Coming Up For Air at Picnic Bay: Legs

Roma St. Station, Brisbane

Melbourne to Brisbane: Easy but EARLY!

The flight to Brisbane was at 8 a.m. That meant getting to the airport between 7.00 and 7.30 for a domestic shuttle. That meant getting a Skybus to the port between 6.00 and 6.30 and that meant being ready for a tram between 5.00 and 5.30 to make sure everything kind of joined. So that's a 4.30 to 5.00 a.m. wake up with everything packed and ready for the tram/bus/plane.

And there's something else. It's still spring in Melbourne which can mean that it's either warm in the morning or Antarctic. Today it's Antarctic. But I'm going to spend a day in Brisbane and then the better part of two more in the even hotter north. There will be no luggage room for jackets. So a shirt over a T-shirt will have to get me through the 9 degree morning to Tullamarine.

I'm organised. Everything joins. Before I can yawn I'm putting my densely packed case on the Skybus rack and going to the top deck to doze to a podcast. Advantage: early morning sounds tough but the tram was almost empty and the typical mass of people to stop movement at the Southern Cross Station stop was a trickle. No suitcase blues for this merry trekker. The Skybus, also, was only about half full and the roads were not jammed. It was a record sprint for the ol' double decker. I got to the terminal and headed air-side with my luggage as carry-on.

Like a twit I'd packed my laptop in the case when experience should have warned me to keep it exposed through security. But apart from a slight protest bother from the staff (blameless, really) I got through and found my gate without drama. Eat on the plane. There was an announcement at the gate about the plane being burdened with carry-on luggage so I surrendered mine to be stowed to Brisbane without a qualm, making a note to check it in for the return double flight.

Took my aisle and was pleased to find that there would  be a gap of a seat between me and my fellow in the row (young woman in business kit). I turned on a cruddy horror flick and waited for Brisbane.

Friend and sometime collaborator Noel turned up at Brisbane airport after a few sloppy attempts by me to start a video blog of my travels and we caught up in a long and enjoyable drive and stroll through inner Brisbane. Brisbane is leafy in the middle (well, leafier than it used to be) and the barramundi 'n' chips 'n' salad at the Breafast Creek is a treat, washed down with original (or "heavy") XXXX.







Brisbane to Townsville: FAMILIAR BUT SPOOOOKY

The Spirit of Queensland replaced the old Sunlander between Brisbane and Cairns. It took ages and now takes ages minus a few hours.

Anyway, I wanted this to slow me down. Flying straight to Townsville would have been too much of a shock. I needed to de-pressurise, the same way I'd go from a busy student life in Brisbane back to Townsville for the holidays. You cannot rush anything on a train.

No more sleeper cabins in the trains o' today so I booked a railbed which is like the cryogenic pods that business class passengers get on Qantas. Very comfy with table service and a kind of steampunk transformation at bedtime.

This is mine in its pyjamas. For most of the day it's more like an extended seat with a hood. If interested, the usb slot won't charge anything higher than an old Motorola so you'll have to use the three-prong in the other chair arm. Do I really have to keep everything charged to 100% all the time? No, but Queensland Rail measure everything north of Rockhampton in light years so you might want to work out your battery usage or just charge things when you can.


Nevertheless, this made for pleasant travel and slumber was not a problem. Mostly. At one point my phone slipped out of my hand and fell between the wall and the arm of the chair. There was no light and it was about 2 a.m. so I wasn't going to bluster around with peacefully sleeping people across the aisle and in the seat in front. So, I tried to reason that I'd be able to get it by the light o' the morning and, with nothing to be done about it now, that I should just lie back and try to dream. But I kept thinking up ideas about how to get it back.




Eventually .... I realised I could use the light of my laptop to work out where the phone had fallen. Some further delirious reasoning allowed me to try the laminated menu to push the thing to a reachable position and there. I was once again among the living and effective of the world.

The first I took on getting the phone back was this shed just outside of the northern town of Paget. That's the first time I've typed it and only knew of it when I checked the exif data on my phone.

Bundaberg  Station. As we passed through I texted my Brother Greg who moved there. He was shocked to discover I was going back to Townsville and warned me about the street crime. In my pre-dawn unslept wooze I googled the issue and almost cancelled my plans to swing by the old house. A brief nap cleared that and I resolved to proceed but with wile. (Details next post.)

 Dawn outside Paget.

My phone camera scruples not to shut its eyes where looking at the sun. Here, then, is the sun rising o'er what always appears to be one single canefield thousands of kilometres long. This is outside Myrtlevale.

