Travel with Indigo

Cairns is a mostly tourist driven small town though the largest along Queensland’s northeast coast. Its marina, one of the finest we have encountered since leaving the US, is within a short walk of the town center, and dock side facilities include many open air restaurants and bars. As if to underscore the dangers of its sea shore, the Cairns town center features an enormous swimming pool surrounded by a white sand faux beach. It’s the only place you can go for a refreshing dip without fear of being consumed by a croc or stung to death by a jellyfish.

During our stay we were visited by a Member of Parliament from the area who had sponsored legislation that now makes it possible for a visiting super yacht (those over 100 feet, a category into which Indigo just barely fits)  to obtain expedited, specially designed visas for its owner, crew and guests. As the first yacht to enter the country under this new program, we were the object of the MP’s and the local media’s attention. As a result the six o’clock news one day featured Indigo, its owner and crew in a brief article on the issue.

Several times during our stay in Cairns I drove a half hour north to visit the delightful seaside resort village of Palm Cove. Its low rise and tasteful design, shaded beach walks, elegant inns and restaurants contrast sharply with the high rise sprawl of the Gold Coast. The village shares with the entire northeast Queensland coast, though, a peculiarity that cannot go unremarked. Though the entire area has miles of near perfect beaches washed by the warm waters of the subequatorial Pacific, there was not a single person swimming in the sea. The reason, as you may have gathered from the Cairns swimming pool, is all those deadly creatures that frequent the place. While seated at a beachside dining table one night, I half expected a giant crocodile to come slithering up from the shore. From its perspective, all those people seated like me at restaurants along the beach must have seemed like a buffet of tasty morsels.

Departing Cairns, we cruised north along the coast over the bathtub flat Pacific still protected by the Great Barrier Reef, passing Cape Melville, Lizard Island and so many more landmarks. Low coastal mountains clothed in arid bush, tide washed islets, coral reefs awash, all these and more glided past us each day.  We watched the sun set over a land hardly touched by humans and each night watched the Southern Cross light the sky. Soon we rounded Cape York at the extreme northeast corner of Australia, passed through the Torres Strait, a choke point for shipping traffic in this part of the world, and headed due west over the Arafura Sea.

This was our first westerly course since arriving at Brisbane nearly six months before and meant we were now making forward progress on our voyage that will one day end back in Florida.
 
It would not be fitting to leave Australia without remarking on its delightful contribution to the English lexicon, Aussie slang. So plentiful are the laconic, offbeat, truncated words that there is a hefty dictionary devoted to the subject. All the daily newspapers, including The Australian, perhaps the best of the broadsheets, use slang freely even in headlines. Some articles I encountered used slang so abstruse as to be unintelligible. One referred to the local law enforcement problem of p-platers hooning. Adolescent drivers with a restricted license are required to display a license plate beginning with the letter p, and hooning is street racing or hot rodding as it was once known. Here for your enjoyment, if not inclusion in your everyday vocabulary, are a few more of my favorites:

Stunned mullet means roughly the same as deer in the headlights. Good on ya, maybe the most useful and fun expression, means good for you. Stoush or blue is an argument. To shout means to pay a bill, as in “I’ll shout for the beer.” A tinnie is a metal skiff, a stubbie is a bottle of beer, a drop kick is a seedy guy, brekky is breakfast, gos is gossip, sus is suspicious, and arvo is afternoon. I once got a text message from an Aussie friend saying he’d see me in the arvo. When I asked the hotel concierge, “Where the hell is the arvo,” great howls of laughter followed.

There is an entire category of slang terms in which half or more of the proper word is simply lopped off, often followed by the letter “o”.  Ambo is an ambulance driver, journo is a journalist, servo is a service station, dero is a derelict, and unco is uncoordinated. These are but a very few.