A Little Further North

The long awaited (?) fourth instalment of my less than dramatic memoirs has emerged.

1.  I Was a Teenage Scullery Maid

2.  Have You Moved Your Bowels Today Mr Brown?

3.  Tom Selleck and I

Last time I memoired (Over a year ago now. Crikey! Where does the time go?) I'd reached the point where I was in my late twenties, working on personnel duties at the Immigration Department in Brisbane, Queensland's charming capital city in what we call The Southeast of the state.  Brisbane was once the largest geographic municipality in the Southern Hemisphere* but over the decades bits of it broke off to form satellite cities that were administratively separate and so it lost that honour. Then other further-away bits grew larger, becoming closer bits and now we have several cities stretching from the New South Wales border up to the northern tip of the Sunshine Coast all merging in on each other to form the large population centre that is The Southeast. Those of us in the bordering cities, like me here in Redcliffe, usually insist we don't live in Brisbane as it's so much more interesting to be living 'in the country', yes? This changes when anyone mentions what a lovely city it is, because then, in order to share the glory, we quickly point out that really we're an outer suburb of Brisbane for all practical purposes and these district boundaries are purely arbitrary of course.

* Things (bridges, dance halls, trees, pineapple factories etc) that were declared the longest, best, tallest or biggest in the Southern Hemisphere were rampant in Orstralia during the middle of last century and we basked in our apparent superiority over the Amazons, Tranvaalians and the penguins of the Antarctic. These days, not so much...

Anyway, there I was at the turn of the nineties, a hip urban spinster, freely childless, paid well enough to indulge in the luxury of living alone in my hip inner city pad, enjoying a pleasant long term relationship with a perfectly wonderful chappy, my thirties were still a mild squint away on the horizon, and the world appeared to be at my large sturdy feet. So, I was genetically incapable of not doing something to screw it up, right?

Actually I guess I was bored out of my skull in many respects. My job, though socially fulfilling, even fun at times and certainly easier than scrubbing bedpans, was becoming a drag.  My best friend, and major partner in hip urban spinstering, had moved away to her tree-change life so I was only seeing her occasionally.  My other best friend and part time hip urban spinster had married and moved south so I was seeing her not at all.  And hip urban spinstering, I can assure you, is something best done in the company of other hip urban spinsters, otherwise it's called being a whore.  The perfectly wonderful chappy remained perfectly wonderful but there were some differences arising between us in relation to our goals in life.  That is, he had some and I couldn't see the point in them.

My choices for a radical change were fairly limited in that I was qualified to do nothing and had no cash reserves to go anywhere. So, what does someone in that position do? Well, if a truely spoiled government worker we stay in the same line of work, but in a different Department in a different city and permit the new Department to pay all our moving expenses. But even with this ideal option there was the limiting factor that the kind of work I did, though common to all Departments, was only available in the other state's capital cities (Sydney - too big and scary, Melbourne - too big and weird, Adelaide - ha! don't make me laugh, Perth and Hobart - too far away) or in that most hated of places: Canberra, the nation's dreaded capital. I'd been there a few times over the years for training courses or for short term placements and as a visitor I'd enjoyed the fine restaurants, beautiful parklands and wonderful Autumn colours that I'd not experienced up here in the sub-tropics. But the thought of permanently living in the Antarctic Circle didn't appeal to me.

(No, it's not really located in the Antarctic Circle, it is merely very very cold there in the winter so I used hyperbole. Or lying perhaps. Call it what you will, the place is tundral.)

What helped me affect my escape, without the need for snow-boots, was a wonderful thing called Decentralisation. This is a bureaucratic tool used to provide services locally and thereby supposedly in a more economical fashion. What it really is defies explanation because inevitably ten years after Decentralisation, a further bureaucratic tool called Centralisation will be introduced in order to provide services centrally and thereby in a more economical fashion. (The fact that both these resource-saving changes cost squillions of dollars to enact each time they happen seems to be lost on the idiots who cyclically plan them.)  Anyway, the Department of Social Security, where I'd started my public sector career some years earlier, had by then opened a decentralised personnel unit up in Townsville in North Queensland. North = Not Cold in my part of the world. Unlike the Dakotas for example.

Townsville is a moderately large city on the tropical coast that has three population groups. The army (all imported folk), the public sector (largely imports like I was to become) and the locals. I had in fact been born there mumble mumble years earlier even though my family were Brisbanites. My old man had been a shop steward for the Electrical Trades Union and at that moment in history he had dragged his heavily pregnant wife and their already existing munchkins up to the remote tropics so he could do whatever it was he did to recruit and service the local members. (One could say he'd been temporarily decentralised in fact.) My being born in Townsville therefore was an accident of post-war socialism. The family returned south to Brisbane while I was still an infant so I had no memories of the place and throughout my life Townsville, that mysterious town named on my birth certificate, had evoked feelings of great intrigue and romance in me. My mother had hated her time there and just about anyone you asked would confirm it was a blisteringly hot dust-bowl overrun with young army jerks and basically a haemorrhoid on the arsehole of the planet. And that all sounded pretty frikkin fantastic compared to Canberra.

So when a suitable vacancy arose I applied, won the job and negotiated a starting date.  Charitably hurling my winter woollies in the direction of the nearest Sallies bin, I sent my big stuff on ahead with the removalists then packed up the car. With Dextar Wan Kanobi comfortably yowling from his cage on the back seat and with Perfectly Wonderful Chappy to accompany me and share the driving (See? There I was doing a runner on him, virtually thumbing my nose at any future for our relationship and he still wanted to be helpful and sweet. He really was quite perfectly wonderful.) I hit the open road for the two day drive north where the rest of my life was waiting to start.