Damien Grant
It’s been a few decades since I spent any time in and around Brisbane. Back then I had a small part in the distribution arm of an unregulated pharmaceutical operation. Joh Bjelke-Petersen was the premier and police minister Russ Hinze towered over the state; the head of a metastasising tumour of corruption.
I was not part of management, but I was required to do a lot of travel. Helpfully, my extensive movements throughout the state were unhampered by those manning the thin blue line, I was un-reliably informed, as they had been adequately compensated in advance.
I’ve no idea how true much of what I was told was real and how much was nonsense meant to put my mind at rest. It didn’t pay to ask questions and the rate for driving a battered Toyota from Townsville to the inner suburbs of Melbourne was enough to silence any latent enquiry.
Brisbane, or at least the parts of it that I saw back then, was raucous hedonism. Fast money and cheap glitter were the backdrop to a magical kingdom that my middle-class imagination struggled to absorb. Fortunes were made and people vanished; usually those who asked too many questions.
This week I’m back. With the long-suffering wife and a five-year-old. My old haunts remain unmolested. We are troubling a different sort of magical kingdom. Theme parks. Dear God. Theme parks.
There are many irritating features of travelling
My extensive movements throughout the state were unhampered by those manning the thin blue line as they had been adequately compensated in advance.
newsreader.
Sadly, Queensland seems a far more serious place these days, or it could be I’m just moving in different circles. Either way, I’m now confined to a holiday resort in the suburbs of the Gold Coast, a pleasant walk to the beach, held prisoner by the whims of a five-year-old.
Which given the sanctions for participating in unregulated pharmaceutical operations, probably isn’t a bad result.