When I am away from home I find it comforting to look up at the night sky and know that my family and I are all under the same celestial blanket. This was why I stood on a road in Ernabella looking at the blazon of night stars as the desert temperature neared zero. I was with a local teacher and we talked about indigenous and European astronomy. I had read about the astronomy of the Boorong people, but this was quite different. It seemed that perhaps we are not all beneath the same sky after all.

In the space of one week, by serendipity rather than design, I visited both ends of the Australian continuum. My week began under stars in a remote Aboriginal community in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands. It concluded in a high-rise apartment on Gold Coast Highway, Surfers Paradise, where the flamboyant wattage renders stars invisible.

While the two destinations fit into easy dichotomies—desert/coastal; spiritual/hedonistic; poverty/rampant commerce—my experiences of them had unexpected similarities. Continuums are curved. The extreme at one end bends to touch the extreme at the other.

The desert terrain was mesmeric, transfixing. It was an ecology based on the almost total absence of water, with landforms that might be found on the moon. I have visited Aboriginal communities on a few occasions. This Anangu community on the Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands was superficially familiar to my middle-class eyes—the omnipresent dogs, the cars and trucks left lying where they conked out. But it was also different to the other communities, in the way that Aboriginal peoples across the nation are different.

Anangu culture is strong. Being with the residents while they spoke together was a profound reminder of my European status. I talked to whitefellas who have lived and worked in the community for years, who speak the language but accept that they can never truly understand the culture. Being an outsider hoping to know Aboriginal culture is like looking at the night sky: you might learn every star on display, but can never know how they are linked together, never grasp those connections every bit as mysterious as the constellations that lie beyond, present but out of sight.

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I still had red dust on my boots when I arrived in Surfers Paradise. That was a second lunar landing of sorts, and the culture shock was no less profound than it had been in the desert. In the Anangu community, I could not get over the suspicion that I was on a different globe. In Surfers, among my fellow tourists, I could not shake the feeling that I was overseas.

A friend once suggested to me that if the Big Brother household provided the entire gene pool and made everything crude and loud all the time then you would have something like Surfers Paradise. Commerce is triumphant. Flesh, ‘fun’ and the free market are rampant. Tomorrow’s temperature matters; global warming does not. You eat ice cream, look through shops full of foreign-made Australiana souvenirs, marvel at the tans and enhancements of the golden-haired locals.

In the Central Australian community you can buy art and have it shipped to any address, anywhere. You just won’t understand it. In Surfers, I tried and failed to find a post office. Perhaps Australia Post seems too akin to a public sector entity—an affront to the one true path of capitalism. Dozens of shops will sell you a post card, but only a sleuth can find a stamp or a post box. After the initial sale, the transaction is over. Maybe no-one ever writes on the things. Maybe visitors are rendered pre-literate by the primitive attractions of the sun temple.

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After landing at Coolangatta we drove inland to visit relatives, then approached Surfers Paradise from the north. My first view of the city made me laugh aloud—the skyscrapers scraping the sky, a cartoonish rendition of Gotham in pastel and grey. And the glass! It conjured other cityscapes, at other times, glimpsed firsthand or with an artist’s eye, but the applicability to Surfers was tangential rather than direct.

When I first encountered ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, I thought Keats was describing a completely new discovery, the great vivid wash of Chapman’s text splashing across a tabula rasa. Later I learned that he had already read Homer in translations by Pope and Dryden and perhaps others; when he sat up all night with his pal reading the Chapman text, the wild surmising and planetary swimming was due to the (pleasing) variations from the versions he already knew. Keats was not quite twenty-one, but already had enough background information to analyse his reading through the frame of existent knowledge.

So it is today – only more so, with the easy accessibility of information. The surprise for me, given that I live in the suburbs of a city, was that I was more disconcerted in a metropolitan setting (Surfers) than in the desert community. Like many Australians of my generation I have read plenty about the central desert, but little on Surfers. For a place firmly lodged in our national consciousness – ‘a trip to the Gold Coast’ might be the second-greatest Australian dream – it is decidedly underrepresented in our culture.

