Once upon a time on the Gold Coast: with Can-Do, Diane and Yanni — and the Noosa Church of Satan

“Ah, you possess the passion of the goddess Pele. She is the goddess of fire, lightning, wind and volcanoes. She is the creator of these Hawaiian islands.” Mary flung her arms wide before folding them around her watermelon-shaped bosom. She tilted her head and regarded Cecilia closely. “You are young and pretty. But more than this, smart and kind. You’re passionate like Pele. I know what you must do.”

(Island of Secrets: A Captivating Story of Love, Mystery and Hope by Diane Demetre, Liberal-Democrats candidate for Moncrieff, Luminosity Publishing)

Nestled in the rolling green spaces of the Gold Coast hinterland, in a strip mall between Made With Love Bridal, Sugar Me Baby Hair Removal and Pacifica Trading, the Spaghetti and Jazz Ristorante Italiano and Venue was jumping — with the great and the good.

There were 150 or so of the Gold Coast great and good, sequin dresses and smart blazers crowded into this smallish tratt, polished marble bar, gleaming wooden pillars, dark and mysterious, pink and blue mood lighting playing over the walls, a big, black-shirted, Ray-Banned pianist, with a bass player, giving them “Volare… no wonder my happy heart sings…” and “Can’t take my eyes off you… you’d be like heaven to touch…”

At the door, a small ticket desk and name roll, a tall woman with an enormous plume-mane of red hair in a sapphire-blue, split-leg dress chatting to a bald man with a cutthroat moustache in a burgundy blazer and flashed white cuffs.

“Dress To Impress”, the invite had said, and I’d had a plan to stop the cab at Surfers on the way back from something in Brisbane and grab a 4XL Hawaiian shirt and a white cowboy hat and look, if not impressive, at least fresh and loud.

But everything had run late, and I had to get straight there, so I rocked up to the Gold Coast Lib-Dems campaign launch in a black T-shirt and jeans and looking like a roadie. Maybe I could get away with being “something in crypto”, but one look said nooooooooo.

Southern Lib-Dems meetings are a mix of no-tax comb-over and black T-shirt auto-cannibals. Here it was like a Surfers Paradise Kiwanis dinner dance circa 1967, black sequins and gold lamé, camel slacks and a pipe or two. Nevertheless, they were still very welcoming.

“Good evening, I ham Yanni!” said burgundy jacket, sliding up to me and slapping me on the back. He came up to my shoulder. He looked like a man badly in need of a fez. “This is my wife Diane.” He cast his other arm towards the sapphired, flame-haired woman. “The next member for Moncrieff!” I thought of Yanni: love god, Eurosynth popstar. Then I thought this might be Yanni. It was going to be quite an evening.

Moncrieff is the federal seat at the heart of the Gold Coast, centred on Surfers, and it’s been Coalition property since inception, less a safe hold than party property. Here was where the National Party bagmen came in the ’50s and ’60s to cut deals, when Surfers was a louche nightclub zone run by the “white shoe brigade” of fanatically right-wing developers, a shadowy cabal behind One Nation’s 1998 0-to-11 seat state triumph, and the batty Joh-for-Canberra push of 1987.

They rose, they fell, and Surfers became the Gold Coast, a 600,000-population linear city which needed actual governance. They’re just about all dead now, the white shoe gang, arteries sealed with $200 T-bones and three-olive martinis, yielding their lands to the new Coasters, superannuated AFL centre-half forwards married to former hand-models, surgeons married to cruise-ship dancers, bikini’ed influencers in too deep with coke-running yachties, Jesus For Life venture capitalists, and the floodtide of crackheads and Kiwis who wash up and down Surfers Paradise Boulevard. Where has the libertarian push, the “government-small-enough-to-drown-in-a-bathtub” spirit, gone? 

“Ladies and gentlemen!” a voice rings out as the band stops with a flourish and a spotlight comes up on a lectern. “The next member for Moncrieff, Diane Demetre. But first — our next senator. Put your hands together for… Campbell Newman!”

Oh God.

