Viva Briz Vegas

So, Brisbane, overshadowed by bigger cities Melbourne and Sydney but still grappling for cultural recognition and a reputation as more than just the Leeds of Australia. I quite like the comparison, personally, having just come from there. But Brisbane could, in theory, be mistaken for just about anywhere else in Europe. For a red dust vision of a wild Australia, don’t come here.

The Kurilpa bridge acts as your gateway between the vast, towering business structures of the city, complete with pedestrianised retailing and the central King George Square (named for George V and featuring these bronzed kangaroos). But head in the opposite direction and you end up in Brisbane’s arty South Bank, known as the Cultural Centre and home to the Queensland Art Gallery, the Gallery of Modern Art, the Queensland Performing Arts Centre and the Queensland Museum, all built in an oppressive 1980s labyrinth-style block structure which would see you open a door at one end only to somehow end up on the roof at the other. I wouldn’t have been completely surprised if Escher had a hand in the town planning.

My bag is taken from me as soon as I step foot into the Art Gallery, perhaps for fear of visitors casually making off with one of the Rodin sculptures. The Hans Heysen exhibition is lovely, covering his full scope of landscapes from his formative years in Europe through to his towering obsession with gum trees, all of which is nicely juxtaposed with the work of Aboriginal artist Joe Rootsey, who disregards the more traditional dot paintings of his people for more striking abstract landscapes of his own. But I’ve chosen to show you one of Peter Booth’s giant modernist paintings instead. It’s just called ‘Painting’ and differs slightly from his more grisly severed head motifs in being, well, nothing but black. Painted in 1974, the label claims that this is a statement piece regarding the ‘anxiety and pessimism of the Cold War and the Vietnam-US war’, but you could tag just about any sort of meaning to a statement like this. Booth just thought it was “strong and beautiful”, and I don’t see anything wrong in leaving it at that.

More great conundrums in the name of art can be found at the Gallery of Modern Art, which is another term strongly open to interpretation. There’s a Valentino exhibition on at the moment, something that will set you back $20. I can't help but feel that the exhibition says more about the glam-class of Brizvegas, which must boast an aspiring number of hot-heeled, seam-savvy fashionistas to rival both Paris and New York seeming as they are the only other cities that will be benefiting from this designer’s display. But the real fun is upstairs, however, because that’s where you’ll find Nam June Paik’s ‘TV Cello’.

Paik is a visual artist famous for using televisions in his work. So, here we have a stack of TVs, some playing sporadic edits of pornography in shock clips resembling something out of A Clockwork Orange, over which he has constructed the strings and framework of a cello, melding both ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture. I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to think here, whether the blurring of both classes is a good thing or a bad thing. It all feels quite sinister to me, so I’m going to say that Paik thinks that this is bad thing. Either that or he just really hates the cello.

Directly behind is Martin Creed’s ‘Work no. 189’, an installation featuring 39 ticking metronomes each individually set to a different speed. Creed’s idea is to create a ‘rhythmical cacophony’, which I‘d interpret more accurately as a ‘bloody racket’. Gradually, each one of the metronomes “lose their momentum and stop at unpredictable times… adding to the paradoxical humour of the work.” After some considerable time staring at giant hanging slogan T shirts, ticking metronomes and strangely placed chairs, I start to develop a slight fatigue as my eyes stumble upon a plastic doormat with a reinforced grip. I’m about to see what the piece is called before the doll-like steward returns and reclaims her spot on the mat. Shame, really, because it would have made quite a fitting installation. I would have called it ‘Disrupted Ambivalence’.

Another quick jaunt across the concrete set of Blade Runner and you’ll spontaneously end up in the Queensland Museum, which ticks every school trip criteria going with fossils and dinosaur bones, studies on the nation’s biodiversity and a top floor dedicated to Aboriginal history which thankfully doesn’t completely omit all the bad stuff. There are sections dedicated both to land rights and stolen generations, of Aborigines forced into foreign families or sent to religious schools. It's at the Queensland Museum where you’ll find the current Burke and Wills exhibition, the Englishman and the Irishman who, in 1860, managed to fail most spectacularly in plotting a route for a telegraph line from Melbourne in the south to the Gulf of Carpentaria in the north, a distance of around 2,000 miles across uncharted territory.

Out of all the horrific early explorer stories, Burke and Wills is the one told mostly to school children, probably as a way for them to fully appreciate the dangers of outback travelling, but also as a valuable life lesson in the imperative need to get on with your neighbours. There would be no questioning the mission’s success when the team set off from Melbourne with a huge scale street parade, consisting as it did of 23 camels, 23 horses, 19 men and 20 tonnes of supplies carried over six wagons. This was the most well equipped expedition through the guts of Australia ever conceived. Too equipped, obviously: after two months, they had only managed to travel 500 miles.

It is around this time that Wills first starts to get agitated by the company of the natives, or more specifically, the Yandruwandha tribe, who seem so eager to get him to 'dance' that he eventually fires shots in order to scare them away, noting in his journal, “[they are] mean spirited and contemptible in every respect.” Had Wills not jumped the gun, he may have noted that the so-called 'dance' was in fact a welcoming ceremony for their new white skinned visitors. But it’s the return journey which has since gone down in Australian legend, thanks mainly - in literary terms - to its cruel irony and neat symmetry.

