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

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Palmer, Kelly (2020) Lost in space:Gold Coast characters wandering home(less). Queensland Review, 27(2), pp. 181-200.

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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 homelessness 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 socioeconomically 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’.

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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. However, the Yugambeh Museum in Beenleigh, Rory O’Connor (1997) and Kathy Frankland (2009) all point to the Native Police, who operated in Queensland from the late 1800s to early 1900s to abduct, then brutalise and desensitise, young Aboriginal men so that the police could ‘drive the Kombumerri [among other local communities] off their lands or into the fringe areas such as the hinterland of the Gold Coast and Tweed Rivers’ (O’Connor 1997: 9). Clearly, the Gold Coast coastline has witnessed and continues to witness immense violence as a consequence of ongoing colonisation, with the few recorded histories of these massacres highlighting in particular the horrors inflicted upon young Kombumerri men. A sense of paradise on the Gold Coast, therefore, has been built on the apparent absence of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander locals. Elaine Thompson (1994: 173) notices that, historically and now, in national and local discourse as well as in legal and social governance, ‘Aborigines were totally excluded from a paradise which denied poverty’. I have previously speculated on how this ‘collective ignorance’ (Thompson 1994: 93) might re-emerge through a collective and perhaps unconscious unease on the Gold Coast (Palmer 2018a). The Gold Coast is represented as a place where everyone and no one belongs: the traditional owners are dispossessed and their histories and sovereignty disregarded; locals may be (un)consciously aware of their own alien-ness on the landscape; and tourists, who are championed, are by definition meant to be temporary residents. The city is working on due acknowledgement and the effort is visible in Aboriginal iconography and artefacts in public spaces, especially along the beach strips, though there is substantial work to be done locally and as a nation. Now that I have travelled and have been able to see and discuss the Gold Coast from all over the world, I am even more keenly aware of the image of commercialised paradise that the city stretches for itself, just as the ocean stretches beyond view. Still, my mum does not mind continuing and narrowing her backpacking tradition to the single city of the Gold Coast. Wandering up and down paradise – or a version of it –

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was an everyday experience for us. The instability of at once being a local and yet wandering on the Gold Coast complicates a sense of and the privilege of belonging, while wandering is coopted into tourist narratives about idle locals.

The Gold Coast Australians are often conceived in the cultural imagination as ‘variously disoriented, lost, estranged, and alienated’ (O’Carroll 1993: 32). The Gold Coast in particular is often represented as a liminal space due to its intersectional liminality, including its geopolitical location on the edge of land and sea and on the Queensland/New South Wales border; its economic isolation within the tourism industries;1 its transient population; and various festivities that make way for individuals’ liminal behaviour. Hilary Winchester and Kathryn Everett (2000: 61) summarise that the Gold Coast is a liminal space, since it lies at the boundaries of land and sea, of Queensland and NSW. It is a unique urban environment within Australia, a phenomenon of tourist urbanization, seen as a city of theme parks and leisure untied to any manufacturing base ::: It is a place to get away ::: where transitions are possible. Susan Carson (2013: 34), though, sees a culture on the Gold Coast that is simply overshadowed by narratives of glitter and crime in mainstream media and advertising: she sees that there is a ‘lingering popular perception that there is no link between “culture” and “the Gold Coast” despite an active arts sector, strong community support for many local creative events, and an awareness of the importance of the Coast’s heritage’. As a result of its budding maturity while still saturated in its own myths about youth and newness, the Gold Coast seems to occupy a liminal space of ‘perpetual adolescence’ (Wise 2006: 185). The New Surfers Paradise Lifestyle video (Gold Coast Tourism 2014) showcases the beach as a matter of paradise, but the ‘locals’ wander about boutiques and sip cappuccinos, while lifeguards smile decoratively as they jog along the beach with nowhere to go (Palmer 2018b). No jobs, schools, health infrastructure, or any other state or local staples of everyday life come into the message of paradise on the Gold Coast. A recent brochure tagging hotels throughout the city calls the Gold Coast ‘Australia’s Playground’ (Destination Gold Coast 2019) and can be folded into a chatterbox (sometimes called a paper fortune teller). Once folded, the brochure peels back to reveal tourist destinations including Dreamworld, Movie World, the beach and the hinterland, thus foretelling the magic that awaits the presumed- tourist reader. The city invites the tourist to become magically transformed into a child, just as children are welcomed into its holidayworld. In becoming childlike, one is free to wander, set free from the burdens of everyday life. Youthfulness and new identities substitute a history of place while promising a lifestyle unburdened by the past or by the responsibilities of everyday life. However, this youthfulness is not natural, but rather commodiﬁed and constructed.2 The city constructs a tourist empire in order to highlight and naturalise the idyllic landscape, climate and lifestyle that transcend the mundane worklife of adulthood. The Gold Coast rapidly grows its population from interstate migrants and overseas migrants at rates not too different from the national proﬁle (Gold Coast City Migration Summary 2019), but the allure of the Gold Coast seems especially