* * *

The day before, the sun was blasting down on the decking of Pancake Paradise. I was complaining about the coffee (“It’s too good… do you have any filter?”) and trying to get Mayor Tom Tate to return my calls. His photo — heavyset, baby-faced, Thai-Anglo, always becollared-and-tied, preacherman style — was once incessantly in the prints; he doesn’t talk to us much these days.

From the “Beehive”, the council’s vaguely James Bond-ish building on a spit of land just south of Chevron Island, the centre of the coast’s waterways, the Surfers scion — Tate’s dad owned the Islander hotel, whose famous seafood buffet looked like the whole Pacific had washed ashore on silver-service tables — has a near $2 billion budget council to oversee, and more bright ideas for the strip than he knows what to do with.

I’d called because that morning the Gold Coast Bulletin, amid the minor stories — “Alleged bikie’s failed bid for freedom”/”Paris Hilton hot for GC seltzer Hard Fizz”/”Police search for missing Varsity Lakes girl”/”Satanists plan protest” (each of which could be a Netflix series) — was the story that the mayor hoped to refloat Home of the Arts (HOTA), the area’s arts complex, through selling NFTs of its collection and basing a cryptocurrency issue on it.

HOTA dumped a half-million getting a travelling exhibition of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat last year (not yr mama’s Gold Coast; art used to be a postcard of a meter maid), and the mayor believes that NFTing the collection’s art, and featuring digital replicas of other collections, solves both problems:

We are an innovative city and it would ensure our local artists can sell their work and not be poor like Van Gough [sic] — and to me that is quintessential Gold Coast.

Yes, what could possibly go wrong?

This brilliant initiative marks a return to form for Tate, whose flamboyance had been somewhat cowed by the release of the report from “Operation Yabber”, an inquiry into his and others’ spending, and Tate’s other “directions”, under his wide discretionary powers, which included the purchase of three $1400+ leather suitcases over three years, a $5000 donation to Juice 107.3 FM, a $500 selfie stick, and an “imprudent” failure to declare part-ownership of the horse “Go Gold Coast” stabled at the Turf Club, some time after the club was negotiating with the council over filling in a 1950s, artificial-water Black Swan Lake.

The report is a serious and searching document, with only 50 or 60 of such tidbits, ably completed by government investigator AJ MacSporran. MacSporran of the Lagoons. The council reply tells me that its “Lifestyle Chair Cr Hermann Vorster” will be in touch. Which sounds like they’ve put out a hit on me.

I can hear synth music and see in my mind’s eye a man in a hat with a brush in its band fitting a scope to a rifle. ’Twas ever thus.

Modern Surfers/Gold Coast was founded when Chevron Hotel owner Stanley Korman, influenced by Florida resorts and a Torah vision of “the waters”, had channels dredged, islands shored up and created ab nihilo, and then the resorts came. It’s said there are at least four handless, faceless bodies buried beneath those new canals, and Korman almost joined them, bankrupt, moving to the US ahead of the mob’s creditors. Today he’s largely written out of the city’s history, for some reason.

* * *

“As Samantha launches into her new career at the Moulin Rouge, she suspects that the show’s super sexy Italian dancer Tony DiFalco is more than just a creative genius and hard taskmaster… Phillipe LaCroix, a struggling young artist in Montmartre, saves Sam from imploding under the pressure. He introduces her to the City of Love, captivating her with his angelic good looks and sensuous touch. All the while, the mounting attraction between Samantha and Tony intensifies. Yet the show must go on!” 

(Blurb for Teach Me: Steamy Secrets Book Two by Diane Demetre, Luminosity Publishing)

“Look, I’ve been very happy getting back into business. I need politics like a hole in the head!”

Campbell Newman, you old rogue you. Small and bald and neat, in the spotlight before the lectern, the band looking on, the mood lights flashing, waiters with trays of finger food circulating in the dark, Can-Do Newman is doing it for the dinner theatre crowd. “I didn’t want to leave the Liberal Party; my parents were ministers in a Liberal government” (cheers) “the Fraser government” (no cheers) “I was in the army, growing a successful business. I didn’t leave the Liberal Party, the Liberal Party left me!” (Big cheers.)