Having separated camp at Cooper’s Creek, South Australia, to undergo the rest of the journey with a smaller number of men and an even smaller number of camels, Burke questions the severity of the illness that has befallen his travelling buddy John Gray. Gray’s complaining agitates Burke to the point where Gray is allegedly beaten up, which couldn’t have helped matters much, considering that he was actually dying of dysentery at the time. It takes a full day to bury Gray’s body due to their collective ill health, and by the time they return to the meeting point at Cooper’s Creek, they have missed the depot party by a matter of hours - a scene so brilliantly recreated in this crushing painting by John Longstaff. One of the museum’s many bearded assistants, whose name is Lance, explains this part to me with excited eyes suggesting that it's the bit of the story that he just loves to tell people: “According to some historians,” he teeters in anticipation, “the embers of the fire were still warm.”

Burke and Wills summarily perish in a defeated mess somewhere along the creek, but not before shooting (again) at the Yandruwandha, who eventually give up trying to help them. To bring the story to a nice poetic conclusion, only one man survives the trip, a certain John King, who is eventually found living with the Yandruwandha where he is nursed back to health. He returns to a heroes welcome in Melbourne almost 15 months after departing for the expedition. As there are few remains available to be displayed, the Queensland Museum mainly focus their exhibition on the role of the Yandruwandha in this story, with objects like replica boomerangs in glass cases somehow helping to punctuate the story. But the lack of any tangible scoop shouldn’t dismay people from going there to learn more about this horrendous tale of misfortune, and I’m sure even Lance, lounging idly by in slippers and socks, would agree with me on that.

The overall pace of Brisbane life, it must be said, it not too dissimilar to that found inside the Cultural Centre - I have noticed the same relaxed shuffling and need for coffee breaks here as I have on the streets, a sort of sleepy melancholy that comes from people who have experienced the cold recklessness of Sydney or Melbourne and prefer it here, thank you very much. You can see it in the way the South Bank weekend markets attract the meandering middle classes on the hunt for bohemian clothing and vintage posters, and the youthful bounding of boys practicing Capoeira on the grass to the background noise of a live pub band. It certainly doesn’t conjure up thoughts of a city in any great hurry, further supplemented by Streets Beach, which is an odd sight by anyone’s imagination.

Possibly due to being labelled as Australia’s only major conurbation without a beach on its doorstep, the Brisbane authorities have compensated with a purpose built beach in the middle of the busy South Bank district, complete with sand, lagoons and lifeguards, which overlooks the Brisbane River and the cityscape beyond. It’s a remarkable piece of public landscaping which, thanks to my weather-beaten British cynicism, I was amazed hadn’t been vandalised. It wouldn’t take the most determined of British hoodies too long to dismantle those fountain structures and fashion out a missile of some kind, but no, it actually looked like people were enjoying themselves at this place, swimming and smiling and mucking about. The less bodily conscious even stripped to scanty bikinis to take a dip (we’re still technically in winter, by the way), one of which appeared to have been fashioned from the Australian flag with a Union Jack emblazoned on the left cup - not that I was looking, of course. It’s not exactly escapism - swimming in your togs in front of the Commonwealth Bank head office - but it’s enough for the people of Brisbane, and this attitude only adds to the strange gaiety of the place. But mainly, Streets Beach will make you realise that there is still a lot of Queensland left in Brisbane.


AU Tube: Understanding Australian TV
‘World’s Strictest Parents’ (Channel 7)

In the past, this show usually concerns wayward Aussie hoons who get verbally pummelled by psychotic drill sergeant fathers who think that doing push ups will improve school attendance and stop them hiding cigarettes in their room. As a result, everyone involved ends up looking ridiculous: from the extreme foster parents to the unruly children, who return after a weeklong life lesson to their distressed but doting parents only to continue the chaos, which then makes the viewer feel even more ridiculous for completely wasting their time.

But sometimes the show features the more evangelical side of American parenting, which is how we meet Ohio choir leader and pastor’s wife Cassandra. She’s introduced belting out ‘Amazing Grace’ in her living room on a cheap keyboard, savouring every note with her eyes closed, and we can quickly determine that she’s a fan of the motivational one liner, quips like “teamwork makes the dream work” and so on. She’s more matronly than motherly, adhering to basic house rules that wouldn’t look out of place in a convent. Enter Troy, 17, from Brisbane, who struggles to go two days without alcohol, and Sydney’s Aza, also 17, a pill-popping grunge girl with all the charm of a wet flannel. They only need to survive a week under Cassandra’s roof, but with some clear prompting, Troy can only manage one hour’s work in the church-run soup kitchen before escaping to drink whisky from a Pepsi can, while Aza starts fraternising with Cassandra’s foster son, canoodling in her back garden.

“I’m not holding my hopes too high,” says Troy’s mother through fretful tears, “but hopefully he’ll come back and get a full time job and sort his life out.” She might be expecting slightly too much from just one week of bible bashing, considering that the majority of the week was spent in a drunken stupor, while a reality show like this can only ever scratch at the surface. If we were actually in the business of understanding violent teenage rebellion, I’d be tempting to look more into any underlying family concerns. There doesn’t seem to be any attempt at reconciliation - or even affection - between Troy and his father, whereas Aza’s father isn’t in the picture. And are American households really that more secure and superior to Australia’s, when the US suffers from such alarming rates of teenage drug abuse, gun crime and gang culture? A program like this excels at painting the kids out to be the bad guys, but it is much more complicated than that.

