VERY GC

I’ve recently had cause to view almost all the Gold Coast tourism videos and much of the delightful kitsch memorabilia produced over the past 50 years. I can summarise my pervading impressions simply: A palm tree. A girl in a bikini. A beach. A shining sun. A high-rise apartment building. Together they form a kind of Gold Coast coat of arms, or mandala, a symbol of all the delights the Coast promises. Give or take a few lorikeets, water skiers in formation and cavorting dolphins, the addition of a rollercoaster or racing car or roulette wheel, these simple elements recur over and over again on all manner of Gold Coast souvenirs, accurately depicting the pull of Australia’s “favourite holiday playground.” In all that time, while the marketing imagery may have become slicker, the buildings taller, the bikinis briefer (then fuller again), the essential message has remained the same. Here is a place you can find miles of golden beaches, sunshine, girls in bikinis, “action” of one kind or another to suit your tastes, and modern conveniences. You can swim, surf, sunbake, shop, eat, party and, with any luck at all, get laid a stone’s throw from the beach. It’s a simple formula that successive generations of Gold Coast entrepreneurs have elevated to an art form. It’s a place that has unashamedly sold itself to the rest of the country, and the world, since its very inception.

“Most Australians, regardless of where they live, understand what is meant by the concept of the Gold Coast lifestyle,” points out social demographer Bernard Salt. “And yet neither this concept nor the city itself existed at the mid point of the 20th century.”

A classic postcard produced by Murray Views Publishing in 1958 depicts the allure in a more sophisticated light. Half the postcard is devoted to the typical Surfers beach scene - high-rise, girls, palm tree, sun, beach umbrellas - while the other half shows an elegant couple in evening wear out on the town. The message is clear: we not only have a beach, we have places to go at night. Fancy places. “International” places, is the common adjective in the tourism promos.

It’s curious, then, that the much-vaunted VeryGC campaign, recently unveiled to much fanfare by Gold Coast Tourism to “re-brand” the Gold Coast, should be based upon these very same elements, albeit in a hip, modern, cartoony form. Or maybe it isn’t curious at all. VeryGC is a deceptively clever campaign, stemming from that same school of advertising theory as “Bloody Volvo Drivers.” Very GC, or more commonly “So GC”, was formerly a term of derision, for something unbelievably tacky or garish or ostentatious. Cosmetic surgeons, tanning salons, old blokes in hairpieces and gold chains driving sports cars with much younger girlfriends, mature bottle-blonde dames in hoop earrings and linen resort wear - all Very GC. The ad campaign claims the tag and spins it around, so that it echoes with something deep in our subconscious but turns it to its own purposes.

But these days, the tourism marketeers and ad-men aren’t the only ones singing the Gold Coast’s praises. Serious academics now study the Gold Coast as a social, architectural and economic phenomenon. Art galleries stage exhibitions of kitsch tourist trinkets. Learned urban planners now spring to the Gold Coast’s defence, as a perfect manifestation of its inhabitants’ desires.
“While seen by many outside the city as superficial, its themed environments and fantastic urban expression is the heritage of the Gold Coast,” write Richard Allom and Tory Jones, in their urban planning paper, “A nice place to visit - celebrating the superficial and planning for permanence at the Gold Coast.” Those who dismiss the Coast as an ill-planned concrete jungle might be surprised by their findings. “These include recognition that the Gold Coast is not only different from other Australian cities in its urban expression and that its holiday culture is perfectly reflected in that form, but that its residents (as well as its visitors) choose that lifestyle and embrace that difference . . . The rejection of the Gold Coast by serious planners and purveyors of taste is cultural snobbery and urban chauvinism.”

Urban heritage writer Colin Symes puts it neatly: “It is a city where the spurious has been turned into an art form, and urban design subjected to the principles of the theme park. This should be celebrated as the quintessence of the Gold Coast.”

Is it perhaps time, then, that we looked at the Gold Coast anew? Is it just possible that it might pose a pleasant holiday option for more than families on the theme park circuit and schoolies bent on post-exam oblivion?

MYTH-CONCEPTION

There are two pervasive Gold Coast mythologies. One is the sustained tourism campaigning, the hard sell, extolling the virtues of an attraction-packed holiday paradise for families and singles, schoolies and retirees alike. It’s our Miami, or Vegas by the beach. Our Rio de Janeiro or Riviera. The kind of pleasure-filled pressure valve every modern nation needs.

The other is the seamy, seedy underbelly, portrayed convincingly in Chris Nyst’s film Gettin’ Square, the AFI-award-winning rendering of the Coast’s colourful criminal world. “A sunny place for shady people”, is the common refrain. Piggybacking this portrayal is the inference that all this ill-planned development has contributed to the moral decay of its inhabitants.

The marketeers go on insisting it’s the former mythology, while its detractors insist it’s the latter. Nowhere else in Australia has so self-consciously and persistently promoted itself, demanded to be seen a certain way, told the rest of the country so ardently, we are this, we are this, we are this, even as the southern critics have bleated: no, no, no, you are that.

And no place name in Australia is as emotionally loaded, carries with it such colourful stereotypes and inspires such extreme views as the Gold Coast. Don’t believe me? Try this simple test: put the name of any of our major cities in front of the label “businessman” or “beauty student” or “property developer,” then try it with “Gold Coast” in front of them. “Sydney businessman” or “Melbourne property developer” seem fairly neutral tags - but to many, their Gold Coast counterparts immediately arouse suspicion. Underlying these prejudices is the perception that the Gold Coast is somewhere to escape to, when you’ve sullied your reputation, screwed up your career or marriage or business elsewhere in the country. It’s somewhere to reinvent yourself, to claim to be whatever you like, regardless of qualifications - movie producer, model, ironman, actor, personal trainer, entrepreneur - and the Gold Coast will have you. “It’s a place of escape, a refuge from more conventional cities and environments,” writes Colin Symes. “Demarcations between work and play have been abandoned.”
The truth, as usual, lies somewhere between these two myths. The Gold Coast of today is a city of staggering contradictions and mind-boggling diversity. It’s home to both the world’s tallest residential apartment building, Q1, and Australia’s most ambitious, master-planned eco-village in Currumbin Valley. It’s home to more surf clubs, bars, strip joints and nightclubs per capita than anywhere in Australia. Yet it’s also a centre for the renaissance in the healing arts, once you’ve comprehensively wiped yourself out, courtesy of four world-class health retreats nestled in its hinterland forests. It’s our sixth largest and fastest growing city. Yet a recent study found the Gold Coast was more bio-diverse than Kakadu - part of the so-called “Macleay/Macpherson overlap”, where tropical and temperate species coexist at their respective southern and northernmost limits. More than 50 percent of the city is preserved as green open space, while cranes line the foreshore. To many, the Gold Coast seems the perfect home for the suspended-reality TV show Big Brother and the alternative universes of Dreamworld, Movieworld, Seaworld and Wet and Wild. Yet a small hop inland transports you to the natural wonders of the hinterland, with its 50,000 hectares of World Heritage rainforest, waterfalls, rare flora and fauna, 4000-year-old Antarctic beech trees, cosy cottages, wineries and country charm. You can stumble out of a Surfers Paradise nightclub at dawn, past board-riders sprinting to catch the day’s first waves and the most enthusiastic beach walkers in the country.