Next Stop Paradise - Chasing The Queensland Dream
The Age
Saturday February 4, 1995
Each year tens of thousands of Victorians head north to Queensland in search of sunshine, jobs and better lives. Some fulfil their dreams, others lose them altogether. RICHARD YALLOP looks at the realities of life in the land of opportunity. Photographs by Mike Larder.
``Life will be better in our new home." -- from The Master Builder by Henrik Ibsen.
The Dream.
LAST YEAR, 56,000 interstate migrants began a new life in Queensland.
To get there, they crossed the Tweed River. It may not have been the Red Sea, but once they were over the border into south-east Queensland a sign lit up inside their heads saying: ``Welcome to the Promised Land."
The town and street signs confirmed it: there was Surfers Paradise, and Paradise Waters, and Paradise Island. And there was a completely new town of 15,000 people, called Robina, which had risen up from the middle of nowhere, like most of south-east Queensland, and which advertised itself as ``The Living Paradise".
Thirty-five thousand of these migrants were from Victoria. They were of all ages and from all sections of the economic spectrum. They shared the dream that life would be better in south-east Queensland, where the sun always shone.
There was Malcolm Payne, who had made his money in Melbourne in insurance and was now migrating to the paradise lifestyle. He had bought a house overlooking the river at Sanctuary Cove, one of the Gold Coast's most exclusive addresses, and his days comprised golf in the morning, a spa and massage at the country club in the afternoon and a barbecue by the pool in the evening. After a working life, Queensland was the final, delicious icing on the cake.
There were Ross and Lynn Ferguson, who packed up the car in September and drove away from Wangaratta, where Ross had lived most of his 46 years. ``I'd always dreamed of living in Queensland," Lynn says. ``We'd been up on holidays and I knew people here." Ross adds: ``We thought there would be better prospects for the kids."
There was John Nevins, a builder from Drysdale, near Geelong, and his wife Ingrid, who came looking for work after the collapse of the Pyramid Building Society had killed most new house building around Corio Bay. ``It had been our ambition for the last six or seven years to come to Queensland, but we couldn't move while we still had a boy at school," Ingrid says.
And there was the unemployed laborer who drove up with his pregnant wife and two children in their battered Ford Falcon. Their last cent took them to the Salvation Army headquarters in Southport. Once there, they were stranded, with no money, no food, no home and no prospects.
They were looking for more than a dream; they were looking for a miracle.
Developing the Dream.
THE statistics are daunting. Almost half a million people have migrated from the southern states to Queensland since 1980 and most of that growth has been concentrated in the corridor between Brisbane and Tweed Heads, on the New South Wales border. A year ago, at the height of interstate migration, 1000 people a week were coming to live in south-east Queensland. With the improvement in the southern economies, the latest figures show a 15-20 per cent drop in the numbers, but that still leaves 800 people a week entering the area.
They have poured into new housing estates and what once was eucalypt forest and grazing land, fringed by the Pacific Ocean beaches, is now an urban sprawl flanked by coastal high-rise blocks with a few green patches in between. The Queensland Government is projecting that the population of south-east Queensland will more than double over the next 40 years, from 1.85 million in 1991 (or 62 per cent of the total Queensland population) to 3.85 million (or 68 per cent of the state's population) in 2031.
For the past two years, Queensland, with 17 per cent of the Australian population, has had 30 per cent of the new housing starts.
Most of those have been between Brisbane and Tweed Heads. Paradise is bursting at the seams.
Subdivision is spreading like a bushfire. Five years ago, a freelance journalist, Winsor Dobbin, bought three hectares of unspoiled bush land at North Maclean, south-west of Brisbane, in the belief that he was beginning a new rural lifestyle. Five years later, he has a huge new development one kilometre from his front door and his rural lifestyle is disappearing.
``People are disgruntled that instead of having one neighbor, they have 10, because the next-door property has subdivided," he says.
``It's all happening too quickly. The last two years have been extraordinary. It's development totally out of control. The infrastructure isn't there. We're going to end up with a horrifying Los Angeles logjam of traffic if people don't do something about it."
The development horror stories already exist. On the Gold Coast, local lawyer Joe Sciacca was elected to council on a platform of ``controlled development", to try and stop situations like the traffic jams at the two housing estates in his district. The developers only supplied one exit road, so each morning residents had to queue for 15 minutes to get out on to the main road.
