AUSTRALIA 1975. 8 The Great Barrier Reef

I enjoyed my waitressing work on Lindeman Island. We had no boss. We simply organised ourselves, with the waitresses who’d been there longer teaching those who were newer.

    Lach (pronounced 'Lock') the quiet Scotsman who ran and once owned the hotel never emerged from his office. I only saw him once. The whole place seemed to run itself.

    Lunch was a barbecue and to start with – until Bob lent me some green flip-flops (‘thongs’ in Australian and ‘jandals’ in New Zealandish) - I worked in bare feet. I couldn't imagine that happening in England.
    We washed and dried the cutlery by hand and sometimes Jayne and I would dance round the kitchen, waving the tea towels like veils. Even Jon, the miserable chef, would laugh.

    From the dining-room in the evenings I could watch the flying foxes swarming in to roost in the trees. After supper while I cleared my tables I could hear Alan at the organ or the band which came over from Mackay once a week and played covers of current pop songs. Later in  the evening, we staff did silly dances to the music and cooled off in the pool while the guests looked on enviously.

     Even though many of the guests were illustrious - diplomats, actors, musicians - or just plain rich, we mixed with them and enjoyed the same facilities. We weren't a sub-species as we would have been back in the UK. I loved that. It was how things should be.

    Sometimes however the mixing went further than I could have imagined. I arrived back from a day of mystical daydreaming on Plantation Beach to find the hotel in an uproar. The famous - or infamous - Bay City Rollers had dropped in and one of the housemaids had gone to a beach with one of them and Had Sex. I was shocked. She was so quiet normally. 

  

When I first arrived we wore our own clothes for work but, as the place smartened up and a new dining-room was opened, uniforms were made in a tropically patterned material, with shirts for the men and dresses for the women – short blue ones in the day and long red ones at night.

We waitresses in our new evening dresses. I'm in the middle at the back. Jayne is far right.

 

The barmen in their new shirts. George is on the left with his hand on Helen's shoulder.

 
This was a relief as I only had one summer dress and I was fed up with washing it every night.

Me in my one summer dress and a borrowed cap, shortly after I first realised that I was happy on Lindeman

One day Jane and I hitched a lift in the plane and went to Mackay to buy some clothes. Doobie came with us and tried to squeeze through a small round ventilation hole in the window. Jane grabbed her rear end just in time.

    There was one clothes shop in Lindeman and Jayne and I almost cleaned it out. We bought a bikini - tiny white-and-blue-striped triangles - in two different sizes and swapped over the bits as Jane was bigger on her top than her bottom and I was the other way round. It worked well.

    I'd never spent so much on clothes all at once, but with the heat I needed frequent changes and my savings were building up nicely. Wages were good and my only expenses were in the bar.

    

Jayne and Doobie

Alan borrowed a boat and Jayne, Alan, Doobie and I zoomed over to the uninhabited island. Doobie stood in the prow, her long hair flying in the wind. She looked like a film star and she knew it.

    As we explored the wild terrain Jane said sniffily, ‘If this was Greece there’d be a nice taverna round the corner.’

   Jayne had travelled all over before landing up in Australia and had reached unexplored places like Greece which was not visited by tourists because of ‘The Colonels’ and their military dictatorship. I didn't know what a 'taverna' was, although I could guess.
    The tide went out and to get back we had first to pull the boat through half a mile of shallow water across sharp coral. I cut one of my feet, it became infected and I had to bathe it every night for a week in salt water.

    We were pioneers. We looked after ourselves.
 
At last it was my turn to see the Barrier Reef itself. We travelled by night, with staff sleeping on the deck and guests down below. I didn’t sleep much. It was all too beautiful. The next day we were offloaded on to a plateau covered with water a few inches deep. Again, we had strict instructions not to touch anything, not only because it was protected but also because everything was poisonous, if not deadly.
    I wandered around in borrowed plimsolls, not knowing quite what to do. I looked over the edge of the plateau and the reef fell away to bottomless blue. I thought I saw a shark cruising way down and stepped back hurriedly.
    Some people were snorkelling, but I didn't know how to.
 
Jayne and I wrote and distributed a satirical newsletter which we called ‘Lindeman Stinks’. Bob thought it was funny but Lach was apparently upset. I was upset that he was upset. He was a nice man. Didn’t he realise that ribbing was the way Australians showed affection? The more they liked you, the more they teased you.   
    There was a song doing the rounds. George was the ringleader.
 
    My sister Belinda
    She pissed out the winda . . .
 
Luckily, I can’t remember the rest. I was pleased to be famous.
    I was teased for using words over two syllables which of course with my bookish leanings I often did. Everything was abbreviated in Australian – cozzie (bathing costume), mozzie (mosquito), smoko (work break), arvo (afternoon). It took me a while to understand the lingo.

A rather sad member of staff (the person who lent me the cassette of Scarlatti), a gay barman who didn’t last long on the island, said that I was ‘bubbling over with happiness’. I was. I walked into the laundry room one day with my sweaty sheets and as I bunged them into a machine I thought, it doesn’t matter what I’m doing. Every moment is alive.

 
For some reason Helen and I decided one night to climb to the top of the island.
 

Helen, en route to the top of the island. I think she's down to her underwear. It was very hot by now, even at night.

 
We arrived as dawn was breaking. Green cone-shaped islands, steaming gently in the early morning sun, dotted the ocean all around. It was like the birth of the planet.

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