Finding Nebo

It suddenly dawned on me that Toxic Math has so far been neglecting the more traditional travelogue routine in favour of crocodile attacks and the latest from ‘Neighbours’. So we’ll come to an account of Brisbane in a minute (colloquially referred to as ‘Brissy’ or, for reasons I can’t quite understand, ‘Brizvegas’). But first, let’s take a trip up Mount Nebo and feel your ears pop as you steadily climb to an altitude of 550 metres. “Pah! That’s not even half the height of Snowdon”, is what you might be saying. Yes, but it’s only one of many mountains that form the D’Aguilar Range, north of Brisbane, and a fine starting point to survey the incredible scope of the sprawling Queensland capital, which quickly alters from suburban lifestyle to dense, green shrubbery within the blink of an eye.

Nebo’s look out point will give you a rough idea of the lush landscape still only marginally inhabited in the north of the city and the crucial Moreton Bay islands beyond. A prime snogging spot, I reckon, well maintained with amenities like barbeque grills and information plaques, but just isolated enough to service the needs of those seeking a moment of solace and quiet contemplation. Which is why we are here; to feel embalmed in the therapeutic powers of Nature. It just so happens that a team of some six or seven loud Aussies have had the same idea at exactly the same time. They were incongruously led by a Geordie.

I couldn’t quite work out what they were intending to do up there, grouped in their loitering, noisy huddle. But this is dangerous logic, because it brings into question exactly what we were intending to do up there, late on a Tuesday night, when you would rightly think that people have much better things to be doing. You could practically hear my stiff upper lip tighten as they discussed Toyota’s antiskid braking system quite antisocially (or some other car-talk), and most affective driving routes in the way that competitive thirtysomethings tend to do, but all in a way which ignorantly suggested that they hadn’t fully acknowledged - even noticed - the rolling green hills that lay open, wild and enthralling before them. We trundled back down the winding track into Brisbane feeling more blemished than embalmed, as the strange gathering continued guffawing around their parked cars, waiting, I presumed, to see whether Citroen’s hydropneumatic suspension is really all it’s cracked up to be.

From here, Brisbane doesn’t so much as politely introduce itself but rather smashes through your windscreen. Huge, audacious skyscrapers appear spontaneously on the skyline, more than you would rightly assume a population of just under 2 million would have a use for. The picture opposite is the glittering view from the Story Bridge, which crosses a bend in the Brisbane River, taken after having walked its full length of over one kilometre twice in complete bewilderment of knowing how to get off the bloody thing. My girlfriend had to pick me up in the end, questioning whether this was some premeditated punishment for taking her to see The Expendables the night before. I’m sure the steel structure was buckling under the weight of six lanes of constant two way traffic, but on second thoughts, this may have been the delirium taking hold. It was another scorching subtropical afternoon (enough to cause a mild sweat rash) and I have an unforgiving fear of heights.

It’s not the height that scares me, of course, but more the danger of falling from it. Four people died while building this thing, by the way, but mentalists can still sign up for the Story Bridge Adventure Climb at a cost of somewhere around $100. “During the bridge climb you will hear interesting and factual commentary on Brisbane, including history and heritage information of both the city and the bridge.” Like reading a book, then, with the slight inconvenience of being suspended some 74 metres in the air on a sixty year old structure. The idiocy involved here quite baffles me.

This bridge takes you directly into Fortitude Valley, a district which lays claim to Brisbane’s phoney Chinatown district, complete with whimsical tiled fountains and scenes of restless squalor, not to mention licensed sex shops boasting ‘Everything Adult’. This is where a slightly unsteady, barrel-shaped Australian in bare feet and standard-issue ocker hat decides to converse with me at a road crossing. He had already made quite a successful attempt at being drunk before lunchtime. “Fucking Chinese,” he says. “I’m an Australian. This is Australia, isn’t it.” The absence of a question mark here is telling, because this wasn’t asked with the slightly inquisitive tone of most Queenslanders you meet (who, especially the younger girls, tend to go up at the end of every sentence whether asking a question or not), but rather barked as a dogged fact, and not even in my general direction. In hindsight, I don’t think he was addressing me at all, as he was still mumbling expletives as we crossed the road.

And since we’ve accurately stumbled upon casual racism, further down the road (Brunswick Street, to be accurate) is where you’ll mostly find the one corner of Australian society that Toxic Math has so far neglected to mention in his travels - purposely, I should add, in order to fully gleam as much understanding of such a complex, pressing and morally unpalatable issue. I talk, of course, of the sorry figure of the modern day Aborigine.

My first experience in this department was back at the packing sheds of Bundaberg. Kym was our only Aboriginal worker; quiet, yes, but wholly pleasant and unassuming in an environment of similarly unassuming people. “Strange,” said a colleague during smoko, “because the blacks don’t tend to stay here for too long.” It was the ease in which he said it which surprised me. I asked if there was a reason for this but one wasn’t forthcoming, so the sentence has remained with me. I made a mental note there and then to look into this at a later date. Kym’s hard work ethic and the high esteem of which she was clearly held amongst her colleagues proved to be my first impressions of the apparently distorted cohabitation between the Aborigines and the white folks: courteous, yes, but was there something lurking beneath the pretence?

