Life Up North - 22/11/02

For most Australians, the word “seachange” will remain synonymous with the ABC’s much loved soapy utopia, but for a growing number it describes the real life drama of severing family ties and farewelling friends in the pioneering pursuit of a better life someplace else. This is our story, of one little family that made the big leap.

While there were a million nails in the coffin of Sydney living, in the end, the hammer was the weather. Perhaps it was the jaundiced view of impending middle age as any fault of Sydney, but where as teenagers our town had a beautiful effervescence and permanently sunny disposition, now she was a grumpy, bad tempered, old harridan given to throwing wet days into weekends as a matter of deliberate, malicious intent.

Every spring, Sydney always promised but rarely delivered. The endless summers of our memory had become a tease of almost weekends. Increasingly, we found ourselves becoming Melbournised, developing a love for the great indoors. Like inmates in an asylum, we were disturbingly grateful for the pink balloon of a sunny day. After 3 successive miserable summers, the seeds of change were sewn.

As a dyed in the wool Sydneysider, I was also beginning to realise that my whole existence was somehow defined by where I lived. A realisation I could have coped with had my humble abode been a waterfront mansion that took in views of the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. But I, like 99% of Sydneysiders, had to content myself with a vision framed by a paling fence, a neat 1/4 acre that keeps your wildest dreams as neatly contained as a buffalo lawn.

And so sometime during the early 90s, we packed up our two small daughters and embarked on a mission to reinvent our future. We flew to Cairns for a reconnoitre, a tentative testing of the tropical water. We would zig-zag our way down the coast, exploring every bay, beach and mountain retreat between FNQ and Mackay.

We started at the top, literally. Port Douglas is about as up as upmarket goes. Its Vogue Living fashion, cuisine and architecture all come with a price tag to match. In fact a modest home with Palm Beach style views will set you back as much as a less modest home in Palm Beach. Which was quite sobering considering that just a few years earlier, this Noosa of the far north was a simple fishing village with little more than a pub and a mango tree.

Arriving now with two small children in the middle of summer really put this tropical idyll to the test. No sooner did we step out of our air-conditioned family sedan than the kids erupted into tears, engulfed by the summer humidity which, like a Johnstone River croc, wraps itself around you and drags you down in seconds.

Like Camus’ “étranger”, our senses eerily reeling in the intense heat, we ran for the nearest air conditioned shop and sucked in the coolness. As much as we craved warmth, this was probably a little too challenging. Which put paid to those fantasies of living in a rainforest lost somewhere in the Daintree. We trekked deep into fabulous primordial forest and shuddered in disbelief every time the real estate salesman hacked down another beautiful walking stick palm in our way. In the end we told him to stop. After all, what was the point of buying a pristine environment only to destroy it in the process? Besides, hemmed in by the silent giants of the forest, we’d simply be replacing one form of claustrophobia, albeit a warmer one, with another.

And so, we went travelling south, through Mission Beach, Innisfail, Tully, Townsville, Ayr, Bowen till we finally took a left hand turn to an intriguing place called Whitsunday. This is the collective term used for the mainland towns of Airlie Beach and Cannonvale, overlooking the Whitsunday Islands.

If one vision has inked itself indelibly on my memory, it’s taking the slow drive up the steep hill approaching Airlie, to reach the crest and be struck with a vista of water, not the cold, steely blue variety of down south, but a solid, pungent mass of aqua, the Coral Sea glittering in all its gaudy brightness. That day, streaks of cloud overhead striped the surface with patches of emerald shade. The sight took my breath away and dedicated landlubber that I am, I could see why this spectacular seascape lures sailors in their thousands and has been dubbed the yachtie’s paradise.

In my days of writing travel brochures for TAA, the hoop pines spiking the skyline on the photographic trannies had always led me to believe that the Whitsundays were some alpine aberration on the tropical Queensland coast. And so the second surprise was the climate. A cool south easterly breeze blew gently across the January afternoon, replacing the stifling heat of further north with that balmy warmth of my long lost childhood summers. It felt like home.

Despite the religious overtones of the name, Whitsunday, or in particular Airlie Beach, is a live and let live, hedonistic, hair down, tops off, free-for-all where every day is a Sunday, with emphasis on the sun.

Architecturally, it’s a round the world trip in 80 ways, where mock Fijian abuts alpine A-frames, Tuscan terraces and rundown colonial, the only common thread, a babble of placards each one advertising the greatest Barrier Reef adventure and everywhere, the world’s most overused descriptor, “paradise.”

While the hotchpotch of shopfronts would have Noosa’s townplanners rushing for a latte, the town of Airlie has a charm that is decidedly contagious. There is none of the hey man smugness that radiates from the cash strapped elitists of Byron Bay or Kuranda. Property watchers have tagged it “Australia’s next Noosa”, but Airlie is continuing to defy the soothsayers and through its very unpretentiousness, finally prove to everyone that it really is like nowhere else.

