An End to the Way: Pulp Becomes Classic Down-Under

In Australia, all of which lies south of the Equator, the summer break is between November and February and covers Christmas and New Year. These holidays and the warm weather combine to slow life down. Nothing much happens in Australia in January. Everyone is in a holiday mood. The country parties. In the summer of 1974, when I was nineteen years old, my lover and I went on a vacation. I was on break from university, and my lover had taken leave from his job as a psychiatric nurse. We'd decided we would travel north from our home in Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, to Queensland, one of two Australian states named after Victoria, whose successors still take their place as Australia's constitutional monarch. Victoria's prurient influence looms large in Australia; she was still queen (for another 22 days) when Australia became a nation on January 1, 1901. Since we had the usual family commitments for Christmas, my lover and I proposed to set out for Queensland after New Year's Day. I hadn't been there since I was a young boy, when my family lived in a tropical town just south of the state border. My lover had never been that far north. He had grown up in Wollongong, an industrial city eighty miles south of Sydney. (Sydney, in turn, is about 640 miles south of Brisbane, which is the capital of and the biggest city in Queensland.) Being the age we were, we didn't plan our trip in much detail. We simply bought second-class train seats for Brisbane and traveled north overnight. The train, then and now, takes about seventeen hours to make its way from Sydney's Central to Brisbane's Roma Street station. We had to sit up all the way, since we were in second class. Traveling that way wasn't much fun, we decided as we rested in our dingy Brisbane hotel after our arrival. We spent a day or two in hot, muggy, and rather dull Brisbane; then, again without much thought or reasoning, we booked a train farther north to Cairns. We again booked second-class seats because we saw that the train left Roma Street at 10:00 a.m. and arrived in Cairns at 2:30 p.m. We were so green we didn't realize that the 2:30 p.m. was actually two days after the train left Brisbane, as the distance between Brisbane and Cairns is almost twice that from Sydney. But as we looked once more at our timetable, this became clear to us about half an hour after we left Brisbane. We didn't want to spend two nights sitting up, so we grabbed our bags and alighted from the train at the next stop.