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ensconced in the concept of paradise. Stimson and Minnery (1998: 201) find that population growth in the Gold Coast region has in the past been dependent on Japanese and other migrants ‘seeking a peaceful, low-key lifestyle’ or a lifestyle ‘closely associated with hedonism’. Meanwhile, Narrelle Morris (2004) finds that not only are Japanese tourists one of the largest markets on the Gold Coast, but in the 1990s, Japanese investors made Japan the fourth-largest foreign landholder in Queensland. Such testimonies, which steep perceptions of everyday life in tourist narratives, highlight a belief that one can live hedonistically on a hedonistic landscape; the trick is not necessarily to bring leisure practices with you, but to transform in accordance with the laws of the land. Assumptions propagated through marketing campaigns such as these suggest that the Gold Coast imposes what de Certeau (2011) calls strategies for living a tourist lifestyle upon not only tourists but permanent residents too. The Surfers Paradise Alliance has leant further into this narrative, now calling the central suburb of Surfers Paradise itself the city’s sixth theme park (Huxley 2015). The logic of the myth follows that for a city to be a theme park, then everyday life is a holiday. Accordingly, through ‘political intervention and vigorous promotion’ (Craik 1991: 172), as well as state and private support of hotels and high-end housing estate development (Dredge 2011), the city’s 600,0003 locals are represented as tourists, mixed up in the Gold Coast’s transient population of an additional one million international (Queensland Government 2019) and 12 million domestic (National Visitor Survey 2019) visitors per year. Walking into the city, it seems, is tantamount to purchasing a ticket at the gates. One could be forgiven for mistakenly assuming that the Gold Coast makes a tourist of everyone. Throughout the mainstream media, these representations of the Gold Coast as a liminal space repeatedly stereotype the city’s locals as tourists, criminals and dole bludgers – as wanderers floating around and through the city limits, even when they are permanent residents. Images of locals lazily stagnating characterise low-income locals as non-working tourists and also as criminals, which fits the figure of the dole bludger. After the federal government ranked suburbs by the number of welfare recipients failing to arrive at job interviews, Kylar Loussikian (2017) of the Courier- Mail reported that the suburb of Southport on the Gold Coast is one of Australia’s dole bludger hotspots. The Daily Telegraph (quoted in Media Watch 2016) characterises one type of welfare-dependent Australian, or ‘dole bludger’,as‘young, able and unwilling to work’. Notably, this characterisation overlaps with that of the Gold Coast local who, according to the New Surfers Paradise Lifestyle marketing campaign, is ‘young’, enjoys the Gold Coast as ‘an attraction itself’ and does not ‘take life so seriously’ (Gold Coast Tourism 2014). The difference between the narrative of the dole bludger and the narrative of the Gold Coast local is marked only by their financial capital: the Gold Coast local shops and dines in high-end restaurants, similarly to a tourist, while the dole bludger’s time for leisure is mysterious, summarised only as ‘not work’. Tourist myths that situate the idea of the Gold Coast as existing only beyond the everyday workweek make room for the ‘Crime Capital of Australia’ epithet taken up in mainstream media, effectively forging a binary of paradise and criminal underbelly. Stephen Stockwell (2012: 281) notices that ‘the vast majority of material set on the Gold Coast has criminal themes’. Examples from popular culture include animated series Pacific Heat; procedural crime drama The Strip;

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reality television show Gold Coast Cops; the noir film Goodbye Paradise; and fiction such as Sally Breen’s Atomic City (2013). Breen (2005: 208) deduces that Gold Coast crime texts are ‘glued to the flimsy surface of an inherited noir style’, while the Gold Coast itself is portrayed as more ‘whacky’ than seriously foreboding. Meanwhile, news headlines regularly claim to have uncovered the Gold Coast’s ‘underbelly’.’4 The movement of everyday life meanwhile goes unseen. These representations unfairly characterise welfare-dependent locals as thieves and fraudsters, while working-class and other low-income locals are otherwise under-represented if not omitted entirely from popular narratives of the Gold Coast. In 2016, 35.7 per cent of the Gold Coast population earned somewhere between negative income and up to A$499 per week (City of Gold Coast 2019b). Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2003) also reminds us that ownership over space is another condition of a coloniser/migrant’s belonging – that is, a sense of ownership that is racially preconditioned, but also ownership of land, property and businesses. However, many Gold Coast locals do not enjoy assets that might anchor them to one spot in space. While 39.7 per cent of Gold Coast residents do not own their home outright or have a mortgage, 7 per cent of the local population describe themselves as unemployed (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2019). Poverty and homelessness are difficult to measure precisely among a population, since household size determines need and since the transience of homelessness scatters data, while adolescent homeless people are likely to hide (Greenblatt and Robertson 1993). Nationwide data show that many Australian residents who depend on welfare – especially Youth Allowance, Newstart Allowance and Parenting Payments – live below the poverty line (Australian Council of Social Service 2018: 48). Meanwhile, in a local context, there were at least 1,723 homeless people on the Gold Coast in 2016 (Larkins 2018: para. 3). Youth homelessness in Australia has risen by 26 per cent since 2006, and one-quarter of homeless youths are of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Island descent (Council to Homeless Persons 2018). Indeed, the city itself overshadows problems of poverty as much as myths of the city’s paradisal decadence hide resistant narratives. A Rosies5 Gold Coast coordi- nator, Kathleen Vlasic, told Damien Larkins at ABC Gold Coast that homeless locals are often hidden among tourists in the central Gold Coast suburb of Surfers Paradise. Vlasic recounts that homeless persons walk through the lights but take shelter in dark corners, so are ‘able to blend in and not be so noticed all the time ::: They can wander through Surfers and they’re not really going to stand out like a sore toe’ (Vlasic, in Larkins 2019: paras 7–8). As Vlasic recounts, wandering homeless on the Gold Coast may resemble everyday movements and wandering tourism – but only from what can be seen during the daylight and nightlight. From this surface paradise, homelessness itself may seem to be a privilege, especially given the mythologisation of the coastline as splendid. Perceptions and realities of the criminal, and so undeserving, homeless also cast aspersions on homeless wandering as a choice and privilege rather than as an injustice. Low-income residents appear mostly as delinquents in the news and other media narratives about crime on the Gold Coast, serving only to reinforce the image of paradise through the contrived binary of paradise/paradise lost. As a result, mainstream media, indirectly and perhaps unknowingly, capture a sense of isolation and alienation among Gold Coast locals. In this tourist-centric world city, belonging and stability are purchasable commodities – and indeed participation in the ‘churn’

