‘Can’t the National Trust be trusted to take it on?’

‘No. They say there’s too much timber in it. It would cost too much to repair and maintain.’

‘Couldn’t they at least slap a preservation order on it?’

As soon as I said it I realized how naive I sounded. She looked at me as if I were a two-year-old. ‘Preservation orders don’t count for much in Queensland,’ she said.

Well, if she thought that was babyish she’d heard nothing yet. ‘Doesn’t anybody protest?’ I asked.

Looking back on it I can see that it was good of her even to have bothered to reply. But she did. ‘You don’t protest for long in Brisbane,’ she told me.

She had, once. When she was a student. As a consequence of which her car mysteriously went missing one night. When she rang the police to report its theft they said they’d impounded it for being illegally parked; and when she went to collect it she found it wrecked. Not our responsibility, they’d told her. Teach you not to park illegally.

It made her tired, just remembering the event. Creases appeared under her eyes where I hadn’t seen any before. ‘You get to find out what’s going on,’ she said. ‘You get to know once the Special Branch are looking out for you.’

She was not the kind of person you expected to hear such a sentence from. She didn’t look an activist. In any other town she would have been a model citizen. But over-zealous police – assuming she was telling the truth – can rattle the respectability out of anyone. And there was no doubt about the size of the police presence in Brisbane; they were everywhere you looked. Always in groups of three or four, often quite young men, lounging on street corners, privately amused, more trouble than the trouble-makers. It’s my most abiding memory of Brisbane: boy cops hanging around shopping precincts, laughing.

We didn’t fly out of Brisbane, as our ragged spirits might have justified, but hired a comfortable car so that we could take a leisurely look at the Gold Coast and chug down the Pacific Highway to Sydney at whatever speed we fancied.

I found that I liked (liked for other people, that is) the absurd resorts of Surfers Paradise and Burleigh Heads and Coolangatta. Grant the desires and appetites they catered for and they made sense. The way they looked and what they were there for enjoyed a perfect harmony. People wanted to come here to see the sea – very well, they would see the sea. If that meant more and higher skyscrapers than you’d find in the rest of Australia put together, what then? How else was everyone going to get their own triangle of placid blue? Within the limits set by affordability, the Gold Coast was democracy in action. Everybody got a look in.