Then there was the one involving children attending a primary school next to a eucalypt forest being cleared by developers. The children swore they saw two koalas drop from a tree when it was felled and were then squashed under the bulldozers. The bodies of the koalas were never found, but Councillor Sciacca instituted a new policy that no felling could take place without the supervision of wildlife spotters.
Some people wanted to shut the gates of paradise, but Councillor Sciacca rejects that approach. ``At the end of the day, it's governed by commercial realities," he says. ``Our role is to look after the needs of the people and if there's a need for housing, we'll try and meet it, in a way that doesn't affect the lives of other people."
Selling the Dream.
AT THE heart of this phenomenal housing growth, midway between Brisbane and Tweed Heads, stands Dreamworld, the fantasy theme park.
But the whole region is one giant Dreamworld.
Just down the road from Dreamworld, Kelly Fabri, a 26 year-old Sydneysider, sits in her office on the site of The Cove development on upmarket Hope Island. She is marketing manager for the project for PRD real estate, and the brochure on her desk carries the slogan ``Live The Dream".
Her own life has been something less than a dream since she came up from Sydney with her new husband. They had grown up on Sydney's affluent north shore and decided to head north in search of cheaper housing. With the money they had to spend in Sydney, they would have ended up in the city's less-than- affluent western suburbs.
The reality of south-east Queensland was the struggle to find work.
In Sydney, Kelly had worked in five-star hotels, but now, in common with many other interstate migrants, she turned to real estate.
``Unless you're in hospitality, or real estate, or you're running your own business, you'll find it hard up here," she says. ``Queenslanders look after their own first, because there's so much migration. Many times we nearly went back, because we got so much rejection, but we stuck it out."
In three years Kelly has progressed to the point where she is marketing manager for the Cove development and her husband is a construction foreman. ``We did think life would be better up here," Kelly says. ``We found, generally, people were very materialistic and money-oriented. Everything's dictated by the dollar. When things are good, you've got to grab the dollar while it's there. It's like survival of the fittest; you've got to be really strong-willed to keep going."
Two married friends who came up from Sydney with Kelly did not have such strong wills. They could not find work, the marriage broke up, and the woman returned to Sydney.
The real estate offices in Surfers Paradise are full of former Melburnians now selling the Gold Coast lifestyle. People like Terry Naug, the 28-year-old investment property manager for L. J. Hooker: ``I used to live in Essendon and it took me 15 to 20 minutes to drive to work. Now, I can wake up, go for a swim, have a shower, and walk to work. I own a unit on the beach which is worth $120,000, and you'd be lucky to find a house at the back of Sunshine for that kind of money.
I wouldn't go back. There's nothing there I can't get here."
Living the Dream.
MALCOLM PAYNE and Graeme Powell are living the dream at Sanctuary Cove, the luxury upmarket resort north of Surfers Paradise. The two former Melburnians inhabit a private world of marinas and golf courses and security arrangements strong enough to guard the fortress of a James Bond villain. The houses here range from $300,000 to $1.5 million, and the owners, largely wealthy, self-made men from Australia and overseas, are happy to pay for the peace of mind that electronic security gates bring.
Graeme Powell, whose businesses included a car dealership in Frankston, bought in Sanctuary Cove after his house in Paradise Waters was burgled four times. Malcolm Payne, who had a successful insurance business in Melbourne, bought in Sanctuary Cove after youths hammered their way into a row of 14 cars in Main Beach, where he used to have a unit.
The resort had some problems after it was first developed in the '80s by the late Mike Gore, but it has since been bought by a Japanese bank. This morning it is looking a picture. The sky is blue, the lawns are emerald green and the bougainvillea is bright crimson. We are sitting having morning coffee in the Country Club. Malcolm has driven from his home in the motorised golf buggy that is the standard resort transport. He is coming up to six months in Sanctuary Cove and he describes it as ``an elongated holiday". ``The thing we love is the lifestyle," he says. ``The people are terrific, and the security is unbelievable."
He was freed to leave Melbourne by his two sons leaving home, and losing his seat on the board of the Carlton Football Club. ``I went through some terrible buyer's remorse after buying the thing, wondering whether I'd done the right thing. Now, the hardest part is looking out of the window at the palms and the blue sky and thinking I've got to work."