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of the real estate market is not always a choice. Baker, Bennett and Wise (2012: 99) observe: For many long-term residents of the Gold Coast, their perception of place and belonging is couched in a long-term sense of neighbourhood and community, albeit one subject to the encroachment of property developers and rapid urban transfor- mation – or ‘churn’. For other, more newly arrived, residents, an understanding of space and place on the Gold Coast is paradoxically motivated by the frenetic temporality of the Gold Coast as a 21st Century city which, due to socio-economic and environmental factors, has an acutely unstable and uncertain future. For low-income locals, their lifestyle may from a distance appear especially detached from place, since many low-income locals do not enjoy the security of stable housing. Wandering is a feature of many low-income locals’ lives, so wandering is not a cultural and economic privilege but rather a necessity of socioeconomic disadvantage. Movement within the city is higher than it is Aus- tralia-wide, with only 43 per cent of Gold Coast residents not changing addresses between 2011 and 2016. Compared to the national average of 52.4 per cent of Australian residents in stable housing (Gold Coast City Migration Summary 2019), Gold Coast locals seem less anchored among the tourists.

Homeless in paradise Georgia Savage’s The House Tibet (1992) depicts wandering as homemaking. In Savage’s novel, two runaway children wander homeless on the Gold Coast in search of food, shelter and paid employment. This 1990s novel remains important and without a modern-day equivalent as the Gold Coast’s population and tourist economy grow alongside a rise in homelessness. Savage’s novel represents the Gold Coast not simply as a place to escape, but rather as a complicated home where belonging is constantly renegotiated through movement around the city. Thus, wandering on the Gold Coast is not a way of making tourism a lived experience, but is part of the seasonal and everyday practices of life for homeless and low-income locals. Investigating these competing narratives of wandering on the Gold Coast reveals belonging as a dynamic process of placemaking and homemaking, and as a privilege of post-colonial habitation and socioeconomic comfort. Transience, for Gold Coast characters, is not always a physical journey but can often be a feeling of wandering lost within the boundaries of home. Wandering is more complicated than following established routes and strategies for being on the Gold Coast. Jay W. Vogt (1976: 27) differentiates wandering from tourism. Drawing from Erik Cohen, Vogt gives the ‘romantic’ term ‘wanderers’ instead of the ‘derogatory’ term ‘drifters’. The wandering traveller sacriﬁces ‘familiarity, prior planning, safety, dependency, and minimal choices’ in favour of culturally rewarding ‘novelty, spontaneity, risk, independence, and a multitude of options’ (1976: 27). Yet across Gold Coast narratives, this ‘romantic’ notion of wandering is not easily distinguished from its degraded counterpart, ‘drifting’, which implies laziness and loss, such as in drifting away. While the ‘travel style’ of the wanderer ‘is in many ways a product of afﬂuent society’ (1976: 27), wandering/ drifting is often a socioeconomic necessity, such as in the case of homelessness.

