TheBanyanTree: The place and its denizens

[JMoney]

As we were looking up and down for the right luggage carousel a familiar
voice called out, "Over here!"  He startled me.  I hadn't expected him to
meet us because he has no car, very little money and because he'd told us
had a casual job that day.  But the job hadn't panned out and he'd caught a
lift to the airport with a friend whose parents were also coming to the
graduation.  So there he was, barefoot, wearing dark emerald green shorts, a
filmy, purple, hippy style shirt and a great big smile.  That's my boy.

His presence made finding the hotel easy, for which I was grateful.  We
dumped our bags there and walked across the river to a local pub for a beer
and a counter lunch.

Now this river is the actual Ross River of Ross River Fever fame or, rather,
notoriety.  I hadn't known that before and the discovery made me a little
anxious, particularly so after a mosquito bit me on the ankle as we sat
under the veranda facing the pub's beer garden.  Middle of the day and
already I was getting bitten.  But swatting the pest left no blood smear so
I decided to decide that no transfer of any nasty virus could have occurred
even if the wretched thing was carrying one.

I do like old pub beer gardens and a proper pub steak sanger; two slices of
toasted white bread, steak (usually tough) with fried onions and a good
dollop of tomato or barbecue sauce lying on a bed of lettuce, tomato,
beetroot, cucumber and, sometimes, a slice of grilled pineapple.  But modern
times have come even to old pubs at smart addresses in Townsville.  The
bread was thick foccacia sprinkled with mixed herbs.  It was also well
toasted and I just don't have a mouth wide and large enough to
accommodate thick chunks of toasted foccacia without suffering some injury
to my hard palate.  Being ever slow to learn I never find out how big the
chunk can be until it's too late and the damage has been done.  Thank God
that the mucosa of the mouth turns over quickly and, therefore, heals
quickly.

After lunch we reclaimed the hire car.  The idea was to go out to the
university so that the following evening we'd know where to go for the
ceremony, how long it takes to get there and where we might be able to park.

Downtown Townsville is on the water.  There are stiff, cool breezes.  They
do not extend to the university campus which is way out on the edge of the
bush.  We parked the car in blazing sunshine up near the residential
colleges and walked back to the faculty buildings over dusty unpaved verges.

Student administration is in a building that, though built of standard
400x200mm cement blocks, looks remarkably like a small Romanesque castle,
all curves and narrow windows; fortress James Cook U.   I wondered if the
Vice Chancellor's executive officer was at work and whether it would upset
things very much if I were to go and say hello, and how is your
investigation into my son's loss of Austudy assistance going?  Husband and
son together decided that would be a bad thing to do.  With smooth words and
jocularity they coaxed me to keep walking past and away from the building.
I am continually amazed by the way all the males in my family seem to regard
me as a dangerous creature capable of causing terrible harm to whomever I
wish with just a word or a frown.  Maybe all men are afraid of their wives
and mothers.

Eventually we found the large lecture hall.  There were no notices anywhere
in the lobby about the graduation ceremony and I began to wonder whether
this could really be the place where it was all due to happen.  A man with a
JCU shirt came in carrying some papers and deposited them on a table by the
lecture theatre door.  As he was about to leave the building I called out to
him and asked if he knew whether this was where the graduation was to be
held.  "Oh, no," he said.  "There hasn't been a graduation here in years.
It's on at the entertainment centre near the casino."

So we walked back to the car and, on the way, passed through the student
union facilities.  What a dump!  It wouldn't look out of place in a big city
 slum; all narrow, dark and dirty with black steel security bars everywhere
and nowhere to sit but the stairs.  Administration attitudes to students and
their needs were illustrated there in concrete reality.  It was the dungeon
of the fortress, displaced a few metres.

So now I know what the place is like where my son has been studying for the
last five years.  Next time he talks about it I will be able to picture it
accurately in my mind.

Back at the hotel I noticed that my ankles were starting to itch and,
looking down, I saw the signs.  Uh, oh!  Sandfly bites.  Six of them,
blistered, blebbed and haemorrhagic.  They itch for weeks.  To scratch them
is such a pleasure and, in the tropics, such a risk.  If you break the skin
bugs will get in and then you can finish up with an ulcerating sore.  I've
heard of tourists from the south getting septicaemic from the bites they
converted to sores.  No.  With sandfly bites you must exercise restraint
until you can find an ice cube to apply to the itchy spot, or some Lanacane
or, best of all, a dose of Claratyne.

Claratyne is a wonderful drug.  It mops up histamine like a super sponge.
The first time I took it I'd been suffering the itch for a week and expected
to suffer it for another week or two at least.  But next morning it was
gone.  Just gone.  Just like that.

Bad luck for me, the Claratyne was at home.  So I went and bought a tube of
Lanacane.  That anaesthetises the skin for a few hours at a time but does
nothing about the underlying problem of histamine release.  You can watch
the bruising spreading and turning from pink to deep purple.  You can watch
as more and more blebs erupt on the surface of the bruise.  You can watch
the blebs turn to blisters and the blisters getting larger and tenser.  All
this drama from the bite of an insect so small that it looks like a speck of
black dust.

Janice