There are exceptions: Helen Garner, whose eye never fails her, wrote in Postcards from Surfers that ‘… blurred in the milky air, I see a dream city: its cream, its silver, its turquoise towers thrust in a cluster from a distant spot’. Later she records that: ‘In the morning the rising sun hits the front windows and floods the place with a light so intense that the white curtains can hardly net it. Everything is pink and golden.’

Google helps me establish that both John Tranter and Liam Ferney have written poems called ‘Surfers Paradise’. Gig Ryan namechecks it in ‘Loose Red’. John Millett released The People Singers: The Surfers Paradise Poems in 2005. I hadn’t previously come across any of these poems. When songwriter Kev Carmody’s Elly leaves the Diamantina River country and enters prostitution, ‘She gazed up at the tall glass and concrete walls / At Main Street Surfers Paradise.’ Carmody, a long-time outback stockman, nails Surfers not just as the Janus face of the bush but also a site of sin.

I cannot find any other cultural items minted in honour of—or in response to—the great Australian holiday destination. Where are the visual artists intersecting with the glass sarcophagi of Surfers? Where are the songs, the films, the comics? Where are the novels that pull apart the entire Surfers phenomenon and explicate something central to the national consciousness? It seems an odd lack, and something that could be profitably redressed; this is a place of personal resonance for generations of holidaymakers, somewhere as worthy of explication and exploration as, say, Central Australia.

By contrast, the vast red interior is not only part of our national race memory, but also part of our cultural iconography. As has often been noted, it is extraordinary that a nation with such extreme demographic distribution—clinging to the coastal rim like frosting on a glass—should maintain a cultural obsession with the desert. I remember schoolrooms with faded prints of paintings by Albert Namatjira and Tom Roberts and spooky Russell Drysdale. School library books offered bush yarns and impenetrable, unpleasingly elliptical dreamtime stories. As an adolescent I read a dozen or more of Arthur Upfield’s ponderous Bony novels, absorbing knowledge about ‘half-castes’ and the dingo fence and bores identified by number rather than name. I didn’t know about Burleigh or Broadbeach or boardriding.

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Films from Jedda (1955) onwards have gloried in the interior, and several movies from recent years are indispensable for anyone wanting to know about Australia beyond the concerns of coast dwellers. Certainly they inform my response whenever I venture outside my sphere of comfort (roughly bounded by the limits of the Melbourne tram network).

Desert Australia’s modern story is examined in the underrated Dead Heart (1996), which depicts some of the hopelessness experienced by those who try to work on either side of the racial divide. It is hard as flint, tough on all characters regardless of pigmentation. Equally valuable is Ivan Sen’s Beneath Clouds (2002), in which sweeping visuals match the rookie actors’ performances in breadth and impact. The other crucial modern outback film is Welcome to Woop Woop (1997). It is horribly flawed and was derided by critics on release (‘as flat as a kangaroo spread across a highway’, wrote Luke Buckmaster in In Film; and ‘desperately unfunny’ according to Stephen Holden in the New York Times), but the guts of this film—the surreal Woop Woop and its shambolic grotesques—is important and potent. Creator Stephan Elliott’s representation of remoteness is as resonant and valuable as Arthur Boyd’s urban insights in his Brueghel-influenced 1940s phase or his outback meditations in the 1950s. Elliott’s dystopia and its denizens add a layer of valuable discordance to our apprehension of non-coastal Australia.

Woop Woop is a screeching contrast to the ballyhooed Tourism Australia cinema advertisement by Baz Luhrmann. The latter provides a Manichean vision of an Australia where desert sand functions like stardust, where toilers in Manhattan’s dark satanic mills have greed-grime washed away by Kimberley waters, and a whole continent bends to the urgent task of a Stateside sales manager’s self-renewal. It uses an Aboriginal child not as a decorative bauble but as an otherworldly talisman. It pretends Australia is a nation without Surfers Paradise. Apart from any marketing success it might have had, it was culturally worthless because it had no grounding in truth.

