The forgotten women - over 60, single and broke

I was thinking earlier today about three women friends who are all in the same boat: over sixty, single/divorced, childless, and with not much money or income to their name despite running their own businesses. One in particular, who doesn't own her own place, is looking down the barrel of a pretty dismal retirement, assuming she can ever afford to.

There's a theory by The Barefoot Investor that one can retire quite happily with $250K in superannuation, get the aged pension (part or full depending on your savings) and work maybe one or two days a week (both for a bit of extra cash and to keep your mind active).

That's fine but my three friends don't have $250K in super. Luckily one owns her own apartment. She also has more in super than the others, so I think she'll be better off. Let's call her Sherry. Sherry started her biz eight years ago after taking redundancy from her employer. Sherry now has a disability so will be getting financial assistance from the National Disability Insurance Scheme. Her quality of life is going to get worse as time goes on, however, so Sherry needs to assess where she is going to live as she is likely to be in a wheelchair sometime in the next couple of years.

Friend number two, who we'll call Shona, hasn't paid off her house. Her partner left her two years ago after 20 years and Shona apparently doesn't have access to her partner's super. She doesn't have enough super of her own to survive on, so she's keeping on with her struggling biz and hoping that when she reaches pension age in about two years' time she'll own her house. She's renting the house out at the moment to pay it off, and living in the granny flat.

Friend number three, we'll call her Sue, is the worst off of the lot. She had to dig into her super early to pay for major surgery. Divorced many years ago, she got a rough deal out of the marriage and has never owned her own house. Her beautician business is struggling but at 65 she's applied for the pension to make ends meet. I worry how she's going to survive in Sydney with rental prices skyrocketing. At the moment Sue is doing a long term house sit and not paying any rent. She is considering house sitting as a way of life or becoming a companion to an elderly woman. She doesn't want to move from Sydney.

If I have three friends in my relatively small group of friends who are in this position, I wonder and worry how many more women are in the same boat? How many have been ditched by their partners for someone younger (poor Shona!)?  How many are worrying that when they retire they won't be able to pay the rent? How many will have to consider moving out of a major city such as Sydney and Melbourne, leaving their friends and maybe family, and moving to a country town where rents are cheaper but where they may miss the city life and culture?

Women's wages have always been less than that of males so women have a rough deal to begin with when it comes to saving for their retirement, on the whole.

Well, you may say, why do these women continue persisting with struggling businesses? Can't they get a job? Huh!!! Despite the government urging employers to take on the over-50s, it's VERY hard for women over sixty to get a job unless they are highly qualified. These days qualifications are everything; a single degree hardly counts any more. To be in the running for a white collar management job you need a double degree at least. Shona has part time work in addition to running her business but can't find a full-time job in the region where she lives.

This is a generation of single women who are going to find their retirement years extremely tough - particularly if they haven't paid their home off. When these women started in the workforce, superannuation contributions from employers weren't compulsory. It's likely many women will have started a super contribution late in their working life. For those entrepreneurs who have their own small and struggling business, you can bet the contributions will be lower than that paid by an employer.

I think we are going to hear a lot more about the plight of 'forgotten women' in the next ten years as they hit pension age and rents continue to rise. It breaks my heart.

Buying into Buy Nothing - confessions of a shopping addict

So Buy Nothing is a thing. I get it. We live in a very consumerist society. Advertising is everywhere; on the tv, radio, print media, social media and websites and of course emails. It's overwhelming.

Use Facebook and ads will pop up for anything and everything, usually targetted to your age and gender. Visit any number of websites and you'll find an ad for something you searched for on Google recently (I'm sure there's a way to stop my search data being used like that but I can't be arsed finding it out). Click me, they urge, go on - click!

As I have a bulging wardrobe and every kitchen utensil known to man, I committed to stop shopping on 1 July 2017 for a minimum of three months with the aim of stretching it to twelve months.

I confess to being somewhat of a shopping addict. In addition to food and toiletries, I buy clothes, shoes, makeup, books, music and sometimes household goods on a regular basis. The woman at my local dress shop calls me her best customer, although I've been 'good' lately and haven't bought anything from her for six weeks, and that was only the second thing I'd bought from her all year.

But I digress. If I can make it to three months, I can increase my Buy Nothing week by week, month by month. Little steps, regular milestones, will make it easier. Rather like someone in AA taking it one day at a time.

I can see why Buy Nothing is taking off, however. Firstly minimalism is back in vogue, so to achieve it, you need less. Then there's the problem of rubbish and landfill we in the west create.