I discovered that everyone who lives in Airlie knows it’s the best part of Australia, but like someone with their private mudcrab hole, no one’s too keen to shout it from the rooftops. Undoubtedly, sunny places beget sunny dispositions and there’s a spontaneity and friendliness from the locals that’s unique in Australia. And an unspoken understanding of just how lucky they are. Everywhere you’re greeted with a smile and a desire to chat. “Nice day, isn’t it”, referring to yet another 28 degree day, gently fanned by that mild south easterly, on the same latitude as New Caledonia and many of the world’s most exotic tropical getaways. And as you look around at the sun bursting through palm fronds, white clouds like sailing boats scudding across a clear blue sky, you answer in your best North Queensland drawl, “Not bad, eh.”

And so, after a few days of watching the children transform into sea urchins, scouring the beach for crabs and shells in the syringe-free sand, bodies browning and clean air filling their lungs, we decided that this is where we’d set up home.

Over the next few years, while our friends took their holidays in Thailand and Bali, we made our annual pilgrimage to the real estate offices of Airlie Beach to find the 5 or so acres that would become our antidote to suburbia.

Of course, once you actually commit to living out the dream, reality throws you some curly ones, usually articulated by well meaning but sceptical friends and family.
“Where will the children go to school?”
“How will you continue to work?”
“What will you do for money?”
“Of course, once you sell out of Sydney, it’s impossible to buy back in.”
And the fear of monsters. “The mozzies are as big as helicopters.” “What if the children catch Ross River fever?”
“Dengue fever’s reached epidemic proportions in Cairns.”
There was endless talk about the venomous snakes that lay in wait around every corner; the cane toads as big as basketballs that would kill a dog with one squirt and the crocs, if not exactly roaming down the main street of Airlie, certainly lurking out there somewhere, just below the surface.

The threats vacillated constantly between biological warfare and culture shock.
“If the midges, stingers, stone fish and bird eating spiders don’t get you, the dearth of intellectual stimulation certainly will.”

After a while, we fielded questions and deflected concerns with the skill of A grade cricketers. Perhaps some of the negativity came from the simple fact that what we were doing was challenging everyone’s acceptance of their own comfort zone. Our failure to make this work would reaffirm their decision to stay put. Our success would hold up a mirror to anyone who has ever had a niggling suspicion that there’s more to life that a ¼ acre block in the right suburb.

In the end, we didn’t worry what anyone thought, we just upped and left. The house was sold, the removal truck booked and the great umbilicus that had tied us to the Emerald City since birth, finally severed.

In Sydney, $350,000 won’t buy you much more than a unit in Yagoona. In Airlie, still in its pre-boom phase, $350,000 will buy a sprawling tropical home, landscaped gardens and 180 ° views of the Coral Sea. Or, in our case, acres of tropical gardens with an open-plan Balinese-style house that was a million miles from the barking dogs and red roofs of our old turf of Haberfield and Balmain.

We moved in July. Naively enough, we assumed the subtropical North didn’t experience winter, so we spent our first night huddled together on one bed, under a sheet, ears red and tingling from the 10° cold.

But come 9.30am, it was summer revisited: track suits were relegated to a dark corner of the wardrobe while we rescued shorts and T-shirts from the bottom of our removal cartons and, like Easter Island statues, sat silently soaking up the revitalising sun.

The first thing you notice up North is the life. It abounds. To think that I used to scream at the sight of a cockroach. In the tropics you have a choice: acclimatise to God’s creatures, or live in a constant state of Hitchcockian fear.

In our first week, one of the kids was bowled over by a wallaby that came careering down the hill behind our house. The dog played soccer with an echidna. Geckos went from being cute to pest as they’d target us with their droppings from the dining room ceiling. A brush turkey waddled through the kitchen and bright lime green tree frogs commandeered the bathroom. Two perched on top of the mirror, a couple more claimed the bath and the amphibian version of a suomo wrestler squeezed itself under the rim of the toilet. And should you dare sit down on the Caroma, a large croak, reminiscent of a barking seal, would emanate menacingly from inside the cistern.

At night, the bush sprang to life. Fireflies cut their neon course through the blackness, playing join the dots with the stars. Broken stumps of branches would suddenly develop wings as Tawny Frogmouth owls swooped down to grab the tiny marsupial mice which delighted in eating huge holes in our dishwasher pipes. (The flooded kitchen is another story.) Toads croaked, geckos chirped, dingos howled and pheasants whooped in an unforgettable feral finale to every day.

Despite all the Readers Digest style horror stories of snakes and crocodiles that we’d so well primed ourselves on, we realised to our enormous relief that the natives were friendly. After only two weeks, we felt strangely at home.

Our main concern was the children. Whereas in Sydney we had despaired at all the weekends lost in shopping malls or surfing the net, how would they acclimatise to a life totally bereft of urban culture? A life without free to air television (thanks to the mountain next door), without Westfield, Hoyts mega-complexes, McDonalds’ and Intencity?