An overwhelming proportion of the Aborigines in Brisbane are of quite a different kind. Even during daylight hours, you can see them in mostly scattered numbers, hunched over grog bottles, listlessly walking or watching from the streets with wild, glaring eyes. Their hostility here is quite palpable but it is rarely active: unlike the street dwellers of England, there are no appeals for hand outs or sympathy. Australians seem to have become so familiar with this sight that life, quite incredibly, goes on around it. On Brunswick Street, tanned Gold Coast blonds conduct market research alongside a drunk Aboriginal couple who sink deeper into the contours of a park bench. You wonder whether this is a reaction borne out of ignorance or helplessness. It’s probably a bit of both.

For a city like Brisbane, which makes no qualms in celebrating its indigenous heritage - in fact, it actively promotes it, as we’ll see in a bit - there is a bizarre sense of double standards going on here which can’t possibly go unnoticed. Here is a city with an almost self-conscious reverence for upholding Aboriginal traditions despite the degradation which is overlooked everyday on its doorstep. It’s important to add here that there are drunk, angry white people out there too, but you don’t need a calculator to work out who is in the minority, further backed by the astounding statistic that in some parts of the country, the average indigenous life expectancy is some 20 years shorter than that of non-indigenous Australians. 20 years! I’ll expand on this in later entries, but for now, there is certainly some truth in Bill Bryson’s perception of the Aborigines as “Australia’s failed people,” in more ways than one.

A prime example of Brisbane’s selective memory can be found at the new Kurilpa Bridge which, according to its placards, crosses the river using the same pathways undertaken by Brisbane’s ancient Aboriginal tribes. According to a very simplified Aboriginal folk tale, the winding Brisbane River was created by a snake whose giant form would shape the surrounding landscape as it traversed across the continent. There is another similar dreamtime legend regarding the uniformly flat Kimberley Plain in Western Australia, which is said to be have been created by the stomping of the kangaroo following an argument with the emu. Despite this, Kurilpa’s architects appear to have based their design on the sailing ships of Brisbane’s colonial past, with an easily identifiable mast-looking structure. And if that wasn’t ironic enough, the word ‘kurilpa’ is an old Aboriginal word used to describe the south Brisbane and West End areas, roughly translated as ‘a place for water rats.’ I’ll leave you to decide who gets the last laugh. 


AU Tube: Understanding Australian TV
‘Election 2010’

The current political trend for hung parliaments is catching on. As I write this on a Sunday morning, Labor have had a terrible election, handing out seats to Coalition occupants who, although almost neck and neck in the polls, have managed a 5% swing against Labor. Gillard made a speech full of sinking determinism, while the robotic Abbott declared his party were “back in business” to a party faithful of moshing drunks. He’ll still need support from the independents to run the country with any form of a majority.

This all followed frantic scenes yesterday across the country as electorates cast their votes for fear of a fine and a potential court hearing. It is compulsory to vote here and the penalties are severe. Because elections are won and lost on television, it makes sense to look at how the TV networks fared on such a tumultuous occasion. Welcome, then, to an election night special on AU Tube.

ABC1: ‘Australia Votes 2010’
The BBC should count themselves lucky: do you remember Jeremy Vine’s virtual Parliament, which placed him right in the holographic centre of a swinging auditorium of blue and red politicians, or Emily Maitlis’ giant iPad? Leigh Sales is a Maitlis protégé who can only manage to point at a basic bar graph on a television screen most likely to be found in a sale at Harvey Norman. Kerry O’Brien, the ABC’s Jeremy Paxman by way of the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz, was on fine form throwing to outside broadcasts while having to subdue some last minute Tally Room campaigning from a pair of Liberal and Labour politicians. At one point, these pundits both answered their telephones live on air, ignoring O’Brien’s questioning in a telling rebuff. But then he does have a tendency to drift into contemplation, and a seemingly complete lack of urgency. “I can’t help but think back to nine months ago,” he says, back when Labour (under Kevin Rudd) were at the top of their popularity. That’s all very well, Kerry, but haven’t they just announced the Melbourne result?

Channel 7: ‘Your Call 2010’
Clearly Channel 7 got the short straw when it came to choosing a name for their election coverage. ‘Your Call’ sounds more like some whimsical ‘X Factor’ results show rather than a general election. Breakfast TV presenters David Koch and Melissa Doyle try to look assertive as a slue of names and percentages cover the screen like an incomprehensible cricket match. All the presenters here look like American estate agents from the 1980s - power suits, open collars and vibrant tans. I noted a slightly worrying moment when Doyle’s confusion got the better of her, asking one of her associates, “So what is actually happening tonight?” But at least Channel 7’s version of Emily Maitlis has a computer generated Parliament to play around with, while Koch successfully condescends the Coalition's youngest ever politician: Wyatt Roy, elected to Parliament at the age of just 20 years old. “Can you sing ‘Baby Baby’?” he asks him, but Roy sticks to protocol and comes out of the exchange looking more like the adult. But, credit where it’s due, Koch saved his best material for when discussing what former tennis player John Alexander will bring to Parliament now he is the new Liberal representative for Bennelong. “A good forehand drive.” Ba-doom. Something tells me he’s not taking this very seriously.

