Here & Now 182: Travellin’ bone

Fingal Head. Saturday, 11.10am

Sometimes you just need to go adventurin’. You get itchy feet.

(These days, though, most adventuring is not by foot, so the ‘itchy feet’ idiom is probably inappropriate. Most adventuring is by car or plane, but I guess having an ‘itchy bum’ just isn’t going to cut it as suitable phraseology for restlessness.)

I’ve not been adventurin’ for ages. A few years ago, I got a job I like. But I still get itchy feet. And I have discovered something: Leading a quiet, hard-working life costs way more than roaming across the Earth as if it is your star-given home and you have every right to wander around it, knowing the universe will provide.

A long working day (five hours) demands recompense – such as a bottle of something special you can’t get from Aldi. Or a bigger screen on which to watch other people’s adventures. (Don’t worry, Bear! The TV crew will save you!)

In comparison, travelling is cheap.

Travellers don’t have to maintain a car so they can drive to work. Travellers don’t have to buy new batteries for their solar system (big TVs suck the power), new albums for their vinyl collection, organic wakame for their homemade miso soup, or take a loan for their root canal.

No, travellers have an El Cheapo flight ticket in their smartphone and a million Vietnamese dong ($50) taped to their stomach ready for a week of motorcycle taxis and beef noodle soup. They happily sleep sans telly, listening to ring tones from the street. And a root canal in Hanoi is cheaper than a kilogram of Australian wakame.

Anyway, I’m strolling along Fingal Beach. My job means that I must go to the Gold Coast occasionally. (Look, other aspects of my job are really good.) I always stop at Fingal. It’s like the last outpost before I cross the border into Whackyland. I usually have a swim, or, if I see multiple shark fins, I take my shoes off and walk the beach before having coffee at the Sheoak Cafe.

The hot sand under my feet aggravates the itch. I’ve really got that ol’ travellin’ bone. Apostrophes and wanderlust hang about me like the many caper white butterflies that have flown in from the Great Divide.

I daydream of the two-wheeled escapades I’ve had in Asia, the wine-glass sunsets of Italy, the sunflower gambols of Provence. I wonder when I’ll go adventurin’ again. Not today. I’ll just have coffee and continue north.

But I don’t go for coffee. And I don’t decide to sell my shack to buy a ticket to Bhutan. No. I do something more radical. Like the monk who keeps on raking the garden upon his enlightenment, I keep on walking along the beach.

When the beach runs out, I’m in foreign territory. I follow a track which wends up the headland to a little lighthouse, standing alone among the pandanus. Built in 1872. I touch it and smile. A sea eagles’s shadow flits over me.

I didn’t buy a ticket on Webjet. I just kept on walking.

Another track leads away from the lighthouse, heading east. Where does it go?

This is exciting. This is adventurin’.

On the edge of the headland I stand, looking out to Cook Island which lies about half a kilometre offshore. Below me a funnel of water surges and froths bewteen the headland and a spur of huge hexagonal basalt columns. Where I stand is also made of these columns. They formed when Wollumbin blew its top and the hot lava hit the sea right here.

The local people, the Goodjingburra clan, called this area Booninybah (Home of the Giant Echidna). These columns are spines. Thousands of years later, Europeans named this place Fingal after a Irish giant, who created the Giants Causeway of Northern Ireland, also of columnar basalt.

I sit on the headland watching butterflies and sea eagles, thinking of giant echidnas and giant Irish.

Adventurin’ is a state of mind, not a travel brochure.

I let my eyes skip over to Cook Island, just so I can turn to admire where I am now.