Surfing@Paradise
Jul. 11th, 2004 05:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skyringNotes from the road from the Bookcrossing journal I'm taking on my holiday,
I left Canberra 45 minutes late, and that delay carried over all the way to Sydney – I was past Goulburn when Tania texted me to say she was in the park with her son and I was to look out for hr and alittle bundle of energy in black and red, and an hour later, well past the time we’d agreed on, she texted again to say she was returning home and hoped my schedule wasn’t amiss.
At that point I was battling with Sydney’s traffic. My daughter, who had only just gained her licence on the wide, empty and well-designed boulevards of the national capital, looked on with horror as I whizzed past buses, parked cars and oncoming traffic with bare centimeters to spare along narrow twisty streets all alike that had grown from the wallaby paths of centuries earlier. Lined with a festive smorgasbord of shops and houses crammed tightly together, each reflecting an architectural style of a previous age. It was the wonder of the world didn’t get lost more than a dozen times. Or crushed under a pantechnicon. Or wiped out by a mad Greek, high on Ouzo and a World Cup win.
But we made it, and when Tania answered the door in response to a loud clang from the ocean-liner’s bell mounted on the tiny front porch, I was able to wipe the cold sweat from my brow and smile when she picked me as a Bookcrosser. I must exude the aroma of the thousands, the countless thousands according to my inventory program, of pre-loved books that fill my house, each reflecting the literary style of a lost age. Or maybe it was the Bookcrossing 2004 convention T-shirt I was wearing.
She offered coffee, but although my whole being was crying out for a chance to escape from the bubbling whirlpool of Sydney traffic, and to sit down with a famous Bookcrosser to discuss books and Bookcrossing and life, philosophy, and all the rest of the cheerful, relaxing, thoughtful things that Tania could fill me full of for a few minutes, an hour, a week, a lifetime, I had to get back on the road. My sister was waiting with lunch for me in Gosford, a long hour’s drive away, and I still had many things I had to do in Sydney.
We smiled for the cameras – why do I look such a goose on film, I wonder, when in my mirror I am the very picture of sophistication – as Tania ceremonially handed over the journal. One camera, actually, and as I steered us out into the traffic, my daughter who had been pressed into sudden action as the official photographer, eased my mind over the quality of the one photograph, wondering aloud whether she had correctly set the focus, pressed the right buttons, aimed in the right direction. How I love her!
Governor Macquarie was the administrator who transformed the infant convict settlement into a decent example of Imperial British civilization, and if the chaotic jigsaw of Sydney’s streets today contains a few well-laid-out roads and streets and elegant sandstone buildings, it is mostly due to Macquarie. It was his wife’s pleasure in those days of improvement to stroll through the bush along a rocky peninsula to a natural outlook on the very end, and to gaze out on the wilderness shores of the harbour, contemplating the glorious city that would one day rise here.
Today, Mrs Macquarie’s Road leads to Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, and the tourist may sit on the shelf of rocks where she parked her bottom, looking out on what must be one of the most beautiful harbours on earth, its sparkling blue waters alive with sails and ferries and pleasure boats, parks, houses and remnants of the original bushland forming a backdrop. And just across the perfect semi-circle of Farm Cove is the extraordinary shape of the Sydney Opera House, the curving shells of its roof echoing the bellying sails of today’s yachts and the vanished square-riggers that once dominated this bustling port. And beyond that is the famous bridge, carrying road and rail traffic high over the harbour. I once saw the Chilean Navy’s sail training ship, the four-masted Esmeralda, tack beneath the roadbed, with barely a metre to spare. I am sure that the white-uniformed cadet perched on the top of the mainmast must have reached up to touch the grey steel girders.
It is one of my favorite spots in all the world, and I would be more than happy to sit for a sunny afternoon in Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, drinking in the view and ruminating to myself on the glories to come.
The parking facilities here are reminiscent of the old convict days, and my face paled when I was lashed across the face of the parking meter and forced to pay a day’s wages for six minutes in a mean little space that had taken a year or so off my life to gain in the first place. Everyone wants to sit in Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, you see, and the busloads of camera-clicking tourists don’t aid restful contemplation. Nor do the lunchtime power walkers and jogglers who fascinated my teenage son as they bounced up the stone steps from the harbourside walk.