Couldn’t Do Newman is running for the Senate on the Lib-Dem ticket. It’s another devil’s bargain for the Lib-Dems. Newman’s obviously an actual politician, with a profile, but he’s also very bad at it, and much hated. There’s also the little matter that his program as mayor and then premier — state corporatism and “emergency” repression of liberties for those deemed “bikies” — was more like Mussolini than anyone else.

But here he is telling us how much he doesn’t want to be doing politics while grinding it out in a bistro next to a nail salon in a strip mall. The night before he’d been on Sky’s “mavericks’ debate”, with Crazyman Katter, Clive and Pauline, hosted by Paul Murray. The show was an absolute own goal for Murray, as the panel showed more interest in ripping into the Coalition than Albanese, despite Murray’s pathetic attempts to lead them back to it. But it was also an economically nationalist crowd who cheered the others’ commitment to huge spending. Campbell? “I’m not as keen on privatisation as some of my Lib-Dem colleagues…”

But he had rediscovered his libertarian faith at Spaghetti and Jazz, raging for the big 10% cuts in spending “that we need to make happen”, pulling back the social safety net until it was a little more threadbare, and “making the ABC a subscription service so we’ll see who pays for their ‘excellent’ work”, sarcasm dripping like the heavy meatballs coming round.

The comb-over Lib-Dem stuff doesn’t get much of a reaction, which was surprising until later when, vox-popping, I found there were almost no Liberal-Democrats here. There were hard-right LNP supporters, who are big Newman fans, but have no interest in microparty pfaff, a sprinkling of crazies — “Is there a freedom problem here?” “Oh yes, freemasons.” “Freemasons?” “Everywhere on the Gold Coast. Insidious.” — and Yanni and Diane’s friendship network, and about half a dozen who were just here because something’s on in Robina on a Wednesday night. (“You into politics?” “Not really.” “What about jazz?” “Not really.”)

What gets the biggest response is, as everywhere, anti-vaccine-mandate stuff, and Demetre leans a lot on that too. When she’s at the microphone, magnificent, shimmering, leonine, Campbell looks like a bobble-head version of himself, suction-padded to a dashboard, nods on springs. “Liberty is an intrinsic prerequisite to the human acme of self-flourishing.” Woah, OK, wasn’t expecting that.

Demetre, having left showbiz on a high and low — dancer, then choreographer, at Jupiters Casino, suing a bunch of men there for sexual shakedowns, doing TV and movies, Saturday show stuff, I’m presuming — has now reinvented herself as a motivational speaker and life coach through New Age productions. This is a woman who has lived.

I’d say she’s a woman with secrets, but I suspect most of them have been revealed in her several genre-busting, bodice-ripper novels — Retribution, Island of Secrets, Take Me, Teach Me, Tempt Me, Evil on the High Seas — and for those with insufficient time, possibly a useful summary could be found in Peter Sarstedt’s 1969 hit “Where Do You Go To My Lovely“.

Look, having written, for money, best man’s speeches for someone who’d never met the groom, and book-length, female-oriented erotica (that Black Lace special you took home from the dentist’s waiting room and were saving for wine o’clock? That could be me), I’m not going to slate anyone for grifting it.

And Demetre’s thoughts, some Dalai Lama, some totalitarianism stuff, a bit more on the human flourishing, shows someone who’s thought about these things and come to some honest conclusions — more so, it might be said, than the opportunistic desperados at the Lib-Dem head office — even if her Twitterpinions suggest some confusion about state and freedom (“The appalling attempts to silence [Katherine Deves] show how much the Commonwealth Constitution needs a Free Speech Amendment”). 

Still, viva the last of the white shoe brigade! So long as we can keep them confined to a few Gold Coast bistros, we’re OK (and my God, Bavaria Haus is still going! It’s now Surfers’ oldest restaurant! Why do people want to eat German food, in Surfers Paradise? Why did they ever? Does Hermann Vorster have anything to do with this?)

* * *

The email from the Noosa Church of Satan had come through while I was waiting for Councillor Glenn Tozer at the Film Festival headquarters at QT Hotel. Outside, round the pool, people of all genders were sunning themselves and drinking daiquiris, holding them aloft in the pool.

