Coming Up for Air in Picnic Bay: Townsville by Twilight

The heat and glare pressed in as soon as I got into the sun, a single pace out of the shade of the station. North Queensland heat feels solid after decades of temperate Melbourne. Yes, it's the humidity, but even the odd muggy day down south feels mild. I'd changed into shorts and a polo on the train, got my hat out of the main luggage and slathered all exposed skin with 50+ cream. Apart from the hat and the sunblock I was effectively in my old school uniform.

The contemporary station behind me and blocks of newer buildings before me didn't feel out of place. Roadworks changed the route adding a few detours but also more to see. Of course there were changes and many more than I could register, given the time away, but something was dawning on me as I took it in: for every passing familiar feature (The Capitol, a Cantonese restaurant from my childhood was still there) the whole experience felt unfamiliar. This was the town where I was born and raised, schooled and formed, and it felt completely unknown to me.

And then (remember that bit about the school uniform?) I suddenly felt I was about seventeen years old. Not younger and fresher but naive, vulnerable. If someone had come up and told me to move on or stop using the shade of the bus stop as it was reserved for locals I probably would have. Or I'd have given them the forks as though that long obsolete gesture was recharged by this bizarre form of nostalgia. You can't go home again? Well, yeah, you can but you'll just be age you left. There are about three episodes of the original series of the Twilight Zone based on that.

So, that's what I had to do: write my own script: doomed to fail but better than succumbing. I bought a ticket at the ferry dock, stowed my main case in a locker and got a bus out to my old neighbourhood.

The bus driver stopped at a red light by a team of roadworkers and chatted about how long they were going to be as it was disrupting the service. I got the feeling that the information she got was going to get circulated faster than anything official. An old timer got on and chatted to the driver. He might have been a driver himself as they seemed to know each other. A few exchanges about a violent street crime incident brought me crashing back to my brother's text warning me of it. I was heading into an area now dominated by a gigantic shopping complex crawling with the disaffected and discarded underclass of youth. A real throb of panic hit me before I brushed it off like I was doing with the flies. It was like that bit in Altered States when William Hurt is narrating from the isolation tank: "I am no longer observing, I am becoming one of them." I snapped out, knowing I'd just deal with it.

I got off near the corner of Ross River Road and Anne Street, a block away from the old family home. It's a small shopping strip and always was in my timeline. All the shops have changed because that's what happens to local shopping strips. I did a quick stroll just to make sure.

Turning the corner I saw that where the Golden Wattle bakery used to me (scrumptious pie with peas there) was now a legal practice with a sign that reads LAWYER streetside. So Greg's text about street crime was coming true? The sign is big enough to be seen from a block away (and probably in the dark) which is uncomfortably cinematic. This is where I started taking photos.

LawyerWorld. The muted Cavendish Banana Yellow building
used to be the alternative corner shop.

The corner of Anne and Patrick was a mix of old and new plus temporal ravages. One corner is still a carpark but now with a bitumen surface. Opposite that is what used to be the Freemans' place. It's been dressed up to look nice now. Diagonally opposite that, where Bob Freeman used to live with his hotted up cars and big jacaranda tree, is now a vet clinic. Opposite that is my old house.

This distorted photo doesn't do justice even to the place
in its current state but it does show how healthy the remaining
mango trees are. Also, a sign of the times: in earlier years
all that yellow grass would have been green.

I knew to expect change, having updated myself through streetview. A couple of years back while drunkenly overselling the size of the pool I had discovered through a satellite image that the pool had been filled. And, while I knew that the fence had fallen in to disrepair and it looked like a big rental property, I was not ready for the exfoliation.

My parents were gardeners but instead of flowerbeds (I do remember some but from way, way back) they favoured fruit trees. The mango trees looked like they had been there from the dawn of time. They bore generously and their shade kept the earth beneath them damp. Everyone has mango trees there but we also had a peach (not successful) mandarins and grapefruit, coconut palms, an odd tangy berry bush, sour sop and a big banana tree/bush/whatever it is. Nana next door grew pawpaw, strawberries at one stage, Lisbon lemons, custard apples, guavas, and too much more to remember. Almost all of that was gone.

As the hedge that wrapped privacy around us seemed to be dying of thirst and exposing the degeneration of the fence it was easy to see in and what I saw was barren. Admittedly, the yard is still massive and the culture of water restrictions rightly allows the lawn to dry and yellow but apart from a few bushes and some non bearing palms the remainder of that little Eden was the mango tree on the corner. A fairly recent streetview check had it cut back to a fraction of its size but it had grown back and was visibly bearing with fruit so numerous they looked like bunches.

The ol' homestead. Long sold and out of the family. Now a rental and in high shambolic state. Then again,
that's the way the lifestyle crumbles. See text for real reaction.

The car in the garage was an Audi and there were a few parked to one side of the house. The land alone would command a fruity rent and even if the once colonial white of the wooden weatherboards was now a solid mission brown which had spoored on to the large two vehicle garage. The long two part gate looked permanently open. Weirdly, the old tin letter box with the plastic address numerals was still in place beside the small pedestrian gate (the carved wooden Jetnikoff sign was, understandably, long gone). The letter box looked crushed. I had seen on a former streetview check that the front gates had suffered a collision. That's why they were open and the letterbox was similarly left as it had been damaged. That, if nothing else, the absence of repair, was what prevented nostalgia as I followed the fence from Anne to Patrick, looking at the damage. This was only the house I'd grown up in if I used my imagination. I had prepared against shock with online views but nothing could more profoundly bring me to this point where the temple of my family life, childhood and adolescence, learning, music, art and literature exploration, political education, the forge of what I became was just this withered husk.

Artist's impression of reaction to seeing state of childhood home in disrepair. Proved false.
Go figure.

