The Blues

Quelling the Tears on our Land

On January 11, 2011, in Animals, News, Travel, by Rosie

When you’re from the southern parts of Australia, Queensland is like the jewell in your country’s beautiful, natural crown.

If you’re lucky as a kid, you might go there to visit the Gold Coast or fly up to join in the fun at the theme parks. When you’re older, it’s almost become a right of passage to head on up to the sun and the surf to celebrate graduating from school, or university holidays, or your first holiday without parents. If you become a parent yourself, the Queensland-calling rollercoaster begins again and you’re tempted to take your own offspring to Seaworld or Caloundra or the Daintree.

Then, when you’re old and wrinkly and Melbourne weather frizzles your insides, you jump onboard a cheap flight, cast off the shackles of the Grey Nomad image and holiday in the Sunshine State for up to three months.

Queensland is such an important part of the southern state’s holiday ritual, we reside down under thankful that the Sunshine Coast, Far North QLD and the Gold Coast offer the dream of sand, sun and surf for the price of a domestic fare.

Today, our Sunshine State has been hit by rising flood waters. The devastation is described as extensive, many are missing due to the flash nature of the flooding, some confirmed dead. The capital, Brisbane, is also under threat with rain continuing to put major rivers under constant strain.

It’s during these times we remember how diverse and extreme our great land really is, that we actually experience everything about ‘a sunburnt country,’ a place ‘of drought and flooding rains.’ Time and again we’re shown that although we have all the modern things, the computing technology that’s small enough to embed on your little finger, the radar that can track incoming missiles from the Northern Hemi, machines that could create an Atlantis under our seabeds …

when Mother Nature erupts, we have nothing to match her RAM, gigs, k/sec or her memory.

Queensland is many things to me. It’s the home of my brother and his family. It houses a couple of friends that I met via Livejournal, it’s a place I journeyed to for my first trip without Mum and Dad. (I stayed with my bro. He was such a good influence, lol). It’s the spot where I danced until dawn in all white (including 80s court shoes) only to realize later that I had sat in a Tequila Sunrise drink about 5 hours before and this created a great stain over the back of moi thighs.

It’s a place of great beauty, of extremely important crop growth, nuts, grain, all types of horticulture that requires the warmth of the Tropic of Capricorn.

It’s a state of yellow, bright blues, rich, bottle greens, with beasts and environment as diverse as this country itself. Its people can’t be easily categorized either, although the stereotype lends to the laid-back character, the ocker, the casual. As with all stereotypes, many of our Queensland cousins are none of the forementioned, though they do reside in a place that needs our thoughts for a more moderate, drier tomorrow.

To all our neighbours in the sodden northern state, our thoughts and prayers are with you.