Lost in Space: Gold Coast Characters Wandering Home (Less)

This may be the author’s version of a work that was submitted/accepted for publication in the following source: Palmer, Kelly (2020) Lost in space:Gold Coast characters wandering home(less). Queensland Review, 27(2), pp. 181-200. This file was downloaded from: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/206858/ c The Author(s) 2020 This work is covered by copyright. Unless the document is being made available under a Creative Commons Licence, you must assume that re-use is limited to personal use and that permission from the copyright owner must be obtained for all other uses. If the document is available under a Creative Commons License (or other specified license) then refer to the Licence for details of permitted re-use. It is a condition of access that users recog- nise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. If you believe that this work infringes copyright please provide details by email to [email protected] License: Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 Notice: Please note that this document may not be the Version of Record (i.e. published version) of the work. Author manuscript versions (as Sub- mitted for peer review or as Accepted for publication after peer review) can be identified by an absence of publisher branding and/or typeset appear- ance. If there is any doubt, please refer to the published source. https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2020.15 Lost in space: Gold Coast characters wandering home(less) Kelly Palmer Queensland University of Technology [email protected] Abstract The Gold Coast is a multiply liminal space, often represented throughout mainstream media as a holidayworld in which to escape everyday life and structured work routines. Represented as a tourist destination and space for transitions – as a space in which to get lost or lose one’s self – Gold Coast locals are misrepresented as everyday tourists, criminals and dole bludgers, essentially wanderers floating around and through the city limits. Local literary fictions capture this sense of alienation among Gold Coast locals. Georgia Savage’s The House Tibet (1992), in particular, complicates local wandering, with the text representing her runaway protagonists not as living a leisurely existence but rather experiencing the idea of homemaking as a kind of labour necessitated by socioeconomic disadvantage. In this realist narrative, Savage’s depiction of adolescent homeless- ness advances under-represented views of the multifaceted city while dispelling tourist myths about the Gold Coast as a youthfully unburdened site. Meanwhile, the disenfranchised boys of Amy Barker’s Omega Park (2009) see themselves as aliens in their home city and wander as a means of distancing themselves from a place in which they are trapped. This interdisciplinary investigation of narratives of wandering on the Gold Coast reveals belonging as a dynamic process of placemaking and homemaking, and a privilege of post-colonial habitation and socioeconomic comfort. Introduction: Wandering home Wandering and liminality are terms often associated with travel and with transitions, growth and development: movement. Kate Cantrell, Ariella van Luyn and Emma Doolan (2019: para. 1) conceptualise wandering as ‘an embodied movement through a landscape, cityscape, or soundscape; it is a venture that one may undertake voluntarily or reluctantly’. The wanderer does not need a destination. Like the figure of the flaneur/flaneuse, if a walker or wanderer ‘is not necessarily walking to, or towards, anywhere in particular’ (Hawkes 2020: 168), that does not mean that their movement cannot be at once purposeful and discursive. This article is concerned with local wanderers within the Gold Coast who may wander out of a Queensland Review 181 Volume 27 | Issue 2 | 2020 | pp. 181–200 | © The Author(s) 2020 | Downloaded fromdoi 10.1017/qre.2020.15https://www.cambridge.org/core. Queensland University of Technology, on 07 Dec 2020 at 00:36:51, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2020.15 Kelly Palmer sense of alienation or purposelessness, but nonetheless wander into acts of placemaking and homemaking. While some melancholy wanderers of Gold Coast fiction become completely lost, others map out a home. Both journeys of wanderers shape a sense of the Gold Coast in the cultural imagination. An interdisciplinary approach allows this article to overlay characters from Gold Coast realist fiction against extracts from Gold Coast culture that represent locals as idle, lost, or wandering, and thus locate a collective cosmic angst that comes from feeling loose, like a tourist, in one’s home city. The interdisciplinary approach specifically comprises literary representations and cultural studies analysis of the Gold Coast, intertwined with personal reflections, and is underpinned