Once, while I was away, a friend of mine stayed with her partner for a weekend. I came to know when it was high tide, or getting close the register shifted, becoming louder, especially when the surf was big, or the sand settled in such a way so as to expose the rocks at the base of Kirra Point. As I fell asleep each night, and in the morning when I woke, I heard the sea. I didn’t mind the salt, the air that was never quite dry – but I don’t miss its corrosive quality. Most of the year I left the window wide open at night, was lulled to sleep by the sea. In the old building where I lived, there was no air-conditioning, and I wouldn’t have used it if there was. But the apartment was sold, and the new owners wanted to move in, make it their own.įor two-and-a-half years, the ocean was my soundtrack. I ended up living there four times as long as I expected to and part of me wanted to stay. I reasoned that if I thought of myself as a traveller, rather than a potential inhabitant, eight months would seem like a long time. I thought of my years of travel, all the times I had arrived in a place and been struck by that same feeling, an impossible yearning to live there, to be someone else, to live another life. I wanted to stay forever or at least, I wanted to indulge in the feeling that I might stay forever I wanted permanence, without actually committing to it. When I moved there, I thought I would be there for half a year-eight months at most. Even there, in that four-storey building that was more than fifty years old, nothing lasted. Sounds like ocean waves in my ear windows#The chain of my rarely ridden bicycle, stored in the open parking area underneath the hooks and latches that kept the windows from flying open in the northerly winds the original wooden window frames and every herb I attempted to grow except, for some reason, continental parsley. In the time I lived there, so much rusted, withered or wore away. I requested they be replaced when I moved in, but was told that fire safety regulations prevented it. The steel deadlocks on the doors of my rented apartment were sealed fast with rust, unusable. Two years later, an owners group sued the developer, alleging that the building’s protective coating was faulty, leaving it prone to rust in the salt air. Within four years of completion, paint had started to peel off the façade. Its foundations extend to over 40 metres four of those are solid rock. The Q1, 323 metres high and one of the tallest residential buildings in the world, was at the time of its construction praised as an engineering feat. The beaches of the Gold Coast, and in particular Surfers Paradise, the dream city, where hundreds of high-rises now emerge from what was once a narrow sand spit bounded by water on both sides, are prone to erosion, especially during cyclone season. The skyscrapers there were built on sand, on coastal dunes more than 10,000 years in the making, in an ecosystem that is not supposed to be still, an ecosystem that relies on the constant movement of sediment for stability. I thought of this phrase every time I looked up and saw Surfers glimmering like a mirage in the distance. In Helen Garner’s short story ‘Postcards from Surfers’, narrator Nora is driving north from Coolangatta Airport with her parents when a cityscape appears suddenly in the distance: ‘Miles ahead of us, blurred in the milky air, I see a dream city: its cream, its silver, its turquoise towers thrust in a cluster from a distant spit.’Ī dream city. Sometimes, when the air is misty and the sea and sky become one, they appear to float, untethered, hovering above the horizon. On overcast days they pale to a shade of muted blue, on the cusp of invisibility. Fortresses of glass, they gleam and glitter in the morning sunlight, mirrorlike. In the hazy distance, Surfers Paradise, a stretch of towers that pierce the sky and dominate the hinterland beyond. Sounds like ocean waves in my ear series#From there, the coast appears as a series of bays, white-sand beaches that cup the sea, broken only by a series of headlands-Tugun, Currumbin, Jellurgal, Nobby’s Head. Sounds like ocean waves in my ear full#From the balcony I could see the full stretch of the Gold Coast and beyond, all the way to the sandy hills of Mingerribah/North Stradbroke Island. 2įor two and a half years, I lived in an apartment at the top of a hill, overlooking the sea. On a cold winter’s day, it’s a kittiwake’s cry: a pre-emptive nostalgia, a mourning. On a sunny afternoon it’s a dolphin’s giggle: joyful, playful, silly. Beneath the surface, it’s a deep, low warble. When heard from above-standing on the top of a rocky cliff-the sound of the ocean carries upwards, reaching towards your ears. A heavy thud, a thunderous clap, the creep of the encroaching tide. How does the ocean sound? Like the hollowed-out whoosh of a shell cupped to your ear.
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