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These books and films provide foreknowledge that shapes my vision whenever I step into red dust regions—not powerful enough to obviate the urgency of direct experience, but providing a prism that prevents me completely apprehending new things as ‘new’. In a recent Text, Moya Costello wrote that Murray Bail’s The Pages is ‘set in the same anonymous west of the Blue Mountains [as] Eucalyptus. I barely remember my pre-Bail perception of the bush, so dominated is it now by Bail’s representations …’ For me, travelling to Aboriginal communities in Central Australia involves the (involuntary) recognition of dotted lines between current experience, past memories and cultural antecedents—in this case, most prominently, the films mentioned above plus Peter Goldsworthy’s Three Dog Night and that novel’s odd, lingering character Felix.

It seems to me that the centre of this country is inherently strange. This is its attraction, or part of it. Perhaps if I lived there permanently it would become less strange. Perhaps you have to be born there, part of a people born there for multiple generations, to avoid dislocation, however partial. If you are not part of the land, you are not part of it. You are just a visitor with a head full of cultural way-paving.

And yet it has a place in me. So many attempts to explicate it, from stumble-footed 1970s television documentaries to the contemporary online magic of ‘Us Mob’ (www.usmob.com.au) have guided my response to this geographic, social and emotional frontier country.

But in Surfers Paradise there is no cultural frame. There is no Gold Coast equivalent of Woop Woop unless you count the unintentionally askew Coolangatta Gold (1984). Counter to intuition, I have less cultural guidance in this oppidan agglomeration than I had in the desert. The gaudy verticals are as difficult to explicate as the centre’s insistent horizontal. There are echoes of Jeffrey Smart’s urbanscapes, but an equally apt visual reference point might be the drawings of Escher. In a bad mood, you might consider staging a Kafka adaptation in any of the high-rises—but I was in a good mood. I was somewhere new.

So we trawled slowly along the shopping strips, looking for the middle of the city. Wrong: there is no middle. Real estate commerce dictates that property value is calibrated in linear distance to the beach, not radial distance to a civic hub. Searching for a centre means you are asking the wrong question; being anywhere in Surfers means you are already in the middle of where you want to be. This confidence can easily transmute into arrogance. The proliferation of skyscrapers is architecture as hubris. The notion of constructing teetering towers above sand dunes, oblivious to potential rises in sea level or falls in tourist favour, is breathtaking. Allowing buildings of such design that they obscure the sun for beachgoers during the best portion of the day may seem like vandalism to some, but it is also a feat of derring-do. Conventional laws do not apply. Similarly, the ongoing presence of ‘meter maids’ (shabbily clad and depressing, the two I saw, their thick layer of fake tan insufficient to keep out the cold) is a refusal to accede to the modern world’s understanding of common-sense feminism. Surfers builds its own meaning and as long as tourists arrive, it can keep doing so. This pigheadedness is worthy of wonder, if not of admiration.

You can’t see the stars from Surfers at night. You can’t see the sun from the beach in the afternoon. You can’t see a post office anywhere. There is excellent surf, but most people swim in small hotel pools. A pleasant middle-aged woman stopped us on a street corner and offered $10,000 if we went to the top floor of a nearby building and heard about the apartments they had for sale. She was not the least perturbed when we declined. During the day, tourists are sucked into the suburban hinterland to visit ‘the worlds’—Wet’n’Wild Water World, Dreamworld and so forth. Movie World is the big daddy. We spent a ponderous day there celebrating our heritage through leaden tributes to Lethal Weapon, Shrek and Scooby-Doo. Along with thousands of our fellow revellers we then funnelled back into the heart of Surfers Paradise for food and accommodation, because everywhere in Surfers—as we know—is the heart.

I do not dislike the place. On the contrary, I found its oddness captivating. I just struggled to fit it into a frame, handicapped by the paucity of cultural interpretations that may have assisted me with understanding a place as alien as anywhere on this continent.

With eagle eyes I stared at the Pacific. Silent, upon a peak in Cavill Avenue Mall.

— Michael Winkler