I perched the journal on the seawall, flanked by a couple of books I planned to release – The Phantom of the Opera in deference to the building across the water, and From Here to Eternity as a nod to Arthur Stace, who wrote his one-word sermon half a million times on the deserted dawn footpaths of Sydney, and whose elegant copperplate was outlined in fireworks on the Harbour Bridge in the first moments of the year 2000 before a global television audience.
Sydney Harbour has many prime residential sites on the hills rising from the water. People will wait thirty years and spend thirty million of dollars for one of the best spots. And yet it is the animals who enjoy what must be the prize of prizes, making their home in Taronga Park Zoo in pricey Mosman on the North Shore. The collection of native Australian animals – koalas, kangaroos, platypodes and the like – draw international visitors here, and the native Australians swell the crowds to view the elephant, the polar bear and the tiger. And all the rest of the ark. If you get through half of it in a full day you are doing very well indeed and you may congratulate yourself as you soak your aching feet that evening.
Let us glide smoothly past the traffic horrors and the parking nightmares required to get there. Suffice to say that we parked illegally for long enough to take a picture outside the entrance, fled from onrushing traffic stormtoopers, and didn’t get to see so much as a giraffe’s head sticking out above the walls.
It is a cold pre-dawn as I write these words, and I am sitting at a rugged redgum table in an extraordinary house planted above a hillside of grape vines. Below me in the cellars are rack upon rack of Australian wines, and if I go outside, I can stand under a sky so black and clear that the Milky Way takes my frosty breath away in its sparkling glory, the glittering Southern Cross against the pure black of the Coalsack high above me, and the Greater and Lesser Magellenic Clouds island galaxies in the glorious sight.
We don’t get this in my city home, but out here in the bush, surrounded by a State Forest where I may see kangaroos emerging from the trees to nibble the dewy grass, why but the locals barely glance at the splendour above and around them.
My high bedroom looks out, through a vast triangular window, at the quiet forest forming a green wall to the winery’s cellar door sales area, white sailcloth shades forming a startling contrast below to the green and earth colours around and the clear sky above. Cockatoos and kookaburras take shortcuts over the grape vines. What glory to live in such a house with such a view! My own house crammed with second-hand books and the suburban view out over my neighbours’ backyards seems impossibly cramped and cluttered in contrast to the outlook here.
We are spending the night at the house of my wife’s sister, outside Port Macquarie on the North Coast of New South Wales. In a little while I will take a morning walk, finding a place to give the journal a taste of the life here. And later today we will take the journal to Byron Bay as we continue north on our winter migration, along with the humpback whales we hope to see cruising past Cape Byron the most easterly point of the Australian mainland.
This little homemade book will have made its own migration, touching at some of the most wonderful locations in the world, and I hope that it will continue to travel before finally wending its way back to rubyjules.
It has been to 5000 year old cities - imagine that! Cities where the wilderness was once close in time as well as space. Cities where our shared humanity across the globe is not something to read of in books, it is there before your eyes. I shall go for my walk now and think deep thoughts in the clear air.
It's five o'clock on a Saturday
And the regular crowd shuffles in:
He's bleary-eyed and unshaven
And his first act is to plug the pot in.
OK. It's a few minutes later, I've got the first sips of my morning cuppa and a sin-filled triangle of chocolate inside me, and I'm sitting down in a little piece of the sky.
Almost at my feet, the Pacific Ocean rolls in, the white foam of the breakers the only sign in a vast eastward blackness. I can hear the thunder twenty floors up as the waves shatter and slide and die over the long stretch of wide, white beach. I'll go down and walk on that beach a little later, once the sun comes up and they turn off the floodlights.
Southwards from my belvedere the horizon becomes visible as a thin line of golden points, sparse at first but becoming ever denser, ever brighter, ever closer until it swings around to rush at and engulf me, a treasureland of lights, flashing, blinking, glowing, spreading and merging to become Surfers Paradise - my holiday home for the next week.
There's a chain of wide brown streams that must be crossed on the way north from Sydney, and it used to be that the schoolchildren of New South Wales learnt them by heart until they knew the names as well as their own. Tweed is the last one, appropriately marking the northern border.
We spent yesterday traversing the Northern Rivers one by one, sheep and cattle and thee odd vineyard giving way to bananas and great high fields of cane. In one town a refinery blew steam in a high streaming plume as it distilled the cane into great mountains of raw sugar somewhere below.