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Drawing Gold Coast locals as wandering in the way of tourism or as part of a broadly leisurely lifestyle is problematic because these images disguise local dispossession, homelessness and other types of socioeconomic disadvantage and disloca- tion that necessitate wandering. The privilege of wandering as a Gold Coast local first depends on rights to move around and reside on the landscape. Moreton- Robinson (2003:23–4) affirms that ‘the sense of belonging, home and place enjoyed by the non-Indigenous subject – colonizer/migrant – is based on the dispossession of the original owners of the land’ and ‘derived from ownership and achievement’. White Australian citizenship is a racial precondition of belonging in Australia, while the Gold Coast’s first peoples, the Kombumerri, are consistently absent from mainstream narratives of place. European Australians themselves are visitors- made-permanent-residents, all the while championing the value of the tourist, and in doing so naturalising the alien on the landscape. On the Gold Coast, to wander about place is a privilege accessible because myths that naturalise the visitor are part of the same logic that undermines any concept of belonging based on stability and history. Savage’s novel, The House Tibet (1992) explores homelessness on the Gold Coast such that it constitutes wandering, but this wandering is a process of placemaking and homemaking that complicates myths about paradise. In previous research (Palmer 2020), I have dissected the protagonist’s journey to the Gold Coast in the context of gender and notions of paradise, but her journey also demonstrates how a low-income or homeless person might practice being a local through the work of wandering. The novel follows twelve-year-old Vicky, who runs away with her seven-year-old brother James, from Victoria to the Gold Coast after their father rapes her, while other family members fail to intervene or help. The pair spend their only funds on train and bus tickets to get to the Gold Coast, and spend the rest of the novel homeless and relocating around the Gold Coast in search of food, work and housing. While Vicky and James are on the Gold Coast, they change their names to Morgan and Max respectively, which marks their chosen orphanhood and detach- ment from their biological family and childhood home (Vicky/toria). Morgan is first inspired to run away in the same moment that she considers the Gold Coast as a comfortable place to be homeless. In a Victorian train station, Morgan spots a tourist poster advertising ‘Winter in Queensland – the Sunshine State’ (Savage 1992: 36), and is able to guess that the poster depicts the Gold Coast. She reasons: I’ll bet it’s Surfers Paradise ::: I could go there and no one would find me ::: Up there no one will know who I am and what I’ve done. I can get a job and find a little flat. Caroline Teasdale says it’s even warm enough to sleep on the beach. And later, when I’ve saved some money, I’ll get a dog, a big grey one like a wolf. Every night and morning we’ll walk by the sea. People will look at us and wonder who we are, but no one will come near us and no one will bother us. (1992: 36) Notably, Morgan accepts the climate and laid-back lifestyle of the Gold Coast as not only appealing as an escape from home but supportive for the conditions of her certain homelessness. She expects a warm climate to accommodate sleeping outside. Milton Greenblatt and Marjorie Robertson (1993: 1180) corroborate this idea in their study of homeless adolescents, finding that ‘many wandering homeless youths’ may be ‘lured by’ a warm climate and legendary city. The spectacle of the Gold

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Coast tourism world does not captivate Morgan, though; what she hopes for is a laid-back lifestyle of wanderers in which she can disappear – where sleeping on the beach and drifting away from home are not conspicuous. However, Morgan does not see wandering as aimlessness or idleness: ‘she in one breath associates this escape with work and domestic activities’ (Palmer 2018b: 190). Indeed, with regard to Vlasic’s observation about the invisibility of homeless persons who are kept moving in the tourist strips, consider that Henri Lefebvre (2014: 152) explains that the difficulty of recognising socioeconomic disadvantage in a capitalist society stems from being ‘caught up in a hybrid compromise between aesthetic spectacle and knowledge’. Points of view from low-income characters help to separate the spectacle from lived experience in everyday life because locals influence the ebb and flow of power through ‘socioeconomic order[ing]’ of space (de Certeau 2011: xiv). These tactical manipulations of space constitute ‘the procedures of everyday creativity’ (2011: xiv), although narrative and description through a low-income character’s perspective can be subversive in itself, helping to see everyday life on its own terms. Morgan’s descriptions counter notions of the Gold Coast as existing beyond the everyday workweek as she notices the work of the city: pedestrians rush ‘past city- style’ (Savage 1992: 60). The city is also not described as youthful, as Morgan enjoys watching the ‘old’ locals ‘sitting in a row on the bus stop seat cackling away like a lot of water-birds’ (1992: 109–10). Rather than fixate on the glamour of the skyscrapers, Morgan is intrigued by how the buildings throw ‘forest-shadows across the bus’ (1992: 59), thus further representing the Gold Coast as a city that is not a place in which to be seen to live a leisurely existence but a place in which to work and hide. As soon as Morgan and Max arrive in Surfers Paradise, their bus driver, unaware of the pair’s age, directs Morgan to the employment office a suburb north in Southport, laughing and repeating his final direction, ‘A short walk to Short Street’ (Savage 1992: 64). The immediate assumption of the driver in hand with Morgan’s eagerness to work dispel myths that wandering on the Gold Coast, and indeed wandering homeless, involves idle play. Rather, wandering, or running away, ‘is work’ (1992: 328). While Morgan, in order to feed and protect herself and her brother, does apprehensively steal from supermarkets and trespass onto boats and into other empty dwellings in her first months as a homeless child, she does so as a morally troubled compromise reminiscent of Oliver Twist. Morgan and Max also spend an undefined period sleeping in open spaces and squatting on a boat, thus risking being found by the owners or by local bikies, whom they are warned about by other homeless youths. To secure her safety and that of her brother, Morgan eventually takes a job as a cleaner in a brothel, hoping that she can hide both her young age and her brother. When Morgan grows suspicious of her opportunistic employer, she absconds with her brother to be homeless again, although she eventually finds an apartment, employment and emancipation in caring for an elderly neighbour. The text does not condone Morgan’s instances of criminal behaviour, but does explain why and how desperate persons may contribute to the petty criminal segment of the Gold Coast’s underbelly due to reduced social and economic capital. As a homeless child searching for work, and working to care for herself and her brother, Morgan’s characterisation destabilises the figure of the dole bludger and the myth of perpetual leisure, and instead complicates the experience of