Not a classic Queenslander but a style of house I enjoy seeing. Non-Queensland or international readers might need to know that the twin purpose of building houses on stilts in the Sunshine State is against flooding and to promote airflow. Whether either reason applies the design can bee seen from The NSW border to the tip of Cape York (actually, I don't know that that's true it just sounds mighty when I imagine being spoken in an old filler documentary form the 1960s). Still, love seeing houses and yards like this. This is, of course, nostalgia which is my foe for this project but this instance no more gets in the way than the singular odour of Bundy rum and cola. Anyway...



But until I could take those, while I was still drifting between sleep and panic, I lay back in an attempted nap and experienced something long forgotten.

Trains scream. They scream with a quiet persistence. They whisper scuttlebutt like workers overdrawn and raving. They growl beneath the breath of the air con, the real message to these bloated and uncaring things that command their work. They shriek beneath the cooling breath we sleepers gratefully ignore. None of this is noticeable when beams of sunlight course through the windows. It only sounds when those of us like me who can never sleep soundly in unknown beds are forced to. And once you have heard it, the scream of the train, awake when all around you are silenced by unconsciousness, dreaming, exhausted and blank or sleeping off the chaos of the club car, once you understand the pain of the long distance locomotive you too bear it, you too walk in the acoustic shadow of its scream.

The stress of metal under weight at speed and the big black night beyond came into my head like it was 1981 all over again and I was hurtling exhausted back home from exams to lazy afternoons, gin and tonic, and the refreshment of fine new faces. Well that last bit wasn't going to happen but it was pleasant to hear as I bumped my skull on the overhead compartment the gent across the aisle say in sympathy: "I felt that." I smiled back and said, "so did I."

That guy puzzled me, too. In the railbed beside him was a woman in her thirties at the latest and he was easily in his sixties. She read, mostly or isolated herself with earbuds. Whatever hold he had on her was strong: if she got up for a leg stretch or a loo break she always came back. I had to admit, as I imagined her standing at the carriage door and gazing out the window,  that jumping from trains only happened in movies. Later, when the staff came through to convert the seats into their bed form and put all the sheets 'n' stuff on. She darted in front of him, held her phone at arm's length, aiming it for composition and took a selfie with a serious expression.

He was on the train at the insistence of his daughter (all the clear evidence of my eyes and reason could not trump my goofy, unfounded fancy) who pointed out that this was a line he hadn't yet been on. He enjoyed train travel and this trek was being done in honour of a late friend who had taken many journeys with him when they were both soldiers. It was a warming story (better than the bullshit one I'd come up with) and he was clearly glad to be pulled from retirement drudgery in Sydney to chugulug through the thickening tropics.

We were to come in handy for each other. The guy in the seat behind them, a frizzy ginger mountain who sat in one of the pair of railbeds he'd booked while he took the other over with gadgetry. Most of the time we heard little more out of his than a few squeaks and farty rattles from the video game he was playing. He came back from the Club Car agitated, ranting to himself about how whingeing poms had nothing on whingeing Australians. He talked in circles but they got wider as more spokes were added to the wheel and the looping tale went spinning.

I think he'd gone to the Club Car and kept playing his video games loudly (partial deafness) on his tablet and when asked to turn it down or off refused. I say refused but what I think it was was more like recoiled in anger. He kept coming back to the staff member who'd insisted he comply and it was there that the escalation took force and swelled to critical mass. He had seen the woman before take a negative interest in him on other trips. It was because ... well, he had other issues as well but I've violated his privacy enough. I'll just stick to what I know.

Storming back to his railbed, he started his rant. HIs accent was a broadened northern but his diction was clipped and his phrasing precise. However much he harangued the light and air around him he didn't swear once (which is more than I could say for myself faced with the same humiliation) At no time, however loud and punchy his ranting got, did he threaten anyone around him.

I remember these points particularly because when he was evicted from the train at the next town the local cops came and asked us about it and we (me and the father/daughter team) witnessed his ranting but made sure they knew he wasn't an on-rail security procedure. The police were fine. They even seemed a little embarrassed at the vehemence of the train staffer who'd called them and quite happily joined in a discussion that somehow arose from this about Italian families in the north. I volunteered that my paternal grans had been cane farmers around Ingham which was by now pretty much an Italian town. The cops went on their way after taking our details and were never heard of again. Well, they would have been but they didn't need to follow anything up so I'm assuming it worked out. Perhaps I should say "hoping".



At that point we were approaching Townsville. The glare was already mighty at 8 a.m. and the heat almost penetrated the double windows.