A more accurate re-enactment of
my response.

If anything I was surprised to find myself unemotional. A friend later asked if I'd knocked on the door and it was hard to explain why I didn't even think to. I told him that the door to knock on was a large wooden portal with an iron knocker (still in place) like a medieval castle door, then there was a kind of courtyard between the old rumpus room and the house. Even assuming anyone was at home the state of the place (neither of my parents would ever have allowed the degradation) kept me at bay. It might as well have been a forcefield. I took many pictures of this but will only include one. It's not for me to make assumptions about the people under the roof and, while you can work out where it is without a lot of trouble, I won't make it that easy. They don't owe me anything and deserve their privacy. I walked on. Nana's place had a severe and forbidding privacy fence. There was no visible garden. I kept going, retracing my old walk to primary school and got to the shopping complex.

I remember the beginnings of this, the supermarket at the end of the street, dominated by Woolworths called Nathan Plaza. At the time it seemed enormous and filled with all sorts of goodies that could be had in merciful air conditioning. About five years after that a Big K-Mart opened on the diagonally opposite corner. Same but more. I didn't say it to anyone at the time but I actually did remember when it "were all fields".

I approached the complex at the end of the street and noticed, with the haunted street-crime text in mind, a teenager see me and take his phone out. Must have been making a call to a friend, the dirty low-life, my reason jibed. Getting to the corner and crossing into the Woolworths zone and away from the effects of seeing the old place I again realised how hot it was. Getting past the sliding doors and into the aircon was bliss.

If you have seen a large shopping complex anywhere then you have seen this one. Batteries of checkouts demark the supermart from the smaller shops. The latter are like human odour in that unless there has been a great deal of effort put in by the body in question, it is difficult to tell one from the next and you need to get intimately close to discover it. And here in this massive conurbation of retail everything has a brightly lit appeal until a close inspection dispells it. I found a loo and then an exit. The place is large enough to warrant signage to tell you which street you are heading for when leaving.

I opted for the main arterial of Ross River Road. I'd originally intended to swing by the old school and could have done both primary and secondary but the intensifying weather weighed more heavily than the need to repeat the family house effect. Also, I really didn't need to hang around a primary school before the end of the school year looking like a fat,middle-aged sex tourist in Eastern Exotica waving a phone camera around ("no, really, I went here when I was a kid!") So I got a bus back to town.

Before the ferry I took a left along the Strand. This small strip of seaside was essential to my life in Townsville and my memories of it stretch from possibly my first (lying on a picnic blanket in shade hearing the bagpipes of a military band: reconstructed with other family members) to easily the last time I was there (early 1985). A stroll from Bowls Club to Rockpool was mandatory.

The Criterion Hotel, repainted from colonial white to peach and rust, was closed but standing. Official buildings like the Customs House which mixed Victorian bombast with spheres and curves that might have come from a Dr Suess book stood still. The old Ozone Cafe site where the kid me would gorge on the best hambugers in history while reading Sgt Rock comics and sipping on lime milkshakes through striped paper straws. And -- see? That's nostalgia, the stuff I'd come to get rid of. I shed it like snake skin going past the old house. This was different. Maybe I had better reason to associate it with fun, fun with friends, grownup fun. That crap's murder to shake. Brief slideshow follows.

Some Strand Views For You

ANZAC Park gate with two old 19th Century beachside edifices

Fountain in Anzac Park

The Rockpool

View of the Island from the Strand.

But I was shaking it. The Seaview Hotel, now a kind of cavendish banana yellow, was still going, busy. I never knew it by day. I only ever really knew it as a beer garden where the lights were low enough for me to pass for eighteen and the pre-party priming was bought in jugs of bitter ale or pots of Bundy and Coke. Who can remember what garbage we talked (it was more like barking, anyway) but we were always ready when we left for the first house. No, stop it! Enough!




Ok, enough. The Strand now has retained its beautiful row of big shady banyans with their lazy ancient hanging roots and the Rockpool feels looked after, strong and safe. And there's something else. There's a pier. It's too high for boats, it's just for walking. For all the flat heat of the city and my lack of connection with it, this one feature in this one surviving strip of the town at its edge brought forth such simple, impressive beauty. After the stark and treeless streets of Aitkenvale, the barren wastes of my sprouting bed, this retained its allure, its plain delight. I was glad to have retread my old footfalls.

(I had to turn the sound off as this is a phone video and there was no way of recording the edible sound of the waves without the noise of wind punching at the mic.) The land mass on the horizon at the end of the walk is Magnetic Island. The waves below are of a colour I had to imagine for the comic.

The way back was more businesslike. After a few blocks I realised a second run would be anticlimactic so I crossed the road and went via the next streets from the beach to the shopping strip in North Ward (North Ward = great Uni parties, erstwhile best friend Wayne Foley's place and STOP IT!) More '50s and '60s Queensland houses later I found the shops and stocked up on fruit (lovely local mangoes!), cheese and crackers and anything that would sustain life in case the local kitchens disappointed.

At the bottle shop the millennial at the counter asked me about the Melbourne Cup. I gave him a rant about living in Melbourne but being there in North Queensland as the race was thundering, a little about the rising anti-racing movement, but a lot about the Breughelian hell of seeing the screeching and spewing mess that makes public transport a torture on the day. I apologised for giving more than I was asked but he said he'd enjoyed it and let me go without charge

And go I did, starting to feel each of the nearly twenty thousand steps of the day, to the ferry, congratulating myself on getting my planned itinerary in and on time and what a good idea it was to start with the house and end with the strand. I grabbed my case from the locker, found a seat in the waiting area and sat with an eye-closing relief and podcasted until the gate opened. The sea! The sea! It beckoned.