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homelessness and financial insecurity/joblessness on the Gold Coast as a mental, emotional and physical struggle for integrity and independence. In the process of walking about from one insecure location to another, while sometimes thieving when without work, Morgan and Max develop a sense of belonging on the landscape. Beginning, as most homeless adolescents do, by living ‘a fearful existence – alienated from mainstream society, aimless, and dissatisfied’ (Greenblatt and Robertson 1993: 1180), Morgan and Max overcome their alienation as far as they can in order to feel, at least for the foreseeable future, at home on the Gold Coast. It is not until the end of the novel that Morgan and Max achieve official emancipation and find a stable residence on the Gold Coast that they can call home. However, because their residence is hard-earned through a brutal and dangerous coming-of-age chronicle that is reflected in their wandering across the Gold Coast in search of safety and stability, their sense of belonging is not something that is achieved like emancipation or a lease but instead something more like home that grows as they too grow. Indeed, Morgan learns from her wandering that she is, or can be, ‘at home everywhere’ (Savage 1992: 304). Therefore, the characters show that ‘dwelling is accomplished not by residing but by wandering’ (Casey 1993: 115). As a result, even while homeless, Morgan and Max are not placeless. Concurrently, as Morgan and Max find and build home, place is repurposed and transformed into home. The landscape does necessarily seem to advance, as with de Certeau’s(2011) understanding of myths defining place, but rather the characters utilise tactics to create homes from abandoned buildings, boats and the open land. Maggie O’Neill and Phil Hubbard (2010: 50) recognise that to wander is not ‘just to follow a line: it is to become involved in the doings and becomings that produce space and make place’. Indeed, Morgan’s new identity emerges while wandering, tracing her own maps and building her own nests –‘in a process of self-making through self-narrating, in producing rather than expressing truth, and in construct- ing rather than reflecting self’ (Cantrell and Ellison 2009: 2). Wandering, therefore – and perhaps especially for homeless wanderers – can be a practice of placemaking at the same time as a self-reflexive act of homemaking. It is perhaps ironic, then, that the Gold Coast lifestyle is touted to nurture a hedonistic lifestyle, which is only accessible to those affluent enough to afford stability; meanwhile, those who do wander as a socioeconomic necessity in their everyday lives do so not in the style of tourists but in an attempt to plant roots and make homes.

Local aliens Morgan and Max of The House Tibet make their way to the Gold Coast, and then in wandering create a home and overcome their alienation. However, for the local teenage boys of Amy Barker’s Omega Park, wandering about in their home city is a way of negotiating their alienation so that they may distance themselves from a dangerous place they cannot leave. Set in the ﬁctional housing commission suburb of Omega Park on the Gold Coast, the perspectives of the novel alternate between (1) thirteen year old Dingo, who grapples with his suburb being placed on police lockdown after he witnesses the death of the second narrator, (2) the seventeen- year-old Jacob, whose narrative perspective follows his life from age two and leads up to his death during a police chase. Like The House Tibet, the young protagonists

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of Omega Park complicate the privileges associated with being young or youthful on the Gold Coast by exploring the unique socioeconomic disadvantages of living in a city that alienates low-income or welfare-dependent locals. Dingo anxiously wanders to avoid becoming caught up in criminal activities, thus doubling his alienation from his family, his neighbourhood and the rest of the Gold Coast, as he fears that he could otherwise face the same fate as his neighbour, Jacob. Jacob’s wandering meanwhile confirms his alienation and results in his embracing criminal behaviours in order to attain any sense of belonging in an otherwise alienated existence. The Gold Coast is not innocent of its own oddities and alien-ness, which often imagine the local as someone outside of the city. For example, the 2018 Common- wealth Games opening ceremony begins with a videocast of three surfers on a Gold Coast beach. Looking up into the twilight, one asks, ‘Ever think that, right now, billions of miles away, there could be a bunch of aliens lying on a cosmic beach, looking back in our direction?’ (Twomey 2018). The camera pans up into deep space and then crossfades to an indigo circle of light on a black field: this is Earth on the floor of the Carrara Stadium. Looking into the sky from the edge between coast and sea, the surfers express a sense of also being on the edge of the planet; meanwhile, the crossfade that shows another Earth and another Gold Coast in the sky suggests an internalised feeling of alienation. They wonder if they are being watched, they feel connected to the rest of the world/universe yet are cosmically lonely, and the fertile emptiness accepts their imagined projections. These first images of the highly anticipated Games (Gold Coast 2018 Common- wealth Games Opening Ceremony) generated quizzical reviews.6 The rest of the opening ceremony on the stadium floor is a live performance, which includes traditional Aboriginal performances and rituals, such as a smoking ceremony,7 and the obligatory musical homage to family-friendly beach fun. While also subject to mixed reviews, these subsequent images seemed to critics to be much more in line with a recognisable Australianness and Gold Coastness, or at least to capture a dominant Australian identity that we should be advancing. However, the visual parallels between the alien and the Earth/Gold Coast highlights (if too abstractly for the context) certain vulnerabilities enfolded within the Gold Coast’s reputation as a beachspace and tourist hotspot. Barker (2009: 75) observes that for her low-income characters, ‘The night sky in Omega Park is like the future and there are thousands of points of light in the distance and each one of these is hope.’ While low-income characters on the Gold Coast sense the possibility of surviving – if not thriving – in their local environment, this hope is distant and belonging is always far away. Their sense of disconnection and alienation is mostly captured metaphorically in their descriptions of their environment. The fictional housing commission suburb of the Park, as the setting is colloqui- ally known throughout the novel, is set somewhere west of Miami, ‘Five kilometres inland from the coastline’ (Barker 2009: 4). The name of the Park is ironic, as life is represented not with the playfulness of youth, but rather as a trap that exacerbates socioeconomic disadvantage. Indeed, the full name, Omega Park, more aptly symbolises the low socioeconomic side of the Gold Coast, wherein characters both feel and become literally trapped within the suburb. Wandering within and beyond the Park, therefore, has subversive potential. While riding around on his bike,