The purpose of this leg was to see if it sparked memories and what might they be. Did this feel like coming home after a year at uni? No. I enjoyed the general experience, the slowdown of travel, the sounds and the refreshed landscape speeding past my window but at no time did I mistake this for the same journey made decades ago. The train was new and faster but it still felt like a long ride. I was temporarily escaping being busy (work rather than study but still). But there was no finale to it. My parents have both gone for around a decade and even if they were alive, they sold the Aitkenvale place in the '90s to move to Brisbane. I had no intention of seeking out anyone I knew from the time. I was heading for a city I only knew as a younger person with a head and nervous system alive with different sensations and values. The city I would find might have some physical familiarity but it might as well be like going somewhere I had never been. Truly, perhaps, this was walking in my past free of nostalgia.

The station has been moved from Flinders Street to the place in the photo. Made no difference to my plans but I do miss the old colonial era architecture of the original station. Townsville has no domestic rail services, just industrial or government/commerical like the train in the pic; as far as the rail is concerned it's a longer than usual stop on the way to Cairns. Shrugging at that, and waving off my unplanned travel companions I made my way from the station (with enough 50+ sunscreen to look pornographic) and found a bus route that would take me to both my old home and the ferry to the Island. Felt good.

And how did it go? Next time on ... Coming Up for Air  ... at Picnic Bay...

Coming Up For Air at Picnic Bay: Prelude

There are no photos fr this section so I drew a page. Then it's just words.

This was written before I did that page

I was thinking of packing this in. From the raw and illformed original novella I'd done back in the '80s to the brainwave to rethink it as a comic the history of The Monsoons as a story has been one of many false starts and stallings. Most recently it's been dormant for almost two years and the thought of it languishing came with pricks of conscience. At some point it occurred to me that 2019 was the 40th anniversary of the events that inspired the tale.

That was in the air already; an old school friend contacted me through Facebook, asking if I'd be interested in coming along to a 40th school reunion. I politely begged off. My connection with anyone who might enthusiastically turn up to such a thing was all but unimaginable. My old school mate Shelly was understanding and left the exchange with a memory of some impromptu joke I'd entertained her with. And that got me thinking. What she described sounded like me but I didn't remember a second of it. I didn't doubt her memory but it might as well have been fiction for all I could recall. And that sealed it.

I was instantly transported by the anecdote back to the seventies with the two of us walking along in school uniform and me ranting against Neil Diamond so vehemently that she laughed. I felt the press of the Townsville sunlight and the dry plus sappy odour of the grass and trees. I had art directed a memory that had faded to invisibility: I had been nostalgic.

Well, what if that kind of fiction had been blocking the other one I was trying to create? This Magnetic Island I was reconstructing had become guesswork. Against the best of my efforts it had become nostalgic. The Monsoons is not a sentimental recollection of the end of adolescence. It's not a fond memory but a scream of despair at the realisation that at seventeen going on eighteen you are soon to be seen as an adult and you have no idea how to do that. So, I had to go back to the Island.

THE BIG IDEA
I had been drawing the Island as an imaginary place. I formed bays and points of sand and boulders and casurina trees copied from photographs. I knew the Picnic Bay jetty that is the location of the opening chapter had significantly changed but to an unknown extent. When I drew figures on it I had to guess the scale. And what did the houses in the small neighbourhood of the Bay look like? It wasn't just nostalgia blocking me, it was sheer ignorance.

I had to go but didn't know when. I thought to stow it in one of the weeks of my annual leave but then remembered that December was when the local Schoolies Week happened and even though the comic is set then I didn't want to live through it. In the end I chose the week of Cup Day. And I was getting excited. I was travelling almost for the hell of it, no conferences or interstate training, just me and some scenery and a lot of calculations. There was a weird allure to it.

Anyway, I gave myself an ultimatum: go and reconnect, prise the remembered from the reality and see what's left. If you still want to do it, do it, if you are left untouched, ditch it. That was frightening but frightening is exciting.

I wrote this:

Melbourne 27/10/2019

I'm filching the title of a George Orwell novel about an ageing man who travels to his childhood neighbourhood to reconnect with his past. It is, of course, a great disappointment with none of the features his nostalgia created for him on the way. His old house is a tea shop, an old flame is ravaged by her life, the old fish pond has been built over: the changes have rendered his old village unreachable. The present that he has grown to detest is the only home he can have. A bomb falls on the village. It's an accident but it reminds him of the coming war (that indeed did come months after the book was published). The novel has always haunted me. I read it in my first year of uni (it was a text), finishing it in the club car of the old Sunlander train that was taking me back to Townsville for a holiday.

