled by the virulent rightwinger John Bjelke-Peterson, who used his pet corrupt police force to ‘suppress demonstrations with violence’, and ‘bugged political opponents, supported the South African apartheid regime, made law that discriminated against Aborigines, and relied on gerrymandering to keep power from 1968 to 1987’. * A fascist regime, indeed. He ran the state as ifit was his own private fiefdom, accountable to no-one, deferential to nothing but his own greed. I don’t know where Peterson’s gone, but thank God he has gone, yet the Gold Coast coruscates with his legacy; the architecture would make Albert Speer engorged with pride, as would the ubiquitous prohibitions: No smoking (of course). No flip-flops. No singlets. No walking in a funny way. The doors of every bar or pub make you feel hugely unwelcome before you’ve even stepped inside.
    And one night we’d arranged to meet Higgy in a surfer’s bar so we turned up at the appointed time