Channel 9: ‘Election 2010: Australia Decides’
I’m not sure I completely agree with Channel 9’s psychedelic courtroom studio, with far too many talking heads clouding the hosts who are perched on an elevated platform gabbling hot air over the bodies of even more reporters in the foreground, who sit facing each other like naughty children. Presenters Karl Stefanovic and Lisa Wilkinson are in the dock, the latter of which is in desperate danger of being overshadowed by her own eyebrows. Wilkinson is clearly unnerved by the thought of a hung parliament, probably because she doesn’t seem completely sure of what it means. “So is all of this actually written in the Constitution?” she asks one of her panel during a more clueless moment. The death of any political career is represented by a ‘Dead Ducks’ graphic where a shotgun appears on screen to blast away their profile pictures, adding to the circus motif which Channel 9 seem to have achieved quite accurately. While TV’s unhealthy Twitter obsession seems to be rampant here, with a designated Twitter Board where off hand comments are treated with much more importance than they’re worth. I thought about Tweeting this observation to them, but then they’d probably only go and read it out, thus somewhat proving my point.

Croc and Roll

There are only two species of crocodile in Australia - freshwater and saltwater - but both will almost certainly kill you, if not make you very late for work. Male salties in north Queensland can grow up to seven metres in length and are regarded as the more volatile of the two species. They have been known to grapple with horses and cattle who stray too close to the water’s edge. If you’re squeamish, you might want to skip this bit: a crocodile’s jaw is made of sharp, overlapping teeth which can close but not chew. So, to put it bluntly, a crocodile can only tear off parts of your anatomy in chunks to make swallowing easier, which is why certain urban tales tell of dismembered body parts found in the tops of trees near the grisly site of crocodile attacks.

The worst story I’ve heard so far concerning a crocodile attack is that of a 34 year old man in 2004 who, while camping in Cape York (located on the very tip of north Queensland), was attacked in his tent by a crocodile just over four metres in length. He was only saved by the quick thinking of a 60 year old woman who not only happened to be sleeping in the same campsite, but also had a shotgun handy to dispose of the croc. Eye witnesses say the woman jumped on the crocodile’s back in an almost Steve Irwin act of cavalier heroism. But the scariest part of the story is that the tent, within which slept “eight adults, several children and a baby” (according to ABC News), was far beyond the vicinity of almost certain crocodile danger. In the frightening words of Mark Read from Queensland Parks and Wildlife Services: “It traversed the beach and came into the campsite,” ready to attack.

There’s a freshwater croc in a makeshift billabong at Underwater World (a giant aquarium in Mooloolaba on the Sunshine Coast), and it’s in a docile mood today. Called Marge (she's pictured above), this freshie doesn’t look like the sort to leap into a tent and cause a spontaneous bloodbath, but the assistant at feeding time still isn’t taking any chances. “We used to have two crocodiles but the other one died,” she tells me, before adding simply, “one’s probably enough.”

You won’t find crocs on the Sunshine Coast, of course, a beautiful stretch of touristy shoreline south of the Coral Sea and incorporating many safe and well maintained beaches. Crocs, especially Marge, have adapted to love the more stagnant waters up north. The concern down here is sharks. Luckily, the ‘Sharks Alive’ part of the Underwater World tour lets you ogle at these creatures from behind 60mm of thick acrylic, allowing the visitor to enjoy the fully immersive views of the inside of a giant fish tank, just like The Deep in Hull. I mention this merely by comparison, because The Deep has one hammerhead shark, whereas this tank (holding 2.5 million litres of water) includes bull sharks, grey nurses, stingrays, large coral fish like red emperor and barramundi and countless other varieties.

The grey nurse shark, by the way, is the one featured in the film Jaws. The grey nurse has suffered a vast decline in numbers following the mass hysteria that Steven Spielberg’s film caused. Recent predictions claim that there are only around 400 grey nurses left in the east coast ocean. The bull shark, we are told, has also been given a bad press, possibly because these intimidating creatures can reach up to 3 metres in length, yet there is a one in 400 million chance of actually being eaten by one. “Most humans who are eaten are spat out,” we are told, which must be quite some relief to the only partially masticated.

One staff member at Underwater World tells us that “it is far more dangerous to drive to the beach than to swim in the sea,” but I’d like to see the figures for this. Firstly, to draw such a conclusion you would need to compare statistics on how many people use Australian roads (just about everybody) as to how many people swim in the sea (only nutcases). Secondly, this claim doesn’t take into account the fact that it is only ever advised to swim in certain areas of the ocean which are well guarded and include all the necessary safety precautions, like lifeguards and shark nets. But even then, the nets can’t protect you from, say, the box jellyfish, which will quite successfully kill you in less than an hour, or indeed a feisty cone fish, or a blue ringed octopus, the venom of which can disable your respiratory muscles within minutes. I’ll take my chances in the car, thank you.

Sharks are extraordinary creatures, though. The bull shark, for instance, prefers to loiter in murky waters at both sunrise and sunset (prime surfing times, apparently), and therefore can’t rely on its limited eye sight to catch its prey. Instead, the shark relies on an electro sensitivity to detect even the slightest muscle movements from up to a mile away. The Great White Shark can trump that, however, detecting one drop of blood in water from distances of up to 5km away, according to the National Geographic website. For $225, you can dive with the sharks in the Oceanarium at Underwater World, or you could just choose to chew your own arms off. A tough call for some, obviously.