When a waterhole becomes overcrowded, (I learnt from our new cable TV), baby Piranhas will cope by eating their parents. Human off-spring have a disturbingly similar instinct for survival that manifests in times of change. Nothing, we learnt, is as adaptable as a child. In just a matter of weeks, correspondence with the friends back home dwindled from nightly teary phone calls to intermittent postcards. Our kids took to the locals like Burdekin ducks to water. Surprisingly, they befriended the “bushies” rather than the “townies” like us. The locals, for their part, were pretty laid back. Unlike the typical dinner party in Sydney where the conversation ping pongs between plummeting share prices and what your house is now worth, the locals weren’t remotely interested in our career, car, money or connections. It made us realize the city still had a lot to unlearn from the bush. When people did find out that we ran an ad agency, there was only a vague interest; this after all is a town free of bus sides and billboards and the regional commercials, all station produced, are so appalling, it’s not a career one readily owns up to.

As soon as we’d convinced ourselves we’d done the right thing by the kids, our next concern was how to keep the wolf, or rather feral dingo, from the door.

When, during a jovial tête à tête with one particular client, we mentioned we might be moving our operations north, he promptly threatened to put the account out to pitch. How, afterall, could we maintain our creative edge and not succumb to brain-zapping holiday mode? How could we possibly resist the temptation to push the advertising brief aside, hoist the hammock, put the feet up and sip pina coladas under the coconut trees? To some clients, the idea of being able to work, survive, indeed prosper in paradise was simply preposterous.

And so, to preserve our business, we quickly learnt the art of instant dematerialization, where to all intents and purposes, we were always in Sydney. Phones would divert from our Sydney-based receptionist to our northern office. “So how’s the weather in Sydney today” queried a Melbourne client. “Awful, it’s raining again” I’d utter dismally as I checked Sydney’s weather update and look out at yet another perfect day.

Paranoid that anyone might accuse me of loafing, like a true Sydney workaholic I became wedded to my desk. Freed from the morning ritual of coffees in the corridor and gossip by the water cooler, my efficiency quadrupled. Instead of battling it out in peak hour traffic to get to the post production studio, I’d just click on the computer and voilà, one new commercial downloaded in mere minutes. Instead of leaning over my art director’s shoulder to view her latest layout, I’d simply lean over my laptop. Apart from the monthly Telstra bills which were starting to resemble our home mortgage repayments, the whole transplantation of workplace from city to wilderness had been remarkably painless.

Five years down the track, my partner and I still smirk like naughty children, in our shorts and singlets in the middle of winter, sip our Jack Daniels and cola before a pink setting sun and wonder if we’ll suddenly wake and find it’s all been a fabulous dream. When will the pre-dawn chatter of rainbow lorikeets and spangled drongos revert to the shrill shriek of the alarm clock? Or the sweet scent of a warm wind laden with orange blossom and frangipani vapourise into eye-smarting smog? At what fateful stroke of midnight will the friendly wave from the driver alongside return to the dreaded up yours finger of road rage? When will this utopian bubble, inflated with the clean air of a simpler, stress-free life, finally burst?

The answer, we’ve come to realize, is never. A different prognosis, perhaps, if we’d been less close as a couple. The rate of divorce in this part of the world is high. Free from city distractions, paradise has an uncanny way of directing a magnifying glass onto all the imperfections in a relationship. But in our case, the desire for change was heart felt on both sides. No Darby dragging a reluctant Joan. So if things didn’t go totally according to plan, there would never be recrimination or blame.

And many things didn’t go to plan. Like the investment property we bought and stylishly renovated only to have it languishing on the market for 12 months. We finally offloaded it, $80,000 the poorer, and this while the Sydney market was booming.

Or the fact that our two older girls have had to complete their final secondary years at city boarding schools. But with the ache of empty bedrooms comes the satisfaction of seeing how they relish all that’s offered by their new private schools, opportunities that their city bred peers tend to take for granted.

Perhaps the greatest legacy of our particular seachange has been the discovery that work no longer owns us; that we have found a new level of freedom. And so I write this article by choice, not for money, as my partner is off felling yet another ute load of spectacular 3 metre high heliconias to send off to Hayman Island florist and by my side, our newest celebration of the good life, 3 years old Clover, (aka feral Cheryl), collects jewel-like beetles of old gold and metallic emerald as they scuttle around blindly waiting for the cool of night.

Increasingly, day by day, we are starting to discover the value of each moment. A lifetime of living in a constant state of hyperactivity is slowly being unlearnt. Perhaps the extra meaning we all seem to be seeking in our lives is as simple as finding that patch of earth where we feel we truly belong; it’s taken me 40 years but I’ve finally come to realise it’s right here, beneath a blue sky, next to a calm sea, sitting on a warm rock, where I am quite content not to ponder or regret, but simply be.