Quantas Airlines has never had an accident and is intent on maintaining that record. The pre-flight safety announcements were stern ("each passenger will observe the safety briefing. . . ") and oversize bags were carefully excluded from the cabin. Unlike the U.S., where your typical air traveler carries on a fat briefcase, an overstuffed garment bag, one or two overflowing shopping bags, and an armload of coats and purses, Australians seem to each bring one trim underarm bag, about the size of a toiletry case. (Officially, each passenger may carry on one piece of hand luggage about the size of a lawyer's trial briefcase and one slim garment bag about 5 inches thick when unfolded; or two pieces and no garment bag. And Quantas personnel do screen out bigger bags -- believe me.)
Brisbane was a 90 minute flight from Sydney, in a different state entirely, but we felt perfectly at home -- it was raining. The Gore-Tex jackets and plastic stroller raincover came out again and we set off to explore the city on foot. This turned out to be quite easy as central Brisbane is even smaller than central Sydney. Another reason is because Brisbane seems to have few distinct "sights" for the tourist. We walked east to Fortitude Valley, west back to the city center and Queen Street Mall, south across the river to South Bank, north through Wickham Park to our hotel, and that was that.
It took a few more days of simply living in Brisbane for us to begin to appreciate the city. People were friendly and relaxed. Things were easy to find. The heart of downtown was barely ten minutes stroll away from our quiet neighborhood. The man who ran the restaurant downstairs from our hotel, a young first-generation Australian of Lebanese descent, told me that his family had moved north from Sydney for peace and quiet, eleven years ago, and had never looked back: Sydney had not looked very busy to me, but I could see his point.
We were in Queensland now, he explained, and things were different from the south. There was law and order, and not too many people -- still. As recently as six or seven years ago, you could leave your car parked on the downtown street with the keys in the ignition and the windows down, when car insurance in Sydney was already unaffordable due to the rate of auto theft. I said I had seen no homeless people anywhere. He explained that there were at least thirty homeless sleeping across the street in Wickham and Albert Parks, tidy city parks with meticulously maintained squares of exotic flowers, but they kept out of sight lest the police lock them up. He said Queensland is called the "police state" in other parts of Australia. Every morning a Council van pulled up to the park and served coffee and tea, and meals were provided later in the day as well. In five days and nights walking around in the hotel, I saw one possible vagrant, walking quickly down the sidewalk one midnight.
Our host explained that when he had been a boy, it had been hard to grow up as a dark-skinned, dark-haired child in Australia, dogged with fights, taunting, and racism. Later the target group had been Asian immigrants, whether wealthy Hong Kongers or Vietnamese refugees. In recent years, however, he felt most Australians had come to terms with being a modern, multicultural and many-colored society and all ethnic groups were accepted. It was unclear if this included Aborigines. Many of the non-native Australian who did not seem to consider the Aborigines as, in the words of our restauranter, "a fellow that won't take the hand that's offered to him and pull himself up". Early in our trip I mentioned to one fellow that the only Aborigines I had seen to that point were panhandlers in Kings Cross, and he replied that I had met an "authentic Abo." During our travels in Australia, I also talked to Australians who seemed more accepting of the contemporary Aborigine, but I could not say that they represented the clear majority of the people I spoke with.
One convenient aspect of Brisbane was the compactness of the city center. The Queen Street pedestrian shopping plaza, the main station for local buses, the Transit Center where long-distance buses and trains come, and City Hall are all clustered tightly together just a wide street from the waterfront. The ride to the top of the clock tower at City Hall was free, so I took it. The man running the elevator gave us a short talk during our ascent. The tower was built in the late 1920's at a cost of 1 million pounds, $4.5 million dollars at the time. The clock is the largest in the Southern Hemisphere. The faces were once of local opal, which was replaced by white glass when the opal dried out after forty years in the sun. After falling into disuse, the tower was renovated in 1988. Since then the motors had been overhauled and rewound six times. I asked him how he was, and he said he was not bad, considering how I might like driving this elevator up and down five days a week. The elevator man and I sat at the lower stop and he and I used my palmtop to work out how many times he had driven the elevator on the three minute ride to the top and back. He had been the full-time operator for six months, and the relief man for five years before that. We calculated that he had made the same round trip and given the same talk about 65,000 times. Plus or minus a few thousand. The elevator man half-smiled and shook his head. I left and he headed up to the top level to pick up the passengers waiting there. He looked like he needed a vacation.