As well as being a consumerist society, we are a throwaway society. Globalisation has seen fashion become an entity which churns out new designs on an apparently weekly basis. (In fact there is a shop at Kingsford Smith Airport in Sydney which promises new stock EVERY WEEK. Ye Gods.) With low labour costs in third world countries it's easy to spend $30-$50 for a new jumper or dress, or $10 on a t-shirt. I'm guilty. When H and M came to Australia I snapped up a handful of $7 t-shirts with absolute glee. After all, white t-shirts usually only last a year or two before they go grey or attract stains even Napisan can't remove. Then into the rubbish they go, too awful to even give to a charity shop.

My goodness, the amount of clothing that goes into landfill is terrifying. How wasteful we are as a society. How greedy. How eager to flash the plastic and buy more, more, more. I feel sorry for the fashionistas who are compelled to buy the latest look, racking up their credit cards to indecent levels, wearing items only a few times before chucking or donating. Because clothing IS so cheap these days, it is very much seen as throwaway after one season.

Granted, little of my clothing gets actually chucked out. Anything still decent goes to charity, damaged clothing gets used by me as cleaning rags before finally hitting the bin.  I get many years out of my clothes as most of what I buy is either fairly classic or interesting enough not to date. I have overcoats I've had for 20+ years and they're still fine.

The human cost behind producing cheap clothes for the western world is heartbreaking. Sweatshops, dangerous conditions, working hours which would cause strikes in Australia. Look at your clothing. Where is it made? Bangladesh? India? Turkey? China? Would you be prepared to pay, say, four times more for each item if it was made in your own country under decent working conditions?

And as for 'the middle aisle' in ALDI - oh, oh, oh! What a joy! The bits and pieces I have bought cheaply, such as weights and gym clothes, or a warm throw for the living room for a tiny $15, fill me with acquisitive delight. For I AM acquisitive, and it's something I'll have to overcome. I don't need more stuff. The majority of us don't need more stuff.

But.

It's not as if I'm in my 20s and have just moved out of home and have to buy or acquire household goods on which to sit, or kitchen utensils and pots. I have it all. Mum left a house full of 'stuff' when she died and I'm still selling or giving away things in an effort to make the place less cluttered.

I'm going to find this Buy Nothing lark hard work I think. I have unsubscribed from various shoe and clothing email lists so I don't get tempted.

So if I'm buying nothing, what are the exceptions for me? Which non-nothings will sneak into the house aside from food etc for us and the animals?

• Toiletries and cosmetics. I don't buy many cosmetics but I'm not going to go without an eyebrow pencil when my current one dies (local supermarket, $14, and seriously good).  And I don't go mad on toiletries like I used to 20 years ago. I estimate in the next 3 months I will have to buy toothpaste, soap, 1 bottle each of shampoo, conditioner, Nuxe Huile Prodiguese and Nutrimetics Nutri-Rich Oil as these are my staples and I'm running low on them. 
• Nails. I like having nice nails. It's a pick me up luxury that costs me about $40/month.
• Hair. Yes, my foils cost money but damned if I'm going to go grey.
• Books. But only e-books as they are cheaper and don't take up physical space, or I'll rejoin the local library and borrow.
• I may have to get supplies for my business such as paper and ink for the printer, but then I've always been frugal with my business.
• Gifts for others' birthdays. Unless I have something I can make or something new I can regift. There are 3 birthdays I have to cater for so I'll have to be canny.

And that's it. For the next two and a half months at least. Wish me luck. Hope I can conquer this shopping addiction and be a Buy Nothing person.

People who don't...um...finish their sentences

I've always been an impatient git and these days find myself increasingly irked when people don't finish the sentence they are speaking.

You know what I mean. Someone's talking and then they um and err and suddenly the sentence is left dangling, waving its nouns, verbs and participles in thin air.

I have an image of unfinished sentences floating aimlessly around our house just under the ceiling in a cloud of words and letters, as my husband G is a chronic non-finisher of sentences.

I wonder sometimes whether he's getting early onset Alzheimers or whether there's just too much going around in his head, as he's under a lot of pressure with his job. I'm sure he completed his sentences most of the time when I first met him.

I do have the odd problem myself. I lose nouns. I can't think of the exact noun I want to say or write; usually the name of a flower or something. Then I'll um or err. But I'm nothing like G.

He'll be lounging against the kitchen cupboards while I'm making dinner - and why he has to lounge against the exact bloody cupboards I'm always opening to get pots, pans and plates out I don't know - and chatting away to me, then a sentence will drift, incomplete, into the ether.