Graeme Powell likes the life so much that he is upgrading from his present house on the golf course to an $850,000 home overlooking the marina. According to Sanctuary Cove regulars, this is not unusual: the people on the golf course often want to move to the marina, and the people on the water often want to move to the golf course. Perfection always seems to be one home away.
Graeme thinks he's pretty close to finding it: ``Victoria is beaut for starting your business and making your money," he says. ``I wouldn't want to do it the other way round. I lived in Melbourne all my life, and loved it, but when you retire the weather becomes very important. Everyone smiles here. When you go back to Victoria, everyone's cranky."
Ingrid Nevins, who lives with husband John further down the Pacific Highway on the Pacific Pines estate, tells the same story: people in Queensland smile all the time. ``The living is easier here. Everything is laid-back, and if you don't like it, too bad." She is sitting in the display home built by John, but she still dreams of moving into a house on one of the canals.
She worried herself sick about leaving the children behind, but now, 14 months on, she says the move has been a good experience. John's one reservation is the morals of some of the people with whom he's done business, such as the couple who took the copyrighted plan of his display home and got another builder to do the job cheaper. ``If you made a verbal agreement in Melbourne, people would back you up," he says. ``Here, you've got to watch it. There's a lot of shysters."
The houses in Pacific Pines sell for about $175,000. But next door, at Studio Village, you can buy a duplex for close to 100,000. This is the bottom rung on the ladder to paradise. It is low-cost, high- density housing, south-east-Queensland style.
The views here are not of the ocean, but of the traffic roaring past on the Pacific Highway, on the way to Wet 'n Wild and Movie World, or the other Gold Coast attractions. The brick veneers are pressed tight next to each other. The estate was gouged out of the bush five years ago and most of the established trees have been cut down. Its detractors call it ``the ghetto of the future".
There's a childcare centre, for all the young families on the estate, and a group of shops with a real estate office, milk bar, hairdresser, bottle shop and video store. There's little public transport and it's a half-hour walk to Helensvale, the new town across the highway.
A ``For Sale" board stands outside one house and in the garden a middle-aged woman is watering the plants. She wants to live closer to the water, at Burleigh Heads. ``No one talks to anyone else round here," she says. When she bought, there were just two or three other houses and now they stretch almost up to the remaining pines on the brow of the hill. ``They said they wouldn't cut down the trees," the woman says. `You can't believe anyone any more, can you?" Two doors down a New Zealand couple in their 20s, Mark and Brigitte Riley, are renting a three-bedroom house. They and their two young boys emigrated last year from New Plymouth, where there was a lot of wind and rain. They started their Gold Coast dream living in a caravan park and moved into Studio Village four months ago. Mark helps run a local supermarket owned by his father.
``Here, there's more prospects for jobs and better-paid positions," Mark says. ``I like the laid-back style of the coast and I like the Aussie attitude let's have a barbecue and a few drinks."
With only one car, which Mark takes to the supermarket, and without much public transport, Brigitte feels a bit isolated. Mark was quite shocked when he went to a social function recently and was asked, after he'd said he lived in Studio Village, ``What's it like to live in the slums?" Mark says the worst thing is when the local hoons roar up and down the street until the early hours on Friday nights, playing at Formula One. The Rileys lock the front door, shut the windows and hope for the best.
Brigitte looks on the bright side: ``Eventually, there'll be more opportunities for the boys, to give them a start."
Prospects for the children also figured high among Ross and Lynn Ferguson's reasons for leaving Wangaratta and moving to south-east Queensland last September. The family had done a reconnaissance trip in July, to see the cost of housing and the employment prospects, and a month later Ross was offered a job managing a new shoe store in Burleigh West.
``We did it for all the right reasons," Ross says. ``I was very comfortable with 40 years of Aussie Rules and barbecues and friends, and we didn't leave because we were disgruntled. The opportunity had come our way to make a new start. We came up determined to give it a red-hot go and we've got off our backsides and made it happen. We've joined the Surf Life Saving Club and the netball club and the basketball club."
The drop in wages compared to Victoria was one drawback, but Ross says the lifestyle, and the cheaper petrol, help compensate. The family is renting a house on a new estate at Elanora and each day Ross gets up at 4.15am to swim, or cycle, or run, and pursue the active lifestyle. ``We didn't set ourselves any great goals," he says. ``We came up to be happy, and we've done it."
Dream or Nightmare?