Hills and mountains appeared here and there on the western horizon as the misleading slopes of the Great Dividing Range drew closer to the coast. There's a fair dinkum peak in the jagged crag of Mount Warning, which Cook, ever the pragmatical namer of features, took as a marker for Point Danger which jutted out into the ocean and almost swallowed up the Endeavour.
We passed Ballina after spending what seemed like an hour hugging the southern bank of one of those northern rivers, and my daughter who had ordered me out of the driver's seat after lunch in Grafton in a startling display of moral authority, was herself ordered over by a policeman sampling the stream of traffic to undergo her first ever breath test. This was the moment of truth - would it emerge that the red wine vinaigrette sauce on the lunchtime sub sandwich had actually contained any alcohol?
With a maximum allowable level of zero on her provisional driving license, this was a subject of some concern to my daughter, but as I'd eaten the other half of the foot-long sandwich, I already knew the answer, and we were waved on our way without a second glance.
Coming up was Byron Bay and the lighthouse at Cape Byron marking the easternmost point of the Australian mainland. I had great hopes for this, because not only has it a wonderful view and a superb piece of early Australian architecture, it forms a natural observation point for the northerly migration of the humpback whales flowing up the east coast to their winter homes off the Queensland coast.
We crested a rise and there in the distance was the lighthouse, a bright white building on a green point, with the buildings of Byron Bay visible beneath, the blue Pacific stretching out behind. I'd seen this sight a dozen times over the years, but it had been near twenty years since I took the turnoff from the highway to the coast. Always been racing from one place to another. Put it off until another time. Well, now "another time" had arrived, and I was privately glad of having a reason to go.
Byron Bay is a special place. Laid-back doesn't begin to describe the atmosphere here - it's flat-out horizontal, mind in neutral, she'll be right mate. There is a strong sense of community, of open-mindedness and fierce pride in what they have achieved. You may be sure that Byron Bay will never see the sort of unbridled high-rise development that has marked the Gold Coast.
We took a quick spin around the streets, looking at rainbow-coloured signs, art galleries, organic food shops - a hundred things that reveal that this place is not like every other place.
But time was limited, and it was the lighthouse on the cape that called me. Not only were there great photo opportunities, but the chance of seeing a whale or two.
I had thought parking was tight in Sydney, but here it was a hundred times worse. And more expensive.
More later.
I left Canberra 45 minutes late, and that delay carried over all the way to Sydney – I was past Goulburn when Tania texted me to say she was in the park with her son and I was to look out for hr and alittle bundle of energy in black and red, and an hour later, well past the time we’d agreed on, she texted again to say she was returning home and hoped my schedule wasn’t amiss.
At that point I was battling with Sydney’s traffic. My daughter, who had only just gained her licence on the wide, empty and well-designed boulevards of the national capital, looked on with horror as I whizzed past buses, parked cars and oncoming traffic with bare centimeters to spare along narrow twisty streets all alike that had grown from the wallaby paths of centuries earlier. Lined with a festive smorgasbord of shops and houses crammed tightly together, each reflecting an architectural style of a previous age. It was the wonder of the world didn’t get lost more than a dozen times. Or crushed under a pantechnicon. Or wiped out by a mad Greek, high on Ouzo and a World Cup win.
But we made it, and when Tania answered the door in response to a loud clang from the ocean-liner’s bell mounted on the tiny front porch, I was able to wipe the cold sweat from my brow and smile when she picked me as a Bookcrosser. I must exude the aroma of the thousands, the countless thousands according to my inventory program, of pre-loved books that fill my house, each reflecting the literary style of a lost age. Or maybe it was the Bookcrossing 2004 convention T-shirt I was wearing.
She offered coffee, but although my whole being was crying out for a chance to escape from the bubbling whirlpool of Sydney traffic, and to sit down with a famous Bookcrosser to discuss books and Bookcrossing and life, philosophy, and all the rest of the cheerful, relaxing, thoughtful things that Tania could fill me full of for a few minutes, an hour, a week, a lifetime, I had to get back on the road. My sister was waiting with lunch for me in Gosford, a long hour’s drive away, and I still had many things I had to do in Sydney.
We smiled for the cameras – why do I look such a goose on film, I wonder, when in my mirror I am the very picture of sophistication – as Tania ceremonially handed over the journal. One camera, actually, and as I steered us out into the traffic, my daughter who had been pressed into sudden action as the official photographer, eased my mind over the quality of the one photograph, wondering aloud whether she had correctly set the focus, pressed the right buttons, aimed in the right direction. How I love her!