“Because the council prayer room has been closed to the public, we will not be holding our 10.30 session,” the Satanists’ release read. “We will be having a 2pm protest Saturday at HOTA,” the arts centre, to re-Satanise it, presumably.

Now Glenn, slender, bearded, youngish, in a light suit, is gently berating me for the sort of article he thinks I’m going to write, that I am going to write, about the Gold Coast. He’d asked what I wanted to interview him about, and when I’d sent back a list of reprobates, scandalistes, and famous missing persons, there’d been a few hours’ radio silence.

Glenn’s the real thing, a councillor 10 years, a lover of the immense variety and complexity of the Gold Coast, instrumental in having Tate’s somewhat idiosyncratic reign curbed. He’s a soldier. He knows I’m going to go with the myth, and he came to talk to me anyway.

“All I’m saying is, we’ve got three universities here, one of which is curing malaria. We have more films being made here than anywhere else. There’s 113 parks and reserves just in my district… Why go for the stereotype?” he said, as over his shoulder, out by the cerulean blue, the hotties rotated themselves on the wicker beds like chickens on a rotisserie. 

“Well, I know, Glenn, but the thing is, this morning I was going to a prayer session in a council prayer room, with Satanists.”

“Oh, the Noosa Church of Satan… I mean, they’re Sunshine Coast…” which struck me as an admirably municipal approach to the problem of Evil. Still, it was at that moment I decided not to ask him about handless bodies beneath the canals.

The whole Satanist thing came about some time after Tate unilaterally established a “prayer room” in the council’s offices building, converting an old storage room. This was after Tate’s pastor, Sue Baynes, had been appointed as the council’s “spiritual adviser”, and inconveniently declared that the HOTA arts centre was “demonically possessed”.

Tate threw the room open to the public, and the Satanists — more your pagan, earth-worshipping atheists — were among the first to book it, which threw things into a lather. Tate declared that they would never use it — ‘They’re going to hell, that’s their choice” — and it suddenly became impossible (and probably always was) to have public access. Denied access, the Satanists staged their protest, and the arts centre was once again reconsecrated to darkness, as it should be. 

“I mean, I bet that stuff like that goes on in your average stretch of Melbourne…”

“Glenn, I think it just… doesn’t. On the way here I saw a woman wheeling her two pekinese in a shopping trolley, stop beside the indoor parachuting centre, outside a strip club called Toybox, and feed them with an eyedropper. And that was one of six things I saw in two hours… Seems to me there’s still a space open here, it’s the carny atmos, the transience, there’s still a bit of a free zone…”

He shook my hand hard as he left. Was he wanting to take it off?

“Remember, here, we’re curing malaria…”

I looked it up later. He’s right. It’s pretty extraordinary. Also Gold Coast University has developed a treatment for a form of gonorrhoea that exists only in Surfers Paradise. Town and gown working together. Still no sign of Vorster. 

* * *

They sussed me eventually, dear reader, at Spaghetti and Jazz. They didn’t chuck me out, but they cold-shouldered me. Yanni was particularly distant, very tough to take, if he is actually Yanni. I felt like a bit of a shit to be honest, casting a cold eye. They make an effort, they’re the ones rocking sequins. I think by law everyone should dress like it was 1959, and the music frozen round about there. Also I enjoyed Teach Me more than The Labyrinth (sorry Amanda). From 1959, it’s been downhill since.

So, yes, here’s to the libertarians of Surfers Paradise, slow dancing in a bistro to Goth-tribute Captain & Tennille rocking out “Something Stupid”, because this is the only place that libertarianism makes sense. Here you say, of course, transponder road pricing, so much per km is the go! Of course, card swipe dialysis machines. Of course, ivermectin. Here’s to the folks who dress to impress, make an effort, rock out the sequins and the tassle shoes, the elemental women, shimmering like water, as they burn like flame. Sure, they may be politically incorrect, sure they…

“She’s a widowed city-slicker business woman. He’s an enigmatic Aboriginal elder. Will they find the killer of the outback before it’s too late? When a young Aboriginal girl goes missing under suspicious circumst–“

(Killer in the Outback: A Diana Daniels Mystery by Diane Demetre, Luminosity Publishing)

OK, shut it down. Shut it all down…