Silhouetted against the view from the Q1 Building, Surfers’ Paradise, from the 77th floor to be exact – is one of my sisters, who lives nearby at Nerang. Her transport department job gives her an intimate working knowledge of routes through the area and people-moving problems, and there’s no better place from which to view the region than up this tallest building on the coast, probably Queensland. It’s amazing how widespread and important waterway development is there, where to be able to say ‘water frontage’ adds value to any property. And looking south to Tweed Heads in the far distance is just this ongoing coastal development strip. Looking in the opposite direction it is the same – up to well past Brisbane. Despite the very mild, ie for Queensland ‘cold’ weather, there were people swimming and surfing, like the tiniest ants below us as we gazed down… a cluster of people with blue and yellow surfboards are way down on the sand below, indicated surfing school was ‘in’ that day.

For some reason the toilet facilities were further up on the 78th floor, and naturally I had to go try them out. No bathrooms with a view, though you could actually access an outside verandah area and enjoy the rather cold wind whistling by.

Our next move was lunch and then to a nearby arts centre where we realy enjoyed the movie “Children of The Silk Road” and popped in to see a Brett Whitely exhibition in the same centre – joy oh joy, my favourite, Self Portrait in Studio was there – it was the controversial 1976 Archibald Prize winner – I’ve always thought it very clever, really witty. And actually the self portait part of it was himself to a ‘T’, too. There were several other marvellous paintings and drawings, and a 50 minute doco of BW talking about his work, paintings, drawings and sculptures. What an articulate interesting person he was talking about his own work – we had to watch the whole thing, spellbound, and so left ourselves no time for the sculpture walk outside, but had to leave it for next time.