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Dingo notes the ‘Omega Park signpost ::: with the graffiti Dodge City spray- painted across it’ from which ‘the two names for the place’—those of Omega Park and Dodge City—‘have become interchangeable’ (2009: 5). The graffiti, as artistic expression/rebellion, visibly voices the discontent of the Park locals: the suburb is rundown, unsafe. Meanwhile, the acknowledgement of the Park as its own ‘City’ suggests that the culture of the Park is different to and discordant with the culture of the more prosperous surrounding suburbs, such as gentrified Merrimac and tourist- attracting Broadbeach. Another reading suggests that ‘Dodge City’ applies to the whole Gold Coast, and so degrades the city to be at best less-than-paradise, and at worst to be a larger-scale version of the dilapidated Park. This rezoning of the Park from the rest of the city is of course mythic, though the locals believe in the Park’s alien-ness to such an extent that the Park is, at least through the wavy credibility of nicknames, divorced from Gold Coast jurisdiction. Conversely, it is the rest of the Gold Coast beyond the Park that seems alien to Dingo and Jacob, with the affluent tourist industries and American imitations appearing unauthentic or anachronistic. Riding his bike along the Gold Coast highway, Dingo describes being close to the motels as ‘surreal’ compared with ‘seeing them from the road like part of the landscape, like rows of pine trees along the esplanade’ (Barker 2009: 143). He wonders, ‘Who stays in these motels ::: Where do they come from?’ (2009: 143). The locals also refer to Jupiter’s Casino, now Star Casino, as ‘OUTASPACE’ (2009: 160). Here, the Park locals invert the binary relationship of belonging and alienation: the aliens are the tourists, dwelling in OUTASPACE, in contrast to the locals who are socioeconomically alienated from participating in the showcased aspects of their own home. However, this reading of the city, which positions the tourists in the excluded category of ‘others’, does not effectively foster a sense of belonging for low-income locals. Jacob muses that the city is collated without space for him: Jacob stares out across the empty oval at the MIAMI HIGH letters mounted on the escarpment – like the Hollywood sign from the TV – he stares out through the grid of small squares. After science it seems like the world is made up of pieces like this, pieces that can be arranged like a puzzle. The gold and blue buses, the sun and sky of the Surfers Bus Line, don’t run in the Park. This is a private bus line paid for by the government (2009: 80). Jacob’s wandering and wondering stream-of-consciousness reveals a sense that the Gold Coast is made up of pieces that can be included and excluded, connected or not. Indeed, the place names and signs evoke foreign beach cities transplanted onto the Australian landscape, while public infrastructure can still be ‘private’ and privilege visitors or some locals over others. While there is a harmony between the blues and yellows of the coastal landscape and government infrastructure and advertising, Jacob cannot participate in all these services and features, since the buses do not service his suburb. Accordingly, his wandering exposes him to a city that encourages his alienation. Jacob explains that his reduced circumstances prevent him from escaping, and describes his very existence as debilitating work. He tells his girlfriend, Johanna, who is a recent local:

