Australia is a big place. It has big motorways packed with big cars driven by big wankers. We weren’t surprised to hear on the wireless whilst driving around that Gold Coast drivers were found to be the worst in Australia. My wife ran a red shortly after just to add to the statistics.
The speed limit on most of the open motorway is 110kmh, which means that every guy who fancies himself as the next Peter Brock – which is half the male population and that’s being conservative – drives it at 130kmh. You may recall that the legendary Brocky died after wrapping his race car around a tree, I think the Gold Coast highways could do with a few strategically placed trees actually, do us all a favour.
There’s a lot of money to be made on the Gold Coast it would seem, no doubt in commercial property and mostly by fat Middle Eastern men, all of whom seem to drive very expensive European cars. There were so many it seemed almost as every second car was German and that’s no small thing given you’re in a country that loves it Holden’s and Fords. If you measured the place just by the cars on show at any given point in time, you could even be forgiven for thinking that maybe you were in Germany. Unfortunately it’s Kath & Kim accents that ring out around the place and not that manly German one that all Krauts, including the women, have.
It wasn’t all a car show though. Amongst all the chrome of the Mercs, the Beemers and the Audis and away from the grunt and muscle of the Holdens and Fords there are some right shit heaps doing the rounds. Driven mostly by guys who cultivate that ‘just got out of bed / the surf / my mate’s buttocks look’. Driving a death trap on wheels just adds to the charm of just such a guy I suppose, it makes him ‘edgy’.
I was surprised to see whilst at Dreamworld that a large Arab contingent had been let in. Only because Australians seem to be as paranoid about terrorism as the Yanks are. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see that burqas were on the list of banned items on the rides right alongside cameras and cellphones, but they weren't. It certainly confused the hell out of the Asian tourists though; they didn’t know whether they should take photos or run and hide.
There was no such hesitation from the group I witnessed at Movie World, who all posed for photos with a little Aussie toddler who had no idea what was going on other than she was getting a whole lot of cuddles from strangers. I was going to try the same thing but somehow I don’t think I would have gotten away with it quite as successfully. I tried flogging off my son for a few pics to the same group of tourists, promising him at least half of the ten bucks I planned to charge the Asians per cuddle, but he wasn’t having any of it.
Speaking of the Vietcong; all the sightseeing choppers that buzz the beaches in Surfers took me back a few years, to the four day weekend that Dougs, Lancey, Big Al and I had off down Long Dik Dong way in ’69. It had been several weeks since any of us had been near civilisation, let alone fresh water and I remember endless hours spent bathing and frolicking together in the sea, nude, whilst the Air Cav boys flew recon missions over the tree line in their Iroquois choppers all day long. We’d finish off the day trying to make a gymnastics pyramid on each others bare backs whilst the sun went down. War does strange things to a man, but that was not one of them.
One of the rich Middle Eastern guys I mentioned actually lived one floor above us in our hotel. His apartment was directly opposite us and the two young concubines he had living with him would spend most of the day out on the balcony sunning their ridiculous trim and taught figures till the sun went down. It made doing anything in the kitchen damn difficult because it was the closest vantage point and I was forced to stare at them the whole time. My wife thought I had prostate issues the whole trip because I always had to run off to the toilet wherever we went, when really it was on account of all the tea I was making whilst back in the apartment.
We bumped into Fat Tony and one of his hand maidens in the foyer one morning. She was pretty enough to be a waitress and he was oozing something, possibly cold hard cash, but whatever it was it wasn’t the ‘just got out of bed’ look that's for sure.
Ah Australia, the land of opportunity. Just leave your conscience at the door.
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