AUSTRALIA 1975. 6 A Whitsunday Island

Apologies for the colour of the photographs. Most of my Lindeman photographs have turned a nasty shade of orange which unfortunately gives you no idea of what the place really looked like.

A few days later Helen and I returned to the YWCA to find a message waiting for us from the office of the Whitsunday Islands. Lindeman Island had two vacancies, one for a housemaid and one for a waitress. Their plane was coming over to Mackay the next day and could fetch us.
    It was perfect. It was the news we’d been waiting for. I’d been losing heart, but now my dream was coming true.
 
Before I left London, Bella’s younger brother Charlie who lived in the same house as Bella and me, said to me ‘Don’t go to Australia with any intentions. Just go.’
    That was the best advice that anyone had given me, and up until then I’d followed it to the letter. I'd run from London, my only intention to get as far away as possible, and since I'd arrived in Australia, I'd taken each day as it came.
    Now, I had high expectations and of course they were not fulfilled.
    There was nothing on the island but the hotel and its airstrip. The hotel itself was slightly crummy and old-fashioned with a foul brown carpet in the lounge and no concession to its fabulous position right on a beach – no doors or terraces, just windows. It wasn’t the Mediterranean.

Lindeman - a small green sub-tropical island with a hotel, an airstrip and a jetty

Up until then it had been family owned but it had recently been taken over by P&O who were refurbishing it. The place swarmed with loud builders in stubbies and boots. We had to stagger over planks to get from the kitchen to the dining-room with our trays.
    The weather, far from being tropical, was like an English summer’s day. A light breeze. Sun and cloud. Warm without being hot.
    It was low season and I only had to work 4 days a week so I took to exploring the island on foot. I found Coconut Beach with its backing of palm trees about half an hour away from the hotel and began to work on my tan. One of the workmen took me by boat to deserted Plantation Beach the other side of the island and I fell in love – with the beach.
    I started to traipse there whenever I could, through groves of trees festooned with snakes like creepers, past mangrove swamps. I lay on the beach all day with my bikini top off, soaking up the sun and the heat that was increasing. After three and a half years in London, I couldn't get enough of them. The water was  turning such a glorious deep jewel-like turquoise that I wanted to be the sea, but I couldn't go in it because the shallows were thick with stingrays.

    Each time I said goodbye to the beach and climbed the path back to the hotel I grieved.
    A party of advertising people arrived to film and I made some friends. I cried when they departed. Who was there left for me on the island?
    I was pleased to be crying however. I wasn’t used to letting my feelings out. Except for the occasional panic, I been more or less numb since I’d arrived in Australia. I was proud of the way I’d let myself cry. It was new to me to feel and yet be separate.
    Jayne arrived to join the small band of waitresses. Since she was English, I took her under my wing and, while I showed her how to make the breakfast fruit juice by sprinkling orange powder into a bucket of water and stirring, we got chatting.
    Like Helen, she was old – 28. She came from Birmingham. She was married to an Australian, Alan, and they were saving to build themselves a house. Alan was a musician and was to play the electric organ in the bar every night. Jayne and Alan were living in a caravan near the airfield and would travel down to the hotel and back by motorbike every day. They had a Yorkshire terrier called Doobie after Alan’s favourite band, the Doobie Brothers.

Jayne and Alan (at a later 1920s-themed party)

Doobie

I decided to take the law into my own hands and have my meals sitting on some steps that led from the staff dining-room to the beach. Why fester inside? Jayne joined me, and then Alan, and then Steve the boatman whom Alan had teamed up with. I had some friends! (Helen had by now disappeared into the ranks of the housemaids where she was comfortable. Anyway, I think she found me rather annoying.)

    ‘Are you happy here?’ one of the guests asked me.
    ‘It’s OK,’ I answered, and then I had a revelation.
    I was happy. I just hadn’t realised it.

    At Wilpena I'd had moments of happiness, but here it seemed as if something fundamental had suddenly changed inside me. Parts had slotted into place. I was a new person.
    It was my turn to go out in the boat for the day and look after the guests. I’d not done that before. As I walked across the beach to the jetty, the world had come alive. It had turned from black and white to colour, from two dimensions to three. It was paradise.
 
 
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