with theories of placemaking from Yi-Fu Tuan (1979), Michel de Certeau (2011) and local Gold Coast cultural studies theorists. Amy Barker’s novel, Omega Park (2009), and Georgia Savage’s novel, The House Tibet (1992), narrate practices of being a low- income local, and in doing so suggest ways in which characters who are socioeco- nomically disadvantaged negotiate alienation and belonging through wandering on the Gold Coast. Although the Gold Coast’s liminality makes way for a tapestry of identities and cultures, there is discord between local experience and the glittery surface of the Gold Coast. A local’s experience does not always neatly counter mainstream media and advertising representations of the Gold Coast as a perpetual holidayworld: instead, locals might internalise this sense of emptiness. Yi-Fu Tuan (1979: 387) defines place as distinct from space, in that a place ‘incarnates the experiences and aspirations of a people’, and so a sense of place becomes ‘a reality to be clarified and understood from the perspectives of people who have given it meaning’. In this light, representations of locals who may wander restlessly or who are compelled to do so out of socioeconomic disadvantage may cyclically drive a sense of the Gold Coast as being liminal and sometimes shallow, but still home. When I was seventeen years old, before the end of 2010, I had tenanted fifteen different Gold Coast addresses. Living on the single parent pension, my mum, brother and I relocated around Australia’s largest non-capital city in search of cheaper rents, but never strayed too far from the city centre so that my brother and I could stay enrolled at the same schools. Although the chief executive of the Gold Coast’sofficial tourism body, Destination Gold Coast, reports that hotels are reaching capacity (Battista, in Larkins 2019), empty motels and leasable holiday apartments litter the coastline. These less-fashionable residences tend to be cheaper to rent than houses, so even though my family could not afford to live as tourists in the holidayworld, we often lived in accommodation originally built for tourists. While Michel de Certeau (2011) might call this reinvention of tourist accommodation a tactic for making use of city resources in unintended ways, the myth of the Gold Coast holidayworld informed our sense of privilege, and we advanced the myth ourselves. When I asked my mum why she had settled on the Gold Coast after she backpacked around New Zealand and Australia, she told me we were living in paradise: where everyone was laidback and kind, where she made friends on the bus, and people said hello as they passed her on the street. De Certeau argues that media and prevailing cultural myths produce a perceived reality. As a result of vivid and growing myths, ‘the terrain itself seems to advance’, but according to de Certeau (2011: 185–6), myths ‘fabricate the terrain, simulate it, use it as a mask, accredit themselves by it, and thus create the scene of their law’. 182 Queensland Review Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Queensland University of Technology, on 07 Dec 2020 at 00:36:51, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2020.15 Lost in space The narrative of paradise on the Gold Coast masks socioeconomic disadvantage and colonial violence in order to maintain the promise of luxury and belonging. Ysola Best (1994: 87) recognises that the pre-colonial history of the region is muted, so ‘The history of Southeast Queensland in particular has not been addressed from a very balanced perspective’. Consider the systematic erasure of the Gold Coast’s First Peoples, the Kombumerri, from history in fiction and non-fictional narratives of the Gold Coast, such as the backcover blurb for Michael Jones’ (1986) book on Gold Coast history and culture, which remarks that the ‘sunny place was created, virtually from nothing’; Brendan Shanahan’s(2004: xiv) book asking whether the Gold Coast was ‘the city of the future – if only because it had no past’; the protagonist of Matthew Condon’s(1995:2–3) iconic A Night at the Pink Poodle musing that the skyscrapers down the Gold Coast highway are ‘the closest thing we had to our own history’; and Tourism and Events Queensland (quoted in Cantillon 2015: 260) proclaiming that ‘nowhere delivers as many smiles or happy memories as the Gold Coast’. Ruth Barcan (2013: 47) thus observes that a sense of the Gold Coast as a place ‘is seen to have begun with the tourist industry – which was stirring in the 1920s–30s’ or ‘with its white history’. The modern history of the Gold Coast is one of mass dispossession. Because of poor records and misinformation, dispossessed and relocated peoples, and deliber- ately erased histories, there are few specific stories accessible that illustrate the extent of the violence against the Kombumerri people.

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