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don’t talk to me about dole bludging, alright, because you don’t know. You go to that posh school and want to be a forensic scientist and everything, but try livin’ here for a few years and see what happens to you (2009: 138). Here, Jacob repositions his unemployment as a burden of his class’ ill mental health – far from allowing a lifestyle of idleness, though Jacob does sell drugs as a means of supplementing his income and creating a sense of community with other drug dealers and users in the Park. He nonetheless understands and indirectly explains here to Johanna that the culture of the Park stifles transgressions against its own norms of criminal behaviour while challenging an individual’s ambitions by way of maintaining the status quo. For Dingo, wandering and running around helps him to escape and save himself, to keep moving enough not to be pinned down, and to do so long enough for him to make it out of the suburb. Throughout the novel, the Park becomes literally quarantined from the rest of the Gold Coast. In response to the police chase that drove Jacob off the road and to his death, the Park locals riot with small explosives, drawing a police response that, after the roads are cordoned off for weeks, functionally places the suburb under a kind of martial law. Dingo experiences the shame of being muted and made useless due to living in an unemployed, so apparently undeserving, household. After Dingo’s sister Larissa suggests that he speak to a news anchor for an interview, he quickly rejects any idea that they will be heard: ‘You’re just a Parkee like the rest of us, you know. You’re not special’ (2009: 42). Larissa retorts by criticising Dingo’s surfing aspirations: ‘You’re gonna end up like Dad. Unemployed. That’s the whole reason we’re living here now ::: It’s all because of stupid surfing’ (2009: 42). Noticeably, the siblings align their reduced socioeconomic capital, locality and hopelessness as a singular disadvantage: being poor means that they must live in Omega Park; likewise, they live in the Park and living in the Park means that they are poor, unemployed, and politically ineffectual. The Park seems to swallow their voice and leave them to drift in limbo, which is idleness severely in contrast with that of tourists. Dingo, however, engages what de Certeau calls tactics – ways of being subversive against state-imposed strategies – for negotiating their alienation and belonging in place. One exception to the suburb’s complete lockdown is what the local youths call ‘the murder pipe’, a wide concrete pipe that ‘runs twenty metres beneath Wattle Drive ::: opening out onto the side of the arterial road’ (Barker 2009: 5). Characters such as Dingo use the pipe to leave and enter the Park unobserved by the general public, which Dingo demonstrates when he travels through the pipe to discreetly transport stolen chlorine in a bid to aid the protesters (2009: 144). Dingo’s use of the pipe to avoid the main road and so move undetected in and out of the suburb constitutes a tactic that increases his mobility and achieves a kind of freedom from the crucible of his home. The murder pipe does not support transgressive tactics for navigating the Gold Coast consistently, though, as the pipe is an avenue of freedom for Dingo but is a death omen for Jacob. Throughout his life, Jacob fantasises about relocating away from the Park, but as Jacob ages he becomes better acquainted with the grim realities of the Park and Park locals, or ‘Parkees’. Jacob’s family and his neighbours suffer from varieties of social disadvantage, including mental illness, misogyny, poverty, drug dependence, and discrimination. Surrounded by despair and without

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close and relevant role models, Jacob forgets the possibility of ever ‘escaping’ the Park, and the destiny of crime and poverty smothers his life – literally. Jacob’s escape from the Park comes through his death, which for some characters is considered ‘murder’ by the police. Jacob’s mother says during Jacob’s eulogy: ‘What them coppers did, it’s murder if you ask me. How is it not murder? They killed my son’ (2009: 170). Jacob’s death can thus be read as a prophecy of the murder pipe in that he did not faithfully conform to the Park’s subversive criminal behaviours, nor did he extricate himself from the culture as Dingo eventually manages to do. Rob Garbutt (2011: 8) reasons that, ‘Being a local is a sort of transparent belonging in this place’; however, Dingo rejects this transparency that other characters constantly suggest to him is true. Instead, Dingo is naturally drawn to the beach, even hearing the beach call to him from the symphony of other local sounds, with ‘the traffic transform[ing] to an ocean of roaring waves’ (Savage 2009: 242). In Dingo’s case, belonging is thus not dependent on dwelling or locality, but on a place with which he identifies. Dingo identifies with the ocean, with a potential surfing career, and so his experience of living on the Gold Coast is one of consistent but managed alienation. Indeed, Dingo eventually ignores his neighbours’ advice to wear the name Parkee ‘like a badge of honour’ (2009: 146–7), and instead uses his intuition around surfing to find his way to purpose and happiness, hearing in the water, ‘This way up’ (2009: 244). The boys’ names also reflect their different struggles to negotiate their alienation: Jacob’s name invokes Jacob of the Bible, who wandered to Egypt and died after seventeen years there; Dingo’s name also denotes the canine, the young males of which are nomadic (wandering), and thus suggests Dingo’s resourcefulness and durability in a harsh landscape. While both characters are alienated from and within the Gold Coast, and both employ tactics for evading the police, their ability to belong or escape depends on their covert wandering, in terms of both leaving the suburb and being able to wander within the suburb and not become weighed down.

Conclusions: Wandering home Morgan and Max of The House Tibet and Jacob and Dingo of Omega Park are not simply Gold Coast locals, nor does a sense of belonging come naturally. The Park in Omega Park functions as a kind of crucible that heightens the disadvantages of being welfare-dependent and generally suffering low social, cultural and economic capital. Wandering in this context is a means of walking away and becoming unstuck from place and one’s otherwise determined future. The House Tibet,by contrast, does not represent one suburb or area of the Gold Coast in particular as a ghetto, or to have an exclusively low socioeconomic concentration, though the novel does focus on experiences of homelessness on the Gold Coast. Low-income, welfare-dependent and homeless residents live scattered across the Gold Coast, under the skyscrapers, in abandoned houses, hotels, boats and so on. In The House Tibet, class on the Gold Coast appears less like a hierarchy or puzzle and rather class manifests as a matrix of intermingling and overlaid socioeconomic conditions. Instead of being ﬁxed to one place, having one’s socioeconomic disadvantage compounded in a crucible, the characters in Savage’s novel are represented as wandering the city, vulnerable and active, in search of security.

