Travel with Indigo

For the first several weeks of the refit work, I stayed in the Brisbane CBD in a room on the 20th floor of the tired but well located Stamford Plaza Hotel. Sited on the Brisbane River Walk, alongside the Botanical Gardens, and just a block from the many cafes, restaurants and bars of Eagle Street Pier, it was a near ideal location from which to wander about the city.

With a population of just 1.4 million, Brisbane, or Brissie as the Aussies often call it, is the smallest of the major cities, the only one in the state of Queensland, and, as the northernmost, the one with the most appealing year round climate. Two of Queensland’s largest and finest universities are here giving the place a youthful energy, especially in the nightclub district called Fortitude Valley. On most week nights and every weekend night the place has the look and feel of Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras. Block after block of nightclubs, bars, outdoor cafes, strip joints and public parks, and of course sidewalks, are thronged with wildly exuberant college kids doing what they do, often until 5am. Oddly, or so it seemed to me, each place has a fairly stringent dress code. No flip flops or tank tops (singlets as they are called here) permitted, among much else. And you won’t see many celebrants wearing denim or tee shirts.

During my many months of roving about the country, I have found Australians to be generally polite, well mannered, possessed of an easy humor, cordial and, with some exceptions, neatly dressed. Sure, they have plenty of rednecks, louts and ruffians (yabos or bogans in the vernacular), who are wild for sure, and with plenty of rough edges, but generally decent and easily likeable. The country, roughly the size of the lower forty-eight states, has a population about equal to that of Florida plus Atlanta. It also is the fourth most urbanized city in the world. Combine these stats and you get a country that outside of its cities is nearly empty, filled only with either vast desert or vast sheep and cattle ranches (stations in Aussiespeak) the size of small states.  With all that vacant space available, the country is the world’s leading exporter of beef and has a major mining industry that digs up huge quantities of coal, copper, and much else.

In Brisbane, I could never shake the image of Australians as a mass collection of people cloned from the characters in Dobie Gillis, Leave It to Beaver, The Brady Bunch and Ozzie and Harriet with a healthy dash of Mayberry RFD. Like Americans of fifty years ago and those from the upper Midwest today, they have a refreshing natural geniality and guileless innocence that I found appealing. At first I imagined that their most vituperative expressions were words like gosh, darn, and by golly, with maybe a dadgummit or two thrown in here and there. (In this assessment I was to be proved wrong.) What is thankfully lacking among them is the equivalent of our black ghetto culture. In fact, while wandering about in its major cities it is rare to spot even a single black ghetto dude, or any black person at all, and rarer still to spot an aboriginal. Needless to say there is rap and hip hop but it’s not nearly as prevalent as in the US.

One morning I read in the local newspaper an article so astounding that I’ve never forgotten it. It concerned Australia’s top cricket player, a celebrated athlete in a country that (for reasons that elude me) loves the game. He had appeared at a press conference dressed in what we would call smart casual: neatly pressed dark trousers, a tasteful long sleeved open collar sport shirt, and shined shoes. The press took the poor guy to task for not wearing a proper suit and tie! It was, they said, a sign of his lack of respect for his fans that he would appear dressed so informally. Wow! And in north Queensland, the united surf clubs—surfing is enormously popular—passed a new rule that no member could appear on club property with his boxers or butt crack showing above his trousers. And this is a group of clubs whose members’ average age can’t be much more than about 25.  Nice place, Australia.