..are carried away by the northerly wind that bends the trees; the sand is now too hot to walk on in bare feet unless one adopts the hot-foot walk of a Namibian lizard; canvas is cracking in the wind and the horizon has upside down mirages of the container ships queuing to pass through the Heads.
The sky is an infinite beaten blue dome, a featureless radiating surface from which nothing can hide. Action is pointless; one finds shade and pulls the edges of darkness over one like a security blanket only to find it slipping away as the sun drums inexorably across the sky.
Butterflies, desperately dipping and shying away from a sea that never turns to land, flutter forlornly and unwillingly on the wind towards a Tasmania they will never reach. People stand mutely in the water up to their waists keeping cool and doubtlessly urinating at the same time – the slight nearly invisible smile of contentment and the lack of people nearby being the telling indicator. One hopes that sharks might be attracted, but they are probably deterred by the drifting residue of Alcopop, beer, prescription drugs and undesirable suburbs.
New Year’s Eve at Torquay was an exercise in crowd control taken to the ridiculous. The Surf Coast, which stretches from Queenscliff to Lorne, has had a long tradition of unruly summer behaviour which in the 1970’s became full scale riots that required mounted police to suppress the hordes of drunken sweating youth and other aspiring yobbos of all and indeterminate sex. The manic exuberance seems to have migrated with Schoolies to the Gold Coast or other exotic locations where fatalities, sex and muggings can occur further away from parental supervision. New Year has become more gentrified and the local problem is no longer the invading barbarians from the outer fringes of Melbourne, but the locals, in what is now a considerably sized town with a young population.
Bear with me in an exercise in local geography writ small. ‘The Hill’, the traditional focus of New Year’s Eve in Torquay is a grassy slope about four hundred metres long by thirty metres deep facing that slopes down to the sea and the south-east, and stretching between the Surf Club and a car park. It is fronted by the surf beach and backed by a public caravan park/camping ground - where I am now situated. Between the hill and the beach is a stone wall about one and a half metres high, the height depending on the depth of the seasonal sand drifts.
Incidentally, a the back of the caravan park lies Bell Street housing the only pub and adjacent to which is Rudd St, the only thoroughfare dedicated to our family name in Victoria. Yes Xavier Rudd (No Relation) is from these parts.
As the years have passed the crowd containment has become more severe. The caravan park has been segregated off by high mesh fences with gates that were shut before midnight, eventually locking in the campers into their own zone and sometimes separating families from their children. Arc lights were set up to illuminate the masses so that the any anti-social acts occurred in the equivalent of full sunlight. No longer could my gracefully aging wife be propositioned by someone sixty years her junior in the comforting shadows.
Police were soon to be accompanied by Security Guards with no necks and even less sense of humour. The crowds became thinner, somewhat quieter but not yet intimidated. The fireworks, both official and unofficial sputtered, soared and banged at midnight and people mumbled the few words they knew of ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Despite the prohibition about ‘Drinking In Public Places’ the largely underage crowd seemed reasonably well insulated against any Southerly changes dropping the temperature down thirty degrees in a s many minutes.
But this year the ‘Powers that Be’ finally cracked it. The entirety of ‘The Hill’ was enclosed by a three metre high fence. ‘The Hill’ resembled bore an uncanny resemblance to a concentration camp, like Nauru or Christmas Island (which we know aren’t really concentration camps).You could get in one end and out the other of the enclosure but you could no longer get onto the beach. All around were enormous signs stating ‘No Glass’, ’No Drinking in Public Places ‘, and the ominous ‘New Laws Apply’, an exercise in New Speak worthy of any Orwellian dystopia. There were even more Klieg lights, and way before time the armed security teams turned up, the fat on their necks rolling over their collars, their faces impassive and their aspect twitchy. Everyone was safe.
The masterstroke was to have the New Year’s Eve fireworks two and a half hours before midnight, with the sunset still a pale line on the horizon; they were quite nice but obviously not too much money was lavished. The party was over before it began, but it was a party to which hardly anybody came. Whereas in previous years ‘The Hill’ had been a seething, wriggling mass of largely well-behaved youngsters - the invisible collective subtext susurration of “I am having a good time, really I am having a good time” rising in thought balloons above the crowd. But this year there weren’t enough masses to huddle. Just an alienated few that melted into the darkness like shadows without bodies.
I wonder where they all went?
Pagan, ancient and modern rituals such as New Year’s Eve, where kids attempt to grow up, is annoying to many adults. Like politicians, who believe that having a free education has served its purpose in educating them and thus should not be available to subsequent generations, we find it difficult to make space for kids to grow up misbehaving in a not too outrageous manner. Or a manner that impinges upon our own comfort
I don’t profess to know what the answer is - I actually have always found New Year’s Eve a pain – but I am sure that creating apartheid against teenagers isn’t the answer. A fair proportion of us were obnoxious pricks once but one eventually grows out of it. Freedom is a responsibility but you can’t expect to appreciate it if you never know what it is. Even vicariously at New Year’s Eve.