On the less murderous side of things, we sit down to enjoy half an hour on Seal Island, where a crackpot duo of highly trained seals flick frisbees to each other and balance beach balls on their cute button noses, all to our baying pleasure. It’s a bizarre circus act which manages to be both glorious and uncomfortable at exactly the same time. This convincing stage show features well timed voiceovers for the two streetwise seals (it is aimed at kids) who hustle with their human captors, unflatteringly called Dingbat and Sharkbait. The premise has us - the guests - visiting an island run by seals where the creatures have been breeding humans in captivity. A bikini-clad “26 year old female” appears on screen. She’s a recent addition that the seals hope will “substantially increase our breeding options.” They continue: “Humans have never been bred in captivity before, but signs are positive with this very friendly girl.” Please. There are children present.

I mentioned my unease earlier to highlight the moralistic concern I have for using animals for entertainment, as we can’t help but compare these images with certain atrocities that we see going on around the world, all under the similarly strained guise of ‘entertainment’. But then again, if we’re going to bring this up, surely the whole idea of glass panelled enclosures is cruel to begin with, and no matter how happy the seals on Seal Island look, surely this is no substitute to the life that they could be leading in their natural habitat? This is, of course, undoubtedly why I can be quite testing company.

Of course, as the seals are only too ready to point out, their natural habitats are continually being threatened by human intervention, whether this be through pollution, littering or over fishing. A new survey of the sea, conducted by the Census of Marine Life, discovered that out of 25 key regions around the world, the Australian and Japanese waters are the most biodiverse on the planet. In Australia, you can find up to 33,000 different species of marine life, and they’re discovering more all the time. Underwater World features an adequate display of the weird and wonderful, with giant Japanese spider crabs (which grow up to four metres in length), rare tropical seahorses, and reef fish of astounding creativity, like the Picasso triggerfish. Judging by the picture above, there are no guesses needed as to how this creature got it’s name.

But threats to the reef are many, from poor water quality which enters from polluted rivers to oil spills, climate change, shipping and cyclones. Yet conservation is strong here, and there seems to be an almost inherent respect for the oceans in Australia and all the many wonders that live within, while a place like Underwater World is a pretty good way to experience but a mere fraction of it. 


AU Tube: Understanding Australian TV
‘Q&A’ (ABC1)

This is the Australian version of ‘Question Time’, chaired by the cuddly Tony Jones who even looks a bit like a younger Dimbleby, but maybe one of the brothers that they don’t talk about very much. There was only one panellist this week, PM Julia Gillard, who remained calm despite a full auditorium of imposing cameras, a revved up audience and the come hither eyes of presenter Jones, asking all the pertinent questions like, “have you ever been called a ranga?” This is an Aussie term used to refer to those with red hair, which Gillard has plenty. It takes roughly 30 minutes until the PM is quizzed on policy, which is obviously quite important, considering there is a federal election here this coming Saturday.

Ah, elections, you can’t beat them. What drama! The one in the UK already seems like a distant memory, when the country binged on Bigotgate, Cleggmania, SamCam and a plethora of other buzzwords, before waking up to find that the party that didn’t win was actually in power. Sigh. It’s enough to make you positively homesick.

Elections played by Aussie rules are just as questionable, it seems, but here we only have two real contenders: Julia Gillard’s fractured Labor party, fresh from hoisting their own leader and their policies along with it, and Tony Abbott’s Liberal-National coalition. Abbott seems to resemble a Terminator, sent from the future to protect Australia’s borders from any darkies that might want to contribute to the local economy. He’s not on the show tonight, unfortunately, his turn comes tomorrow. In his absence, you can’t help but be reminded of Abbott’s recent quote of being “too busy” to take part in another TV electoral debate, despite their obvious significance. If you want to learn anything about how the Australian people view politics and their politicians, then you can take quite a lot from the fact that when the first TV debate between these two leaders took place, it was rescheduled to an earlier timeslot so that it didn’t clash with the ‘MasterChef’ final.

As for policy, I’m finding it a bit rich to hear both parties talk so incessantly about climate change when, for example, Abbott could be found jetting off to three separate locations in one day earlier in the week. Given the vast distances involved, if Gillard actually wins she will surely be offsetting her carbon footprint well into her second term, probably by sitting in a cold room for her first three years in office. Abbott said this regarding climate change: “I fully accept we only have one planet to live on,” thereby flatly refuting any future Liberal policies to colonise another planet.

Gillard is a great speaker, mind, who has developed a simple knack of thanking the questioner, then politely telling them why they’re wrong, before finding room for a slight smile and, if you’re lucky, a gag. “John Howard didn’t know what it was like to be a mother,” she says to claims of her preaching about family values despite not having a family of her own. This accusation has kept Gillard’s PR team working overtime, securing a frightening Woman’s Weekly cover shoot which somehow made the PM look like a former royal horse trainer (evidence pictured opposite). This blatant recasting is textbook spin and may scare rather than secure the family vote.

But at least she’s not saying “moving forward” every five minutes. This was getting infuriating, and reminded me of that episode of ‘The Simpson’s’ where Bob Dole’s body is usurped on the campaign trail by a bemused space alien: “We must move forward, not backward. Upward, not forward, and always twirling,” he garbles from the podium. Gillard looks much more believable when she is less animated. She has admitted to being an atheist, which is refreshing, although has somewhat outdated opinions on gay marriage. She has an affable charm, but whether a vote for Gillard is merely a vote for a scapegoat before the Labor faithful think of someone more user friendly - like the way Kevin Rudd was dumped before her - will surely be enough to plant a slight seed of doubt in the electorate’s mind.