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The sense of the Gold Coast as young, anachronistic/timeless and beyond the everyday workweek drives locals and theorists to question where a sense of authenticity or belonging should be located. The city is supposed as a place of transience, and indeed – given its real estate ‘churn’ and traffic of tourists – in many ways it is a constantly moving site. However, perspectives on why and how people wander, especially in relation to low socioeconomic persons and characters, can shed light on how locals might behave like tourists. Indeed, realist literary fiction, cultural studies analysis and my own experience of localism suggest that locals may wander and relocate in their own city out of socioeconomic necessity – and this wandering is both purposive and discursive. In this way, the mirage of the Gold Coast as offering a tourist lifestyle to locals is partially valid, although everyday life is not a holiday. The Gold Coast is changing and growing, and this article does not wish to impose any absolute perspectives on the Gold Coast and its economies. Rather, I want only to explore the myths of wandering as a tourist or hedonistic adventure that might further mask the experiences of some locals. From Brisbane, I can see that the Gold Coast is becoming built over in many positive ways. The hospital in which I was born has been demolished, and replaced with one much better equipped to grow health and education in the region. The Stardust Motel, where my family lived for a month after we were abruptly evicted, is gone too. In an inversion of Joni Mitchell’s lament for a paved paradise, parking lots have become greenspaces on the Gold Coast. Nevertheless, my mum still moves every year or two, searching for cheaper rents, slowly making wider circles as the city becomes more gentrified and her pension relatively smaller. I would prefer it if the Gold Coast did not build over her too. Those who wander as a socioeconomic necessity in their everyday life do so not in the style of tourists, but in attempt to plant roots and make home. Although the Gold Coast hosts a transient tourist population, the myth of wandering locals is not simply owed to a laidback and hedonistic lifestyle. The Gold Coast is not simply a liminal space to and in which to escape, but an everyday space where place and home are built around each other. Wandering on the Gold Coast does not always constitute privilege and leisure, as is an assumption that fits so neatly with dominant myths of the Gold Coast as an all-encompassing holidayworld, even for locals. Wandering homeless people do so as a necessity of their socioeconomic disadvantage: wandering is the pursuit of safety and a search for home. In the process of wandering, the landscape itself becomes a place that contains their belonging as well as their alienation, a home without strict borders and with rules that must be broken. Wandering on the Gold Coast is thus not about running away, but about running to somewhere, even if that route is not a straight line that always progresses forward.

Kelly Palmer teaches in Media and Communication and Literary Studies at Queens- land University of Technology. Her PhD and other research in scholarly books and journals explore a sense of the Gold Coast as a mythic city and as a place of everyday life.

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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 Kelly Palmer Notes 1 While the local economy is and has been dependent on tourism industries – often folded into data sets for accommodation as well as recreation services – the economy is diversifying. Health care and social assistance in 2016 accounted for 12.4 per cent of all employment on the Gold Coast, which was up from 11.1 per cent in 2011 (City of Gold Coast 2019a), most likely as a result of the University Hospital’s completion in 2013. Meanwhile, construction, retail trade and education together comprised 30.8 per cent of the workforce. The extent to which tourism drives construction and retail, as well as accommodation and other hospitality services, is unclear though, with the city’s 2013 Economic Development Strategy report (City of Gold Coast 2013: 28) conceding that economic growth is ‘predominantly underpinned by population growth’ and the ‘tourist market’, resulting in ‘an over reliance on the property, tourism and retail sectors to generate growth’. Helpfully, the city’s report groups retail, accommodation and recreation as one category in order to pinpoint tourism drivers; according to these data, in 2013 the Gold Coast’s tourism industries made up at least 29 per cent of its economy – more than any other individual sector, including construction or government services (2013: 5). 2 Consider, for example, the (re)construction of beachspaces, which involves relocating sand and beach grass, and installing infrastructure such as nets, breakwaters, signs, footpaths and stairs. 3 Population Australia (2019) estimates that in 2018 the Gold Coast had a population of 580,000 permanent residents, though ABC Gold Coast estimates that in 2018 the Gold Coast population was 606,774 permanent residents. 4 Some headlines in local news include: ‘Gold Coast Underbelly: Sunny Days, Shady People’ (Potts 2016); ‘Gold Coast’s Dark Underbelly’ (Condon 2008); ‘New Underbelly on Gold Coast’ (Braithwaite 2008); ‘Australia’s Crime Capital Looks Like a Paradise’ (Hutton 2014); and ‘The Sun-drenched Sin-city that Wants to Shine’ (Breen 2018). 5 Rosies: Friends on the Street is a Queensland and Christian not-for-proﬁt organisation that provides food and other materials for homeless locals. The organisation is also known to preach and lead prayer during its charity work. 6 Many mainstream news sites think the welcome to extra-terrestrials ‘peculiar’ (Wolfe 2018: para. 19), ‘a little weird’ (Twomey 2018: para. 8), and the ‘discussion about aliens ::: seemed to go over most viewers’ heads (including ours)’ (Naghten 2018: para. 4). Many news sites included Twitter feeds from viewers consistently expressing confusion. 7 With regard to the previous points about Indigenous history on the Gold Coast, note that the smoking ceremony performed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders narrates a universal origin story as a welcome to international guests but does not showcase any speciﬁcally Gold Coast Indigenous history or country. The city is again represented as an international or cosmic meeting place rather than country with its own roots.

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