Well, I'm about to do what might well seem like the same thing. I'm going to get a plane to Brisbane and then a train to Townsville and then a boat to Magnetic Island, the setting of the graphic novel this blog represents. Why? Do I really expect to plug in to the world of forty years ago and lower myself into a warm bath of living memory? No. The reason why I am haunted by Orwell's book is that I remember its lesson about nostalgia, received before I was old enough to have really developed any of my own. Far from any idea of harnessing any good ol' days, I'm going back to walk around in the difficult weather, the glare and the mossies and document what remains: the motion of the water of Picnic Bay at different times and its colour, the look of Townsville across the bay, that kind of thing, the physical reality of the place. If I can connect to that, to whatever was and is still, I'll continue with the book. If it falls flat, I'll seriously consider shelving it.

There must be some people I knew from then, family friends, school friends, but I'm not going to make any attempt to contact them. One got on to me earlier in the year to see if I'd be into coming to a high school reunion but I declined the same as the other times. I don't dislike any of them that I can remember and that's really the point of that. If I get recognised (and they'll have to be quick as it's not a long sojourn) it will be incidental.

So, I'll be going to the Island museum to see what the old boat looked like, take as many photos as I can of the houses, water, rocks and forest. With this in the bag I'll practice drawing them until they look like the fictional location that I still have in my head of the story and its own distance from the real thing that it had from the time when I wrote it as a novella in the mid eighties, as the best fiction always feels true.

Melbourne 31/10/2019

I finished all the booking on Sunday, including the accommodation. I'll be flying to Brisbane on Monday, meeting with at least one old friend for a few hours, getting on a train to take the long way to my hometown, walking around there for a few hours before heading over to the Island and checking in. I hope to be starting straight away, taking photos, wandering and soaking it up, typing out notes like this in the room.

I'm staying at a small apartment complex called Serenity which is a few minutes walk fro the beach. Foraging for reviews eventually revealed that after some dodginess the place has lifted its game and is now more acceptable. Negative reviews persist but they drop off sharply after 2017 (and one was so picky that it said more about its author than the place).

Oh, I forgot to say: I eventually settled on staying at Picnic Bay, the setting for most of The Monsoons. I ummed and aahed for a week over whether this was wise but eventually realised it was the best option. I could have stayed where the ferry comes and goes (every hour or so) Nelly Bay which seems the best served by shops and hotels etc. but, increasingly, I realised that staying at Picnic Bay had to be it. It's where I spent most of my time on the Island previously, has the Island's museum which I will need to visit, and is a quieter, less touristy area. I was actually quite chuffed to have finally chosen it.

The basic itinerary is as follows:

Arrive Townsville Station Tuesday morning and get a bus to Aitkenvale for a photo trawl and expected crushing disappointment that it doesn't look or feel as it used to. I'll get off at the old shopping centre, go past the old house, up along Patrick St to the shopping edifice, detour to my old primary school and make to my along Ross River Road to my old high school before getting back on a bus to town. I'll make my way to the Strand from there and walk to the Rockpool and back, past the Seaview, playground and maybe the Ozone Cafe (if it still exists) pick up some goodies at the supermarket before rolling on to the ferry at the other end. Take too many pictures on the water. Bus from Nelly Bay to Picnic and either check in or leave my main bag at Serenity and go wandering at least to the jetty (which I had erroneously thought had been demolished). And then back to touch base, probably rinse off, write what really happened and rest until dinner which will probably be at the pub. Then back to the digs for more productive writing.

Up as early as I can on Wednesday for a day that will include more beach, Townsville skyline and jetty photos, the museum, a bus trip to Horseshoe Bay and about an hour there, back through Nelly or Arcadia and a walk around the streets at Picnic Bay (more photos), dinner at the pub and write up back at the room. Sleep.

Thursday morning wake, wash and checkout. Back to Nelly Bay (see how easy or not the walk is) and ferry to Townsville. Walk through town if time permits and then on to the airport for my 11.30 plane to Brisbane and then Melbourne for an early evening sundowner.

I keep imagining myself in the apartment and should stop but I want to do this so much I'm already living it. My problem won't be fending off nostalgia as much as getting constantly disabused of the above fantasy.  We'll see...

November 2/11/2019
Bad day yesterday for hayfever as scorching winds swept the pollen and leaf dust around everyone on the streets. I got home with a wooziness I couldn't shake. Went to an exhibition I enjoyed but couldn't stay so got back and settled into a pampering tub bath with a mai tai and kept it subdued with wine and a comfort food movie (Wolf Man). Two more sleeps till travel. I'm still imagining myself on the Island and it feels like a fabricated memory.
Melbourne 27/10/2019