Cairns Personified: Skydivers, Bogan Bingo, and Chicken-Suited Bungee Jumpers Im not very adventurous.

I wear earrings to the gym, claims Hayley Brown. Its 8am on Saturday April 20th and she is in Cairns, where people skydive over the Great Barrier Reef. Hayley enters the Skydive Cairns office. She takes four forms from the receptionist and signs them. After clearing Skydive Cairns of liability in case of serious injury or death, Hayley watches a tutorial video. A red light will come on -- get ready. A yellow light will come on -move to the edge of the plane. When the green light comes on -- jump. A white van pulls up outside the office to take Hayley and five American friends to the airport. Her instructor lays her harness on the ground by a fence double her height. He guides her feet into two loops and helps her shrug on the top like a jacket so that the harness hangs loosely. Arriving on the other side of the fence is a plane small enough to be a helicopter. Hayley has 25 minutes to gaze at the rising sun as the houses below blur; her instructor has 25 minutes to tighten her harness without her noticing. Red. Yellow. Green. Holy shit, she thinks as she hurtles into a minute of free-fall. He made me flip out of the plane, she later mock-complains. Fifty-one other tourists free-fell for 60 seconds that day. Hayleys bus ride back to the Skydive Cairns office was one of seven for instructor Jeremy Roberts. After five days of seven jumps per shift, Jeremy crosses the street and walks into The Crown Pub. Gripping a beer he nods to the bartender, schleps around the side of the pub, and sinks into a seat. Its not sunny but hes wearing sunglasses. It costs $334 to dive from 14,000 feet -- plus $130 for a video immortalizing the dive thats more like a tumble. People freak, he concedes, but, If theyre still doing what theyre told, well throw them out. Hence the tumbling effect. Working with tourists is fun money for Jeremy, but after seeing 500 smiling, screaming, foreign-language-babbling

faces each month, the constant happiness becomes as oppressive as the year-round heat. I have to go on holiday, I have to get away, Jeremy stresses as he stares far down the street. In the adventure city of Australia, a boat to the Great Barrier Reef, one of the seven wonders of the world, is five minutes from Skydive Cairns. Twenty minutes away is AJ Hackett, the only bungee jump in Australia where customers can plummet towards the water wearing a chicken costume. The Daintree Rainforest or white water rafting rapids of the Tully River are within ninety minutes. Such commercialization is not new. According to the Cairns Historical Society Museum, the tourism industry was born in 1890. Domestic tourists arrived daily on steamships to explore Cairns rainforest wildlife, cascading waterfalls, and living coral reef. Though tourism is now the number one industry driving Cairns economy, in the early and mid 1900s the economy was mainly driven by sugar cane, tobacco, and fishing. Colin Maudsley, a Cairns resident of 20 years, saw the switch. With cigarette in hand and beer sitting on a wooden table, Maudsley tells of his career exporting seafood. A boyish guy with scruffy facial hair interrupts; he asks Maudsley for matches. Can a take one of these too? He winces, pointing to a pack of cigarette rolling papers. Take two; theyre just fucking papers mate Maudsley barks in his raspy voice. Refocusing, Maudsley recalls that people caught more fish than they could sell. The economy suffered. Cairns turned to the tourism industry, which had been quietly growing in the background, to infuse the market. In the 1960s Tourism Tropical North Queensland (TTNQ) formed as a private company focused on marketing Cairns as adventurous by nature. Private investors opened restaurants and accommodation, advertising 50 cent beers, $12 hostels, and Cairns priceless natural splendor. Maudsley remembers a contest hed heard about. A company

handed 30 tourists fucking cameras capable of photo and video and asked them to, in Maudsleys words, fucking interpret Cairns. The best 20 second clip won a prize. By combining the best elements from all the cameras, the company hoped to launch a marketing campaign depicting how different nationalities see Cairns. In 1984 TTNQ organized a group of private investors to take ownership of Cairns Airport from the government. It became Cairns International Airport and in the following years tourism exploded. With new international flights, Japanese group tours began overshadowing domestic travelers. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Japan continued to have a strong hold on the tourism industry in Cairns. Maudsley asserts that groups of Japanese tourists signed up for package deals through the Japanese company Daikyo. They had tight schedules, shuffling from one Japanese-owned destination to another until their group flights back to Japan. Upon returning home they missed fresh seafood sampled on their vacations, so exports from Cairns increased. Maudsley, having been in the seafood exporting business, brags that Cairns locals can buy fresh fish for almost nothing. Eating the same fish can cost up to $400 at a restaurant in Japan. Why do you think we live here? He beams. We live in paradise, my love. Daikyo was sold in 2006. Japanese tourism declined and backpackers, a term coined by the Backpackers Inn hostel in Cairns, repainted the tourism scene. Backpacker took on meaning in the 1990s and became the dominant personality of Cairns after the millennium. Youth hostels like Gilligans Backpackers Hotel and Resort play host to the European and Canadian backpackers who color Cairns. James Deller-Smith, a 23 year old front desk worker at Gilligans, sits in a dimly lit booth next to a pool table after his shift. The booth is situated between the reception lobby and the