WHO DO you turn to for answers on why these people keep moving and searching? Perhaps to Dr Bob Montgomery, former psychological guru of Melbourne talkback radio, now professor of psychology at Bond University on the Gold Coast. His old address was Eltham, where he parked the car under the gums. His new address is Paradise Point, where he parks the boat at the back gate by the canal. On weekends he sails it up the Broadwater, through wildlife territory and the mangroves.
Eighteen months ago, Dr Montgomery was fighting cancer. He came out of the treatment with a new, enhanced sense of purpose. ``Moving here has given me a new lease of life," he says. ``I'd had 13 years of private practice, after setting up the psychology department at La Trobe University in 1981, and it was starting to get a bit repetitious. The one real drawback is leaving behind your circle of friends, though we've decided to install a reception desk for the steady stream of friends and relatives."
Queensland has worked for Dr Montgomery: ``Come home, cook on the barbecue, jump in the pool it's like being on perpetual holiday."
He pondered its psychological impact on people: ``The grass does look greener on the other side, especially when Queensland markets itself so well. People have good memories from holidays, which don't carry the same pain as everyday life. They believe going somewhere with a glossy image is somehow better for them.
``But, go to the caravan parks on a stinking hot day and see what the image is really like. The infrastructure just isn't here; they're frantically building roads and railways. And look at the high rate of psychopathology associated with moving: the marital distress, the family problems, drink and drug problems, stress and anxiety. Women talk about the isolation they feel when they move here."
Dr Montgomery also sees the social pathology inherent in uncontrolled urban sprawl in south-east Queensland, with new estates created out of nothing and in the middle of nowhere, with few community supports. He referred to the psychological phenomenon of ``de-individuation", where human beings are herded together in masses in such a way that they lose their sense of individuality.
``The risk in uncontrolled urban sprawl is that you end up with de- individuated people with no sense of community. The more alienated people feel, the worse behavior you can expect. If they don't plan carefully and with intelligence, they'll end up with urban ghettoes like Los Angeles, with the `haves' inside the fences, and the `have- nots' outside, trying to get in. It's not exclusive to the Gold Coast, but it will happen rapidly there. It has that Wild West, anything-goes feel to it."
This sounded like living the urban nightmare and it's certainly not mentioned in the holiday brochure. Nor does the brochure mention the fact that the Salvation Army's temporary accommodation hostels in Southport are full, as is the Fairhaven detoxification centre for drug and alcohol addicts. The daily number of aid requests at the Southport headquarters has risen in the past 12 months from 50 to 80. This is the other side of paradise.
``Without doing any checking, people get here and think it's all going to happen," says Graeme Rowe, from the Salvation Army's headquarters at Southport. He cited the example of the couple who arrived from Victoria with their children and the Ford Falcon and nothing else: ``They think they will leave all their problems behind them. They are fed up with life down there and they want something better for the kids. They think it will be wonderful in Queensland and they'll start a new life."
Mr Rowe closed the holiday brochure in the couple's minds and opened the Life Survival Guide: ``We told them, `We can't keep propping you up. You've got to want to do the work.' We found them accommodation for three months and they both got part-time jobs."
Even Father Harry Dyer found himself drifting off into the holiday brochure when he moved from the Catholic parish of Springvale North in October 1993 to become director of Rosie's Youth Mission, in Surfers Paradise. His new mission was working in the parish of broken dreams, ministering to the young people who had come to the Gold Coast in the hope of finding glitz and glamor. Instead, many found unemployment, homelessness and drug and alcohol addiction.
``I still can't believe I'm working here," Father Dyer says. ``It's got a holiday brochure image. I feel I should be on the beach, rather than dealing with the cares and traumas.
``There's 101 reasons for coming to Queensland," he says. ``For some, it's escape; for some, it's hoping for more employment. The weather's better and it's seen as a place on the move.
``But it doesn't matter where you live: it still comes down to the nitty gritty of life personal interactions, going to school, getting and finding a job, doing the shopping. If people haven't got that peace and harmony within them, it doesn't matter where they live, it's not going to make much difference."
Each night Father Dyer takes a van down to Cavill Avenue, in the heart of Surfers, to offer tea and comfort to the lonely and despairing. Some local traders attack him for this, saying it helps highlight the problems of youth crime, drug addiction and homelessness. These things, they say, shouldn't be seen to happen in the paradise of south-east Queensland, where people come for a better life.
© 1995 The Age