Right across the river from the city center was South Bank, a riverfront development of parks, shops, and restaurants that was one of the finest examples of public space I had ever seen. A broad pedestrian and bicycle path along the river fronted a winding series of grassy parks, small playgrounds, curvy footpaths, and a swimming hole with a sandy beach complete with lifeguard tower. A stream, complete with rocky bottom, resident ducks, and groves of trees and streambank plants, flowed the length of the park to the Brisbane art museum. One end of the stream crossed through a carefully constructed morsel of rainforest, closely planted with moist ferns and tall trees. We walked on a wooden footpath zigzagging through the forest and looked down at lizards and fish. At the other end two small boys swam in the water in the company of a mother duck and ducklings. City residents came here to picnic, swim, visit the shops and restaurants discreetly hidden behind the riverfront greenery, or simply to bicycle through on the way home from work. All along the main waterfront path, bright new city ferries cruised up and down the river and on the north bank Brisbane's office workers went about their business in this peaceful, livable city.
It is a little embarassing to admit that the most interesting wildlife we saw was in an indoor exhibit in the South Bank area of Brisbane. We happened on the Gondwana Rainforest Sanctuary while seeking refuge from the rain. An ersatz cave entrance right off from a cafe patio is always hard to resist. I initially thought the whole thing was rather hokey, even with the earnest conservation messages posted everywhere, but eventually the place won me over. It may have been the colorful tropical birds that flew all around the elevated walkway through a simulated rainforest, or the suprisingly active koalas that munched contently on freshly placed gum barely a foot from us, but I think it was Minibus the wombat. Minibus was named after the cause of his mother's demise, and he was only six months old. He played, ate, and slept -- this being daytime, mostly slept -- with a larger wombat, Silver, in a pen with several koalas and a lot of gum branches. His tummy was warm and fuzzy, his shoulder sprouted from his cheeks, and he looked sleepily up at us for a few seconds before snoozing off again, oblivious to our admiration. When we put Minibus down, he woke briefly, went over to Silver, climbed over Silver, was climbed over in return, and they settled down to sleep again. Apparently wombats like to clamber over each other before turning in. Minibus and Silver were about to leave on a vacation, his handler explained, to another property owned by Gondwana, where they would not be on display and would be free to burrow and live naturally. They rotated between vacation and work, spending a month at each.
The person holding Minibus in the photo above is Mark, a young Gondwana "ranger". He explained that wombats are plentiful, and we felt better. The "Endangered Species" placards nailed up all over Gondwana had made us wonder if we were looking at the last two wombats on earth. Koalas are not endangered either, although they are considered "vulnerable". Dogs, development, and, until recently, the fur trade, were a threat to the koala and some variants were scarcer than others. Recently, a fatal veneral disease called Chlamydia was killing many koalas. Nevertheless, the koala population was still fairly strong and Mark thought the conservation ethic had come to Australia in time to preserve the koala and most other native species. The relative lateness of Australia's population boom had something to do with it too. Unlike the U.S., where we spread thickly over the whole country and shot off many species long before wild animals were considered anything but pests or pelts, Australia until not so long ago was a mere ten million people sprinkled over a huge landmass with room for men and beasts. I privately thought that the inoffensive, vegetarian nature of many Australian species had probably helped them survive until now, as well. The Tasmanian Tiger, a peculiar Australian carnivore, had been labeled a threat to livestock and hunted to extinction long ago, just as the North American wolf and grizzly had nearly been.
Exotic birds were so accessible for photographers in Gondwana that I have begun to form a theory: that the fantastically close-up, perfectly framed photos of normally elusive wildlife that you see in magazines are taken from the footpaths in wild animal parks, not by crawling on one's belly in the mud and bush for miles, hoping for a glimpse of a white-crested red-bellied whatever. A $A10 admission fee and a large lens aperture get you close to the birds and crocodiles, effectively hide the bird netting and emergency exit doors in the background of your photos, and allow you to shoot from a comfortable bench, sipping a Diet Coke, and be back at the pub by five.
Traveling on a Budget: We found a modern, clean, air-conditioned motel in a fine area, with private phone, television, balcony, bath, and refrigerator for $A53/night, at the SOHO Motel on Wickham Terrace, rather less than we had paid in Sydney for more modest digs in Kings Cross. However, we also found that for real supermarkets we had to go out into the suburbs: in the central area, the choices were mostly corner convenience shops with high prices and limited selections.
We had decided to carry almost no travelers' checks and instead rely on ATM machines for all our cash. The $2 charge for using a foreign bank would be worth the convenience of not having to compare the rates and commissions of different money exchangers, we thought. This worked fine in Australia, although we had to find machines of the ANZ bank as most others would not accept our U.S. (Plus System) autoteller cards. Fortunately, ANZ branches were easy to find everywhere.
Staying Connected: Compuserve has two local nodes in Brisbane and our hotel phone used a U.S.-standard RJ11 modular jack, so getting online was easy as pie. I even found a suitable scanner to replace the one destroyed in Sydney, and started scanning and uploading images to these Travel Pages. We also learned that for computer and electronic needs in almost any Australian city, the simplest thing to do is skip the Yellow Pages and head straight for the local branch of Harvey Norman's. They sell almost everything, are found almost everywhere, and we could usually get 5% or 10% shaved off the prices just by asking.
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