Gilligans bar and night club. For the past week, 75% of the 700 beds have been full. Though he estimates there are 30 hostels in and around Cairns, with 700 people under 30 next to a night club, um... He trails off into a giggle implying the overdose of hormones makes Gilligans one of the more popular hostels. After serving the 40-and-over crowd at Caravaners Hotel in his hometown of Rockhampton, working at Gilligans is like working behind a bar without getting covered in beer. The looping bungee jump clip on the reception area television teases him, as do the 300 backpackers clamoring through the lobby with bungee jumping I did it shirts. Nonsuicidally James exclaims, Someone push me off the top of a building already; someone throw me out of a plane. Although Cairns is a city, James notes, You dont feel like you have a skyscraper about to swallow you whole. It is still a small east coast town. The dense population of backpackers only partially masks the bogan flare. James two coworkers strap on synthetic long-haired wigs to host weekly Bogan Bingo. Participants are required to shout your mums a whore when a number ending in four is called. Besides bogans, locals include aborigines and workers in the tourism industry, like James. Spotting long-established locals is easy. Look for who glares and frowns. These attributes prevent the dreaded shoulder tap and repel essentially the same German tourist asking where the tour is. Tourists come to Cairns to be entertained, but for James, who has only been in Cairns for 5 months, tourists are the entertainment. At 10pm on Thursdays guys dress in drag for free drinks at ladies night. An Irish guy skulks to the lift covered in mud on a Sunday morning. Joking that he must have had a good night, James stops him. I lost my wallet. I lost my phone. I lost my room key. I woke up at the lagoon.

You dont even know where you slept last night. Nope. Can I get a new room key? The backpacker spirit is that of a TV drama -- James likens it to Skins. The characters change but they experience Cairns similarly. There are different tourist seasons: Germans come, then its Scandinavian season and Gilligans is full of Johansens, Carlsons, and Neilsons, then spring breaker season brings the Canadians and Americans. The cycles of people fascinate James. I wish I spoke more than one language. Im learning really good sign language now. He swipes an imaginary room card shouting key card in a distorted accent. The backpackers may entertain James, but the economy is losing interest -- the backpackers spotlight is dimming. The Japanese tourists overthrew the domestic tourists, who were overtaken by backpackers; now the Chinese tourists are creeping onto the scene. Still in sunglasses sipping a beer at the Crown Pub, Jeremy reveals that while Skydive Cairns traditionally marketed to backpackers, it is now targeting the emerging Asian market. Its strategy is more than projected statistics; trends of increased Asian tourism are already visible. Though Hayley jumped with a group of fellow American spring breakers, Jeremy remarks, Today there were a lot of Asians, a lot of Chinese. The Japanese are again showing interest in Cairns as well. Direct flights from Japan, launched 3 years ago, and China, beginning 5 months ago, largely account for the start of this new era for Cairns tourism. Trends of Koreans are also visible. Jeremy smirks as he depicts the hordes of Korean couples wearing matching t-shirts during honeymoon season. Tourist culture permeates Cairns. As James says, it is a spirit that is ever changing yet always familiar. Maybe future tourists will peer through their fucking cameras and see the

adventure capital differently, but they will still get lost and bother locals for directions. They will still come with, as Hayley describes it, the light behind their eyes. Packing up the suitcase she lived out of for 8 days, Hayley reflects on her week. It was nerve racking putting a tank on my back. You hear horror stories. The fact that I could do that by myself -- it was just me and the [scuba diving] instructor guiding me. Skydiving is the same thing. Usually Im not like that. I tend to over think things. This was the one opportunity for me to take a risk. Hayley still wears earrings to the gym, but the spirit of Australias adventure city stayed with her. The next thing I want to do is bungee jump. Now Im addicted to taking risks.