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the living done in them and how all of it with its great weight depends on one thin hinge, ramshackle and small. Gone like a breath, really, slight and sustaining and fluttering and brief. The feeling is not too far removed from being bereaved.
    The trip is getting interesting.
    Back on the highway, heading up to Noosa, Higgy drives us through Moorooka.
    –D’you remember the advert, boys? We all used to sing it together. D’you remember it?
    And we do, suddenly, and we all three sing it, thirty years on from when we last did, two forty-somethings and one fifty-something now and less fingers and less hair and greyer hair and more scars and tattoos and muscles and height and bones and so much more living done since: 
    Moo- roooooo -ka!
    Magic mile of motors!
    Moo- roooooo -ka!
    Service with a smile!
THEN
    The boy and his family travel to Noosa Head for a day out. On the way there, they pass a giant pineapple by the side of the road and at Noosa the car begins to cough and splutter like an ex army major watching a documentary on glam rock, so it is taken to a mechanic in the town. Watch this kids , the mechanic says, and puts his finger to a spark plug and his tongue on the propped-up bonnet and blue sparks leap between the two. The boy’s father roars with laughter. The boy stares at the fire that dances around the older human. They’re of the same species.
    On the beach called Squeaking Sands, the boy loves the sound the beach makes as he walks on it. His dad explains that all the grains are the same size so they produce a high-pitchednoise when rubbed together. The boy likes this very much. Squeak, squeak. Men can make flame and a seashore can whistle.
NOW
    –Look! There’s that bleedin’ pineapple! Still there!
    And it is; house-high pineapple by the side of the road. Exactly the same. I didn’t know what it indicated in the seventies and I don’t want to know now but I’m happy that it’s still there. Bloody stupid thing and what good is the world without such things?
    –Noosa, says Higgy, who’s driving. –It won’t be like you remember it. Round about the time you boys were last there a mate of mine bought a house for eight thousand dollars and he sold it about ten years ago for ten million.
    We drive over the Blackall Range Mountains, promoted on a map I pick up at a filling station as ‘the Calm Behind the Sunshine Coast’, which I sincerely hope it is, and can believe that it is, observing the seemingly-empty immensity that we pass through. So much space here. I’m knackered, today, very tired, after sleeping badly for three nights; I sleep better on the balcony than I do in the fiendish orchestra of apnoea inside the unit but I’m still woken early every morning by the dawn cacophony. It’s a long drive to Noosa Head and when I get there I don’t find it very exciting; money, beaches, tourists, big houses, usual stuff. Dull, except for the bush turkeys which wattle and scrat everywhere; them, I like. Funny little busy blue birds with velociraptor feet. I buy a take-away coffee from a kiosk on the beach and the guy takes the lid off the cup and shows me the liquid inside:
    –That okay for ya, buddy?
    –Grand, I say, and think: Course it’s okay. It’s black and hot and no doubt tastes of coffee. It’s what I asked for. Why’s he showing me my drink? –Thanks.
    I sit with Higgy on a bench at Laguna Lookout. I came here too, as a child, but don’t remember it. Uncle Higgy, as he once was to me, was also a Ten Pound Pom, landed in Oz in 1974 at age twenty-four. Went back to the UK in ’76 but came back to Oz in ’85, to Melbourne, because his sister lived there. After eight years there, he moved again to Brisbane in 1993, ‘fell in love’ (his words) with the Sunshine Coast in 1994 and has been there, in Mooloolaba, since. He’s been a site manager for 14 years and makes a decent living; his brother, back in Auldum, a civil engineer, makes the same money as Higgy but ‘it goes a lot