Then north to Clump Point and Bingil Bay, rejoining the highway at El Arish (El Arish?) from where it was a half-hour’s drive to Innisfail. It was at Innisfail, on the junction of the North and the South Johnstone Rivers, that Ros bought for $7 a kilo – call that a bit more than a pound a pound – the prawns of her life; the prawns for which all her existence so far had been merely a preparation; the plumpest, sweetest, tenderest, pinkest prawns that anyone can have ever driven into Cairns at sunset devouring, without bothering even to free them from their shells.

18 Gone Troppo

Eighteen
 
Gone Troppo

‘Well, how do you like it?’ the young man at the petrol pump asked me.

‘It’ was obviously Cairns. I tried to explain that I had only just this minute driven in, but he didn’t have an ear for that sort of prevarication.

‘I’ve been everywhere,’ he went on. ‘Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Townsville – I’ve seen the lot. And you can keep ’em. As far as I’m concerned this has got it all.’

‘Well, it certainly looks good,’ I said, as though there might be some other way of measuring what a town’s got.

‘No worries,’ he said. And when I asked him for a receipt he said it again. Only this time very slowly – ‘No – worries – at – all –’ – because in Cairns there – really – weren’t – any –.

In fact you didn’t have to be in Cairns for much more than a minute to see that Townsville was kidding itself if it thought it could seriously compete. It wasn’t that Cairns was at all beautiful. Or homogenous. If anything it seemed to have less idea how it should develop – whether upwards or outwards, whether for the rich or the not-so-rich, whether for celebrities who were here to catch marlin or for beach-bums who simply wanted to island hop – than Townsville did. But it was spectacularly set and you could not mistake what you were here for. With the rainforests behind you, half-obscured by the mist that appeared to be of their own breathing, you looked outwards to the harbour and the Coral Sea and the Reef itself beyond. And you watched the Reef traffic – the planes, the speed boats, the passenger ferries, the cruisers entertaining party-loads of weekend scuba divers – in perpetual motion, day and night.