Before all thoughts of Australia are dashed to the polluted winds of East Coast port cities, I feel this must be properly documented. First, I have to ask: do you believe in portal discovery? Astral projection? Parallel universes? It is, I'm afraid, the only way to encapsulate what you find in a little place called Yorkeys Knob, up in the town of Cairns, North Queensland. Now don't go there or anything, otherwise I will have spoiled the delicious secret. You should probably just stick to the backpacker-friendly city of Cairns, spending your days in the beergarten of Shenanigan's and picking up twenty-something American college students who are throwing caution to the wind while on parents' travel money, unless...
You know the answers to the following:
1) Cairns was discovered and settled by the English explorer named blank.
2) The main cash crop in Cairns is blank.
3) The surrounding area is most like America's blank in terms of education and opportunity.
4) You can throw your used syringes blank.
One of the first sights when you arrive in Cairns is the giant cartoonish monument to Cap'n James Cook's legacy. There he stands, proud in breeches, sharing this momentous discovery with you, but you're too busy consulting the map in your ridiculously painted mystery machine that some idiot either thought would be TOO cute to decorate the six-pack-toting backpackers passing through town, or a cruel joke to alert locals to the trust fund babies on board.
Driving down the single access road to Yorkeys at dawn is one of those smells you can't forget. They're cutting the stalks of sugar cane to add to all those products that in the US are injected with enough high fructose corn syrup to make your grandkids diabetic, and the salty sea spray air spreads it around the valley.
As with many little preserved secret paradises, the area is home to skilled tradespeople and rednecks who have a great connection to the land they tried (and succeeded) not to share with the natives.
Although I can't imagine it has very much more heroin being pumped through its wayward youth than, say, Eugene, OR, Australia definitely takes a more responsive approach to the problem by providing public bathrooms with easy syringe disposal here, there, around the corner, pick up new ones at the free clinic. Enlightened! Proactive! And yet exactly the kind of thing would send up a million furious mothers at preemptively introducing their impressionable youngsters to the evil facts of the world. Sex can wait--masturbate.
I could give a flying yorkeys knob who settled the place, but I'm most intrigued by this last bit comparison between Uzzie and Auzzie. Maybe because of pressure we feel to attract tourists and locals alike, lure them into a false sense of security by pretending that the drug problems of some of its citizens need not interfere with anyone else's daily life. A sign placed on the inside of a bathroom stall door could, hypothetically, interfere with someone's God-given right to drop the kids off at the pool without having to think about larger community issues. Can we at least get those sacrosanct five minutes, please? In our hustle and bustle of fulfilling ambition (a term not nearly as household in OZ), we need to consider the children. (Won't someone pleeeease?!) Where else will they get the brilliant idea to give themselves a booster shot of pure
sweetsugarheavenJesusridingamechanicalbullTijuananineteenseventyfourwasahelluvayear than these, quote, proactive signs? We might as well be handing out fliers at all the bus stops, for His sake! (Statistics of applicable ratios, prevalence of signs to later junky-hood still in progress).
But we mustn't fool ourselves that our empire expatriate cousins down under are more enlightened in all respects than us poor fallen Puritans. After all, we got like fifty years on them in terms of integration, and I'm sure there's been a lot of back-patting for this one at least. 2008 was the first formal governmental apology to the aboriginal and islander peoples of Australia, but the resentment still sticks like peanut butter in the mouths of many bushies who,
not unlike the natural-born workers of Arizona are having a tough time getting on with the new kids from the other side of the fence.
In my month stay, I didn't hear of a single violent crime not linked to an aboriginal or islander man, and the paper proclaimed growing support for anti-petrol-sniffing efforts in a town north of Alice Springs. On Thursday Island where I stayed for four days, in amidst the continental crumbs from some prehistoric Pangea in between Australia and Papua-New Guinea, memories of the Lost Generation, the children who were yoinked from their families by the missionaries to learn proper cosmic philosophy still smart. Families who raised chickens to support their families were stripped of both chickens and children, then told to buy the one back at a government-installed grocer, and leave the other in the hands of Christians. (Ooh, but we love their artwork!) With a past like this, maybe inhaling petrol would feel better.
But I wasn't there for political reasons, or I really can't claim to have left D.C. at all. I went for the rainbows, the geckos, the salty sea air that poodled my hair, and the sun that turned it golden-white and my skin brown. And in this regard there were no disappointments. It's a forty-five degree slope up to where my sister lives on a cliff overlooking the dry tropics, beach and tablelands. The building is circular, and her balcony overlooks this grotesquely gorgeous scene. The windows and doors stay open even though it's wintertime because it's the dry season, and besides it's only about seventy-five degrees Farenheit. And should anyone get a little chilly out there, you can just climb on in and make for one very strange bedfellow:
And yet Octavio wasn't so dangerous as some of the other friends I made at the zoo where my sister works.
Even though he could rip me apart faster than any full-grown adult male, I am ultimately more likely to trust a fellow like this one:
