Stuck in a northern tropical city, my workday routine became a dream

In this series, My Happy Place, our writers reflect on the holiday destinations in Australia and around the world that they cherish the most.

CLANG! Imagine the sound of a huge steel door slamming shut in a wall around the city of Melbourne. That’s the sound I imagined on hearing the announcement of the fifth COVID-19 pandemic lockdown (of what turned out to be a series of six) in July 2021.

However, for a change, I was situated outside that notional door. I was in Cairns, Queensland, at the end of a week-long travel writing assignment.

Was I going to fly back into the arms of a lockdown in the middle of the southern winter? No way. I quickly phoned Cairns’ YHA hostel, whose manager I knew, and arranged a discounted en suite room for seven nights. Then, having moved my backpack there from the fancy resort room I’d just vacated, I pondered how to structure the coming work week.

This is how it ended up. Each morning I’d leave the hostel and have a leisurely breakfast at one of the cafes on Grafton Street, which tended to cater more for locals than tourists (favouring the Japanese-influenced dishes of local hero Caffeind, especially its excellent miso scrambled eggs). Then I’d slip through the Oceana Walk Arcade past its funky retro record stores and bookshops, walk through Woolworths to buy a sandwich ahead of lunch, then end up at Cairns City Library. This public institution is contained partly within a beautiful 1920s council office building surrounded by a tropical park; and in 2021 its trees were still home to a colony of flying foxes, at sunset a noisy reminder to the passer-by that you weren’t in Kansas any more (so to speak).

I’d work in the library for a few hours via my iPad and portable keyboard, then inevitably in the late afternoon I’d pack up and go for a swim in the nearby Cairns Esplanade Lagoon. This landmark is an artificial (but very pleasant) saltwater swimming pool complete with beach, its edge overlooking the unswimmable mudflats of Trinity Bay.

As an adapted tropical-strength version of my weekly work habits – which in Melbourne involved public libraries but not saltwater lagoons – I did not see how this routine could be bettered, and it made me ponder what living permanently in Cairns might be like. Could I possibly move here? Would this new work schedule inevitably lose its lustre over the months and years? And could I really afford a cooked cafe breakfast every day?

The lockdown soon ended and I flew back south, of course; but it made me wonder what might have been.

For anyone who knows me well, this wistful daydreaming of