“Susan” In Australia Luxurious Resort Of Hayman Island

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28921, 15 June 1959, Page 2

“Susan” In Australia Luxurious Resort Of Hayman Island

In my visit to Australia, I had one regret and one disappointment. The regret was that I was too early for the enchanting jacaranda festivals of the Queensland siting, when the blue-bonneted blossoms veil the air with lavender chiffon and cover the earth with a lavender carpet.

Now I must wait until summer, when our own jacaranda, reluctant exile from a sunnier clime, will sprinkle our path with its more sporadic blue. The disappointment was that wherever I was, “The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll” was not, for I would have been intensely interested to see this great play in a real Australian setting, and best of all in Queensland. For although the scene is set in Victoria, it is the sugar cane of Queensland that provides the money, the motive, the symbolism, the romance that in the end is inevitably more bitter than sweet.

Now 1 am the more eager to see it in Auckland, where it is one of many outstanding attractions at our eleventh Festival.

When I called it a great play I did not use the word lightly, for in spite of its superficially sordid circumstances it is valid statement of a clasic theme with a universal application, presenting a vital aspect of human nature rather than a minor sidelight of Australian life. In mind and body, spirit and desire, we grow middle-aged and then we grow old. Our tragedy, the “Doll” shows us, is that we cannot co-ordinate these inevitable changes within ourselves, let alone with the parallel changes in those we love. Emerald Spears

But it I did not find the “Doll” in Queensland, I did at least find 800 and Barney—or at leapt their youthful counterparts, bronzed, virile, humorous, relaxed—and I did drive for many green miles among the springing emerald spears of the sugar cane. From Brisbane I had flown north to the picturesquely ramshackle township of Proserpine, where the bus driver told me that the 5000 residents of the district pocket an annua] cheque of £2 million for sugar alone and spend 6d of it oh paint. The older houses all over Queensland are built high on ’ stilts to beat the heat and the ants, and many a gracious homestead one sees perched up like this, besides many a derelict shack. After about an hour on the

road, crossing and recrossing the tramlines with which the canefields are riddled, we reached the coast at Cannonvale and at a little jetty which the second-to-last cyclone blew into the sea and the last one blew back, we boarded the launch for the twohour crossing to Hayman Island. The Magic Began

That was where the magic began, for there is absolutely nothing at Hayman but the luxurious resort and nature’s wonderland of island, reef and ocean, so it follows that no-one goes to Hayman except to relax and be happy. Even the busy staff work in idyllic surroundings and share the bliss. One of them was a distinguished conchologist, for instance, one of those dedicated enthusiasts who think nothing of diving into a shark-infested pool for a rare shell or coral.

Karl Uetz by name, he gave me a beautiful pink spider shell—“very clean, no stink, no smell, I hef poiled him”—to bring home with me, and asked where I lived “Auckland!” he exclaimed “Ach yes. Mr Powell!” A city to him was just the address of the local authority on shells. One of the chefs. Nick Snyder, a veritable artist in the decoration of banquet foods, as I can testify, is married to a Wellington girl and dreams of building a little Hayman in New Zealand, perhaps in the Bay of Islands. May his dream come true. The head gardener is an authority on hibiscus and had the same rapt light in his eye as he showed me his treasures. Even the man who drives the little candy-striped train down the long jetty across the lagoon and through the verdant tropical gardens to the hotel makes a game of it, almost transporting the young fry to Heaven as well as Hayman by letting them work the controls. There is a State school at Havman Island, with a prettv young teacher and 17 pupils, who sang “the Maori farewell” to me in many different accents besides Australian. The lass who tidied my lodge on the edge of the sea was a trained nurse saving money “on holiday;” and all the waitresses were hostesses, decked in graceful sarongs for festive occasions.

During my stay a big cruise ship called in at our tiny, island bringing 500 extra for lunch—such a tropical feast as I have hever seen before. Even the girls looked good enough to eat. The piece de resistance was a huge Viking ship made entirely of lobsters, but rather more poignant was a little glazed sucking pig. with a lovelorn expression and his sad story written in pink icing down his back: “I lost my heart on Hayman Island.” So did we all. Like a Dream

That evening, just before the shadows fell, Hayman’s genial host, George Milne, and his exquisite wife, Peggy, took me out in the launch to have a sundowner on the cruise ship and later to wave it goodbye as it sailed away down the Whitsunday Passage. This historic waterway was opened up by Captain Cook in 1770 and has been little changed since by the hand of man or time.

Round and round the big 12.000-tonner we circled, tooting our little toot, thrilled like children to get their deep toot in return. until at last she outdistanced us and we Curved away back on the rising tide to Hayman, so quiet and peaceful and all our own again, after the exciting invasion of the day. As I left in my turn, reluctant to don again the trappings of civilisation, even to a hat instead of a frangipani blossom in my hair, an amphibian was unloading a patter of disc jockeys for a recording company’s convention, and the launch arrived with a chatter of glamorous professional models who, with a formidably fashionable female reporter and a conventionally blase male photographer, were to produce a big magazine feature at Hayman.

Besides my beautiful spider shell and many happy memories. I brought home with me one elaborate certificate to say I was a master of aquaplaning, and another to say I had caught a 403-pound fish. My recollections of these feats are modestly dim. but if it comes to that, Hayman itself seems like a dream in retrospect as I shiver on these frosty mornings. And anything can happen in a dream.