It was a beautiful day with clear blue skies and calm sunny weather, and he thought of earlier trips home when he’d looked forward to seeing the long white beaches of the Gold Coast, a place widely known as Australia’s playground. It had been a world class tourist resort, but since the beaches had disappeared behind the now familiar dykes, the tourists had deserted it, yet to Nick it was home and he was eager to see it again.
Over the years high-rise buildings had sprung up on the Gold Coast beach-front like mushrooms in a field after rain; some almost overnight. Each offered increasingly luxurious apartments, the latest one dwarfing its predecessors. People had complained about the shadows over the beach in the afternoons, but Nick thought they were interesting; they looked like fingers pointing the way to the ocean. It was a bustling, colourful, cosmopolitan town, housing people from all parts of the world that had come of age in the early 1980s, when the skyline bristled with dozens of cranes and the town prospered in an unprecedented building boom.
Japanese investment had been high, and as a result visitors from there outnumbered tourists from other countries. Theme parks such as Seaworld, a magnificent marine-park complex lying on the edge of the Broad-water, Dreamworld catering to different tastes and Warner Bros. Movieworld offered children, as well as adults excitement and wonderment. The clean white beaches with sand as fine as table salt, rolling surf, water sports on the Broad-water and many other attractions were abundant, enabling people from all backgrounds choices not found in many holiday destinations.
The collapse of the Asian economy in the early twenty twenties forced the Japanese to withdraw their investments, and the Asian tourists could no longer afford holidays abroad. Then the encroaching sea had signed the final death warrant to the seaside resort.
In 2025 Australia changed rapidly when it was selected by the World Government to house millions of Indian and Chinese evacuees. Ten million Indians were sent to Queensland and fifteen million Chinese to Western Australia. Both Government were forced to contribute to rehousing, and the social welfare of these immigrants, and money was tight since the world crash of the Stock Market in 2020. India was a poor nation at the best of times, because of mismanagement by government officials, and it’s population explosion to three billion. China had continued it’s one child policy managing to keep population growth to a reasonable level, but India had no such policy and had surpassed China’s numbers in 2022, doubling it’s population of 2012.
With insufficient subsidies from these countries, the Australian Government had built substandard satellite cities in rural areas, but the people wanted to be where there were established infrastructures and pleasant surroundings, so many abandoned these satellite towns for the popular urban coastal areas. The result was thousands of ten to fifteen-storey square boxes providing affordable council flats, occupied by a mixture of the Indian and Chinese population. The impact on these cities was devastating, the Gold Coast’s population rose from one million to three over the years from 2025, turning the small city into a metropolis. Many of these immigrants were largely uneducated, unable to speak English and therefore unable to find work, as a result they felt isolated and abandoned by their governments. The Chinese Government had become the power house of the world with a burgeoning economy, so it’s refugees were provided with a better standard of housing and a decent weekly income, whereas the Indians received just enough for their daily existence. Their youth became insolent, and resentful of the Australian and Chinese citizens, taking out their frustration in waves of crime and violence. This pattern was repeated in the larger cities of Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.
Nick thought of those satellite towns and guessed many survivors would find their way to them, and although they were ugly and substandard, at least they would provide a roof over many heads.
Chapter Twenty-three
Landing at Coolangatta Airport was an anticlimax, and a minimum of fuss accompanied their arrival as they pulled into a small hangar away from the main passenger terminals. Their arrival raised little interest, apart from some admiring glances at Wave Rider from a group of people gathered around a nearby Veto. Tall palm trees dotted the perimeter of the terminal and gave it a tropical feel, and the cool colours of the arrival lounge beckoned travellers from the heat outside. It was once a busy place, yet now light aircraft that once squatted on the tarmac watching big jets coming and going, waiting for their chance to sprint off on their charter flights, lay dormant and gathering dust in their hangars.
Nick left the pilots to secure Wave Rider and headed off to the Trancab station. It was a thirty minute journey from the airport to Nick’s apartment in Surfer’s Paradise, and he hoped Marie, the apartment manager, had opened up the place and had it cleaned. His apartment block was one of the few that remained in demand from holidaymakers from nearby Brisbane, and Marie had often urged him to rent it out while he was away. This was something he refused, because the thought of strangers using his things was intolerable. He explained his unexpected visit as business, and reminded her that this was exactly why he refused to rent.
He had ordered the Trancab to take the beach-side route to his apartment, but the scenery that had filled his heart on previous visits now alarmed him more than he liked. You could no longer see the ocean along the entire length of the urbanised spread, or the beaches that long ago fronted family holiday homes. High rise apartment buildings thrust their towers into the sky at varying heights, and at the end of the cross streets where white sand once stretched a wide path to the blue ocean, dykes ten metres high held back the sea.
They had experienced challenges here in the summer season, when the dykes had failed to contain the sea surges brought on by cyclones in the North, when waves crested over them, flooding the streets with foam and damaging some of the grounds and buildings on the edge of the land.
As he rode the lift to his apartment on the twenty-fourth floor in the Contessa Apartments, Nick wondered how this building would stand up to the tsunami. Feeling extremely unsettled and out of his element, because lifts were not his favourite place, he contemplated their demise. Not a lift in town would be operational once the Pacific Ocean rolled in.
He knew little of their construction but it would need to be exceptionally strong to withstand the flood. Maybe it could survive the first wave but there would be several, all of different heights and intensity, usually arriving in intervals of between fifteen minutes and one hour. No-one had any way of knowing how many, just as they could not predict their height. They travelled across vast distances at almost the speed of a plane and history had recorded that the third wave was often the most dangerous.
When Nick entered his apartment, the usual sense of homecoming eluded him. He gazed sadly around the room and at the soft comfortable lounge where he had spent many relaxed hours. Masculine colours of burgundy and deep forest greens provided a perfect foil for his treasures. Several pieces of art inherited from his grandmother, who had died prematurely with cancer before he was born, some of his mother’s craft-work, and pieces collected from exotic places he had visited. A large glass bookcase housed boat books of every kind. When he was not on board Platypus he collected these books to sooth his separation anxiety, and often found himself reading well into the night. His interest was broad, from luxury super yachts to Navy battleships, as long as it floated Nick wanted to read about it.