Published The Advocate, November 13, 2004

101 COASTAL NIGHTS


UNABLE to sleep, from the dining room window the night turned to morning and the bathroom lights on the hill opposite were being switched on-off, on-off.

The town was rife with gastro.

A sallow face was reflected in the window. I am not a morning person although I have seen more than my share of dawns, and here I was about to start my 100th day as editor of The Advocate. Time flies, huh?

Some fragments:

Everything and everyone here is connected. People have histories and sub-plots that I do not know. They can communicate by eye movement and small shifts in their seats.

People ask where you live and they know the street, the number and who has lived there going back into pre-history.

Looking around for somewhere to stay, I was adamant the place must have a view of Bass Strait. If you live in this part of the world, why waste the spectacle?

And yet, I was told, not long ago a view was worth nothing in real estate terms because everybody had one. Not until the Mainlanders arrived did a view suddenly gain a dollar value.

Overlooking the sea is not as romantic as I had imagined. Once, maybe, in the days of masts and sails, but not now, not when I’m trying to sleep and the industrial noise from the docks travels easily across water and uphill.

The wind is another constant companion if not always a friend, especially not if you are a bike rider.

There were some things I had never experienced in Adelaide.

Petrol was over $1 a litre. People lived in lavender mauve houses, which I thought odd until I saw the same colour on Bass Strait at dusk. There were hardly any dual-flush toilet cisterns. There was no mains gas, either, and something called Pay-As-You-Go Power.

Goats were tethered at the side of the road, with their dinky little alpine huts. Also by the roadside, parked cars were for sale, which I thought was illegal, not to say dangerous.

And there was so much wood smoke around, the horizon was hazy from chimneys and backyard bonfires. Yet there were very few household smoke detectors.

I was surprised to find there were nine councils covering 100,000 over-governed citizens.

Still, people were passionate in their civic pride. The Burnie Civic Centre, a complex beyond economic commonsense and the financial means of ratepayers, is much loved for all that.

I have already upset people. Truck drivers threatened me for suggesting one of them drove recklessly on the Bass Hwy; and I was lambasted on ABC Radio by the West Coast Mayor for daring to suggest it rained a bit at Strahan. Uh-huh.

The rivalries and differences in self-image between Devonport and Burnie can be quite striking.

In each city, The Advocate office provides handwash cream in the staff toilets. In Burnie, the handwash is called ``sea minerals’’; in Devonport, it is called ``milk and honey’’.

That says it all.