The show makes room for one final dismissive, however, with a question regarding indigenous representation in the Constitution and how Aboriginal issues have so far been ignored on the campaign trail. Gillard answers, as fully as possible, before Tony Jones interrupts to say that they have run out of time. Ouch.

Bushwhacked

Apologies for the delay, but it should be noted that Toxic Math has spent the majority of last week sleeping outside, apart from one night in Brisbane and two nights on a rubbish truck. There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this, of course, but you’d have to read on to find that out.

We’re calling this the ‘dunny shot’ (I can take no credit for this pun, unfortunately, aim your firm handshake towards Alistair Brooks for that gem), taken on 100 acres of scrubby bushland in Clairview, on the cusp of Queensland’s Great Dividing Range. Australians refer to ‘the bush’ as a means of clarifying a limitless, marshy landscape which stretches for an almost inconceivable length of nothingness. Of course, the bush is far from nothing, mostly identified by it’s tall gum trees, harsh, dusty cropland and busy wildlife.

This can be an unforgiving landscape to live amongst, particularly in any form of comfort, and a great deal of careful cultivation and respect for your surroundings is required. The mere notion of owning such a vast acreage of land is almost unthinkable in British terms, but in this area of Queensland, bushland is readily available to anyone brave enough to tackle it, and at an incredibly low cost. This land, for example, was bought for the sterling equivalent of under £20,000. Affordable, yes, but here’s the catch: we’re off a hidden dirt track on the brilliantly named Bruce Highway, roughly 150km from the nearest city, an hour and a half drive away. That’s a long way to go for milk, so welcome to the most sustainable housing environment that you’re ever likely to come across.

Every aspect of this home seems to be harnessed straight from the source, from the trees holding it up to the rain water which is collected from the roof as it trickles from the solar panels, which keeps a caravan and side shack going with reserves of battery power. This house has a carbon footprint the size of an asthmatic ant.

Any food waste is fed to the chooks, while cows dote on the more open fields, keeping the grass in check. Cooking is done by fire: we enjoy hotpots of stew and, on one occasion, a baked scone-like bread called ‘damper’, made from the limited swagman ingredients of flour and water. A private creek provides ample supplies for fishing and crabbing, as the mouth opens up into the Clairview shoreline, but more on this later.

Now back to the dunny shot, a surprise for any townie like myself, whose experience of a swift evacuation has never before involved a bucket of water and a procession of giant ants. Visit in the dark under torchlight and you’ll never know what you’ll find: one particularly tense excursion was accompanied by a rather severe scuttling sound. Just so you know, this is the terrain for the giant huntsman spider, one of which takes a particular shine to our tent on the last night. These arachnids grow to the size of a small plate, and although they do bite, they can’t kill you with quite so much discomfort as, say, the redback spider, which also patrol these grounds. This is a small comfort, obviously.

But it is a great notion to consider how the creatures that inhabit this area have been doing so for some considerable number of years, mostly unhampered, and now side by side with humans who are still finding it tough to fully adapt to the terrain. This is the land of roving wallabies, possums, kangaroos, birdlife too numerous to mention, snakes, dingoes, ants (white ones, green ones, red ones, all in intimidating numbers), and a buzzing population of mosquitoes and sand flies. These blighters don’t seem to bother the locals, of course, but positively feast on and devour any out-of-towners like a mobile buffet. Out of the three Brits here, we’re all currently resembling something out of John Carpenter’s Hellraiser.

I should say that this land belongs to my girlfriend’s parents, which inevitably starts to make this whole escapade sound a bit like a bad Ben Stiller film. There would undoubtedly be a fishing scene, which appears to be an essential activity in bush life. That’s probably because of the teeming varieties of reef fish which wash up to the shoreline and provide a big feed for any lucky angler. Population numbers are strictly controlled and it is illegal to fish anything below a quarantined size and amount, and it’s great to see this law in action, self regulated by the fishermen themselves.

During this scene, we’d catch crabs with wire cages and have to empty our catch due to the weight restrictions. This is where the following slightly disconcerting conversation would take place. “So, er… there wouldn’t be any crocodiles in here, would there?” You’re surveying the green murkiness of the creek water as the tin boat slices through the stillness causing ripples to cross the mangroves. “Oh no, not at all…” A brief but unsettling pause. “Well, actually, yeah, maybe…” Crocodiles have been sighted merely a kilometre south of this creek, but my girlfriend’s father, with a lifetime’s knowledge and appreciation of the landscape which surrounds him, takes a more philosophical approach to any form of impending danger: “Well, when your number’s up...” he says, which is undoubtedly a more positive outlook, but it still won’t stop you from clinging onto the side of the tinnie with gleaming white knuckles.

I should probably mention the jellyfish at this point, which can be found causing a stir amongst those sightseers plucky enough to dip into the ocean at Clairview. That’s where we find this sign, which makes quite a disturbing leap in issuing advice to those unfortunate enough to be stung by one of the jellies’ venomous tentacles. Firstly, “douse the sting with vinegar.” That sounds like good advice, but what if you’re all out of vinegar? Well, you’re clearly buggered, then. “Apply mouth to mouth resuscitation if breathing ceases” is the next bit of advice, bizarrely linked with the first. Blimey.