Governor Macquarie was the administrator who transformed the infant convict settlement into a decent example of Imperial British civilization, and if the chaotic jigsaw of Sydney’s streets today contains a few well-laid-out roads and streets and elegant sandstone buildings, it is mostly due to Macquarie. It was his wife’s pleasure in those days of improvement to stroll through the bush along a rocky peninsula to a natural outlook on the very end, and to gaze out on the wilderness shores of the harbour, contemplating the glorious city that would one day rise here.
Today, Mrs Macquarie’s Road leads to Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, and the tourist may sit on the shelf of rocks where she parked her bottom, looking out on what must be one of the most beautiful harbours on earth, its sparkling blue waters alive with sails and ferries and pleasure boats, parks, houses and remnants of the original bushland forming a backdrop. And just across the perfect semi-circle of Farm Cove is the extraordinary shape of the Sydney Opera House, the curving shells of its roof echoing the bellying sails of today’s yachts and the vanished square-riggers that once dominated this bustling port. And beyond that is the famous bridge, carrying road and rail traffic high over the harbour. I once saw the Chilean Navy’s sail training ship, the four-masted Esmeralda, tack beneath the roadbed, with barely a metre to spare. I am sure that the white-uniformed cadet perched on the top of the mainmast must have reached up to touch the grey steel girders.
It is one of my favorite spots in all the world, and I would be more than happy to sit for a sunny afternoon in Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, drinking in the view and ruminating to myself on the glories to come.
The parking facilities here are reminiscent of the old convict days, and my face paled when I was lashed across the face of the parking meter and forced to pay a day’s wages for six minutes in a mean little space that had taken a year or so off my life to gain in the first place. Everyone wants to sit in Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, you see, and the busloads of camera-clicking tourists don’t aid restful contemplation. Nor do the lunchtime power walkers and jogglers who fascinated my teenage son as they bounced up the stone steps from the harbourside walk.
I perched the journal on the seawall, flanked by a couple of books I planned to release – The Phantom of the Opera in deference to the building across the water, and From Here to Eternity as a nod to Arthur Stace, who wrote his one-word sermon half a million times on the deserted dawn footpaths of Sydney, and whose elegant copperplate was outlined in fireworks on the Harbour Bridge in the first moments of the year 2000 before a global television audience.
Sydney Harbour has many prime residential sites on the hills rising from the water. People will wait thirty years and spend thirty million of dollars for one of the best spots. And yet it is the animals who enjoy what must be the prize of prizes, making their home in Taronga Park Zoo in pricey Mosman on the North Shore. The collection of native Australian animals – koalas, kangaroos, platypodes and the like – draw international visitors here, and the native Australians swell the crowds to view the elephant, the polar bear and the tiger. And all the rest of the ark. If you get through half of it in a full day you are doing very well indeed and you may congratulate yourself as you soak your aching feet that evening.
Let us glide smoothly past the traffic horrors and the parking nightmares required to get there. Suffice to say that we parked illegally for long enough to take a picture outside the entrance, fled from onrushing traffic stormtoopers, and didn’t get to see so much as a giraffe’s head sticking out above the walls.
It is a cold pre-dawn as I write these words, and I am sitting at a rugged redgum table in an extraordinary house planted above a hillside of grape vines. Below me in the cellars are rack upon rack of Australian wines, and if I go outside, I can stand under a sky so black and clear that the Milky Way takes my frosty breath away in its sparkling glory, the glittering Southern Cross against the pure black of the Coalsack high above me, and the Greater and Lesser Magellenic Clouds island galaxies in the glorious sight.
We don’t get this in my city home, but out here in the bush, surrounded by a State Forest where I may see kangaroos emerging from the trees to nibble the dewy grass, why but the locals barely glance at the splendour above and around them.
My high bedroom looks out, through a vast triangular window, at the quiet forest forming a green wall to the winery’s cellar door sales area, white sailcloth shades forming a startling contrast below to the green and earth colours around and the clear sky above. Cockatoos and kookaburras take shortcuts over the grape vines. What glory to live in such a house with such a view! My own house crammed with second-hand books and the suburban view out over my neighbours’ backyards seems impossibly cramped and cluttered in contrast to the outlook here.
