Buddhas and Bikinis - Vetbook

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Buddhas and Bikinis 8
When Hiroshi first asked me about my childhood, the first thing that came to my
mind was my sister Maria at Mission Beach.
It wasn’t easy for me to confess to Hiroshi that the only female who held a special
place in my heart was my own sister.
Mission Beach in North Queensland was an aboriginal mission until a cyclone
struck the coastal community in 1918. The superintendent of the mission at the time, Mr.
Kennedy, was killed, along with his daughter.
Following his death, the Queensland Government resettled the aboriginal
community to Palm Island, really just a euphemism for a penal colony, situated 100
kilometres to the south.
The local aborigines, now addicted to opium and alcohol through the benevolent
generosity of European settlers, grew rebellious over land-rights, and with the only
effective peace-maker gone, riots were common.
Palm Island was an ideal solution for the aboriginal unrest situated as it was on a
tropical island forty kilometres off the coast. As well as eliminating the black problem, it
allowed mainland traders to continue selling their opium, tobacco and alcohol to the
islanders from their modern cargo ships in exchange for cheap labour and prostitutes.
Palm Island would grow into one of the largest aboriginal communities in Australia,
with the unenviable reputation of having ninety percent unemployment, the highest rate of
youth suicide in the world, an average life expectancy of forty years, and a listing in the
1999 Guinness Book of Records as the most violent place on earth.
Since the relocation of the aborigines, Mission Beach had evolved into a sleepy
coastal community of mostly AngloSaxon farmers, who enjoyed a leisurely middle-class
tropical lifestyle, where their families could flourish economically, grow and eventually