But what paradise, particularly the derelict sand dunes, private beaches and startling scenery. We sit around a late night camp fire, where the full moon gleams with enough power to rival a light bulb. This is the night where the drink flows and the guitars come out. My girlfriend’s father reaches for his trumpet, blaring out a rendition of ‘God Save The Queen’ causing a piercing intrusion into the quiet of the night, shouting at full volume “thank fuck for the Queen”. Here, here.

It suddenly dawns on us that this is the sort of Australian experience that you don’t tend to read about in guide books. Even many backpackers would struggle to fully involve themselves in the unpredictable, untamed and unrelenting magic of bush life. Queensland is regarded as the real Australia - straw hats and big beards, singlets and fishing, spiders and snakes and so on. So when authors write about discovering the ‘Australian dream’, I reckon that they could do a lot worse than to start their search somewhere around here.

The Splendour in the Grass music festival was great fun, with a line up and audience not too dissimilar to this year’s Reading and Leeds festivals, but in a much more pleasingly non commercial setting. With 35,000 revellers turning up to the hilly confines of Woodford (a new home about 40 miles north of Brisbane, west of the dramatic, sweeping greenery of the Glasshouse Mountains), you would rightfully expect corporations to be all over this like a bad rash. But I can’t even spot a main beer sponsor, and what’s with all these juggling hippies and trapeze artists somersaulting to loud dubstep, shouldn’t they be handing out leaflets explaining how much money I can save if I switched phone tariffs? It’s easy to forget what festivals are supposed to be like. Hopefully Splendour can maintain this organic, charitable, sing-along approach in the wake of big business and its many encroachments.

The camping was different, though, which is where I have to come back to those two nights spent on the back of a rubbish truck. This was the result of a cheap $20 tent, which had taken some liberties in calling itself a ‘two man tent’, when Ronnie Corbett would have struggled to have spent a night there, not to mention the distinct omission of the words ‘waterproof’ on any of its associated literature. You’d think that would be a rather basic prerequisite for any tent, but clearly the notion of being protected from the elements is only reserved for those who don’t want to take the cheaper option. The weather, it has to be said, was unseasonably warm (26 degrees, and they have the cheek to call this winter?), so a piece of tarpaulin strapped over the back of a dumpster truck didn’t seem like too strange an alternative at the time.

There is always the option of sleeping in your car, which, in a major difference to British festivals, are parked within the campsite. This incurs the wrath of some quite intrusive and vigilant security measures, where cars, cases and clothing are continually turned upside down and inside out to confiscate enough drink and drugs to stage a Motley Crew reunion. It’s not a nice feeling to be constantly treated as a shady criminal, and the heavy handedness was most uncalled for.

As for the music, the larger stages are mostly filled with the current crop of electro indie and faux-folk bands that have gathered continual airplay on the Triple J network (which are bravely streaming most of the sets live on air), but with three more established headliners: Ben Harper, who is massive here; The Strokes, enjoying a brief resurgence and still sounding just as important; and Pixies, who were reportedly paid $1 million for their closing Sunday night set. But this was seemingly still not enough to get Kim Deal to show her face on the big screen, which was made particularly evident when it came to her song ‘Gigantic’ with the camera panning up to a seemingly headless woman.

There is a large constituency of British bands making their first, excited sounds in Australia, like Mumford & Sons, who seem to have only been around for five minutes and are already folk champions of the world with their stompy, rootsy banjo-led Americana; a bizarre sound, of course, for a band from London. Florence Welch (and her machine) is still doing her best Wuthering Heights routine and I am quite certain that she will soon start referring to herself in the third person. Her set is a wailing whitewash of theatrics which suits her sound and the large setting. Then there are Foals, who are a post-punk band from Oxford, responsible for the track ‘Spanish Sahara’ on their new album which is probably the best track of the year so far. Foals are great, but whenever I see them live, I get the distinct impression that they don’t want to be there.

As for the best of America (or, more specifically, New York), James Murphy seems to have adapted his awkward front man act into something quite powerful, fronting his LCD Soundsystem with great verve, while Yeasayer are finally enjoying some well-earned fame for being a superbly crafted and talented act. Australian bands feature heavily, which is just as well for bands like, say, The Vines and Wolfmother, who probably wouldn’t be given the time of day anywhere else. Other local heroes include The Temper Trap, Art vs. Science, Midnight Juggernauts and Paul Kelly, but what I’m aching to discuss is Aussie nutball Luke Steele (pictured below), who finally has his Empire of the Sun set down and ready to travel to a circus near you.

I missed it, unfortunately, but have heard pleasing reports of drummers with giant Mohawk haircuts, feathered outfits, costume changes and often-overlooked dance routines. Steele, for those who don’t know, was the former front man of The Sleepy Jackson who declined to tour with his new act until stages up and down the country could tailor to his somewhat over-indulgent needs. His former band mate, Nick Littlemore of Pnau, left the group last year without telling Steele, leaving him to steer the electronic act into new realms of complete madness. Their music is somewhat underwhelming, but their style over substance approach will make them a must see on this year’s festival circuits, in the same way that The Flaming Lips have become essential viewing.

Meanwhile, during the Empire of the Sun and Pixies sets, ex-Verve front man Richard Ashcroft takes to the smaller third stage and gets halfway through his opening song before realising how small his crowd appears to be. He summarily throws a tambourine at the drum kit, screams at his security and storms off stage. Allegedly, his last words were “I’m off to watch the Pixies.” His manager has since said that his shortened set was due to vocal problems. Now that’s a bittersweet symphony. Ba doom.