We are spending the night at the house of my wife’s sister, outside Port Macquarie on the North Coast of New South Wales. In a little while I will take a morning walk, finding a place to give the journal a taste of the life here. And later today we will take the journal to Byron Bay as we continue north on our winter migration, along with the humpback whales we hope to see cruising past Cape Byron the most easterly point of the Australian mainland.
This little homemade book will have made its own migration, touching at some of the most wonderful locations in the world, and I hope that it will continue to travel before finally wending its way back to rubyjules.
It has been to 5000 year old cities - imagine that! Cities where the wilderness was once close in time as well as space. Cities where our shared humanity across the globe is not something to read of in books, it is there before your eyes. I shall go for my walk now and think deep thoughts in the clear air.
It's five o'clock on a Saturday
And the regular crowd shuffles in:
He's bleary-eyed and unshaven
And his first act is to plug the pot in.
OK. It's a few minutes later, I've got the first sips of my morning cuppa and a sin-filled triangle of chocolate inside me, and I'm sitting down in a little piece of the sky.
Almost at my feet, the Pacific Ocean rolls in, the white foam of the breakers the only sign in a vast eastward blackness. I can hear the thunder twenty floors up as the waves shatter and slide and die over the long stretch of wide, white beach. I'll go down and walk on that beach a little later, once the sun comes up and they turn off the floodlights.
Southwards from my belvedere the horizon becomes visible as a thin line of golden points, sparse at first but becoming ever denser, ever brighter, ever closer until it swings around to rush at and engulf me, a treasureland of lights, flashing, blinking, glowing, spreading and merging to become Surfers Paradise - my holiday home for the next week.
There's a chain of wide brown streams that must be crossed on the way north from Sydney, and it used to be that the schoolchildren of New South Wales learnt them by heart until they knew the names as well as their own. Tweed is the last one, appropriately marking the northern border.
We spent yesterday traversing the Northern Rivers one by one, sheep and cattle and thee odd vineyard giving way to bananas and great high fields of cane. In one town a refinery blew steam in a high streaming plume as it distilled the cane into great mountains of raw sugar somewhere below.
Hills and mountains appeared here and there on the western horizon as the misleading slopes of the Great Dividing Range drew closer to the coast. There's a fair dinkum peak in the jagged crag of Mount Warning, which Cook, ever the pragmatical namer of features, took as a marker for Point Danger which jutted out into the ocean and almost swallowed up the Endeavour.
We passed Ballina after spending what seemed like an hour hugging the southern bank of one of those northern rivers, and my daughter who had ordered me out of the driver's seat after lunch in Grafton in a startling display of moral authority, was herself ordered over by a policeman sampling the stream of traffic to undergo her first ever breath test. This was the moment of truth - would it emerge that the red wine vinaigrette sauce on the lunchtime sub sandwich had actually contained any alcohol?
With a maximum allowable level of zero on her provisional driving license, this was a subject of some concern to my daughter, but as I'd eaten the other half of the foot-long sandwich, I already knew the answer, and we were waved on our way without a second glance.
Coming up was Byron Bay and the lighthouse at Cape Byron marking the easternmost point of the Australian mainland. I had great hopes for this, because not only has it a wonderful view and a superb piece of early Australian architecture, it forms a natural observation point for the northerly migration of the humpback whales flowing up the east coast to their winter homes off the Queensland coast.
We crested a rise and there in the distance was the lighthouse, a bright white building on a green point, with the buildings of Byron Bay visible beneath, the blue Pacific stretching out behind. I'd seen this sight a dozen times over the years, but it had been near twenty years since I took the turnoff from the highway to the coast. Always been racing from one place to another. Put it off until another time. Well, now "another time" had arrived, and I was privately glad of having a reason to go.
Byron Bay is a special place. Laid-back doesn't begin to describe the atmosphere here - it's flat-out horizontal, mind in neutral, she'll be right mate. There is a strong sense of community, of open-mindedness and fierce pride in what they have achieved. You may be sure that Byron Bay will never see the sort of unbridled high-rise development that has marked the Gold Coast.
We took a quick spin around the streets, looking at rainbow-coloured signs, art galleries, organic food shops - a hundred things that reveal that this place is not like every other place.
But time was limited, and it was the lighthouse on the cape that called me. Not only were there great photo opportunities, but the chance of seeing a whale or two.
I had thought parking was tight in Sydney, but here it was a hundred times worse. And more expensive.
More later.