I wait for it to resume, but it doesn't. I wait and wait. I feel like snapping, "Oh, finish the bloody sentence!" I try not to show my impatience; I keep the same expression on my face, but inside I'm gritting my teeth.

It's easy for sentences to drift into nothing in English. In German, you have to think about your sentence before you utter it, as the verb at the end of the sentence you will put.

G's a great one for umming and erring too. That's not quite as irritating as not finishing a sentence, or listening to someone pepper their speech with 'like' every few words, however.

Am I the only one annoyed when people don't finish what they are saying?  Or do you also find it um....er... um... ?

Good old golden rule days?

I was making the bed this morning and my mind digressed - as it often does with tasks that don't rely on much brainpower - to another topic. For no reason that I can think of, I remember my Nan telling me that 'schooldays are the best days of your life.'

Well.

I hated school. Hated it from day one. It took me away from my Mum, my animals, my books and everything else I enjoyed at home and thrust me in a room with about 30 other kids and most of them, in kindergarten, were dumbos who couldn't read or write (at the risk of sounding like an annoying prat, I could do both by the age of 3. I was bored shitless in the first couple of years at school.). 

Coupled with an anxiety that having had one parent bugger off, the other would as well while I was at school, my early schooldays were filled with anxiety. Would Mum be there at 3pm?  (She invariably was.)

Things improved a bit over the next few years but I was never happy at school, and when Nan made this proclamation when I was about ten and later when I was a teen, I didn't believe her. 

It's lucky I wasn't the suicidal type because by the time I hit high school, the thought that life couldn't get better than this was a living vision of hell. 

I guess Nan meant that while you were a child you were free of adult responsibilities, of pregnancy and childbirth, of running a business, paying tax, avoiding bankruptcy, struggling to find pennies to pay for your children's dinner, not to mention finding rent. She was born in 1902 and had a successful bakery business with my grandfather in the 20s only to lose it in the Depression. Then there was WWII… For Nan, schooldays in a sleepy country town must have seemed like a blissful haven before adult life began at 16.

Now I'm struggling to pay bills, to find money to pay taxes, selling things from the house I won't use or don't like to get some cash, panicking because I have $50 to last till the end of the month, all the usual stuff people do. But do I think my schooldays were better than this? Nope. They were still hell.

I'm just glad social media wasn't around when I was a child or teenager. It was tough enough getting teased face to face. But back then kids didn't suicide because of bullying. We fought back. Or I did. I tried to chase Michael Tw*gg and punch him in the face when he made fun of my bicycle in primary school (sadly I couldn't run fast enough. He was a little bastard), and when a couple of fellow pupils tried to chuck my bag over the side of the ferry in high school I pushed them hard enough to almost send them overboard and got left alone after that. 

I'm digressing - as usual - but are we bringing up kids to be more namby-pamby than in previous generations? We are bringing up a generation which has an expectation that they are perfect and deserve to be totally pandered to. Often the entire household revolves around a child's or children's activities. Nobody says No to them any more (do you know that childcare centre workers aren't allowed say 'No' to kids in their care?). Nobody tells kids they are naughty or bad in case they get a complex about it. Nobody threatens a smack because smacking on the bum appears to be outlawed too. You can't send a child to a naughty corner because then you're excluding it from its classmates. 

Spare me.

We had a teacher in year 5 who was a serial hair puller, a punishment reserved for talking in class and other crimes. We survived. Mind you Wendy whatshername had a chunk of hair pulled out one time and that stopped Mrs E from hair pulling for a while.  Mrs E would have been sued or arrested today.

Had Mrs E seen Wendy's imaginative if not totally accurate drawing of "A Hairy Dick" she would have done more than pull hair. That drawing was one of the highlights of the year and circulated the classroom covertly. I imagine a counsellor if not the the social services would have been called in and Wendy subjected to careful and perhaps leading questioning about her father. Wendy's story was that she saw her Dad galloping from the bathroom to the bedroom and drew it from memory. In those more innocent days, I am sure she wasn't lying. Kids will always draw rude stuff.

And this - the year of the hair pulling teacher - was probably the best year of my schooldays. I had finally made good friends and was relatively popular with my classmates. Sadly that all changed two years later. I hated high school with such a passion I was a reasonably mute, pathetically law-abiding student in order not to get a detention. Any extra hour spent at that place filled me with horror. The knowledge that it took an hour to get to or from school didn't help. I just wanted to be at home, writing; working on a novel. 

Working life, when it came along, was a revelation. Nobody minded you talking. You could even tell jokes. And get paid for it. You didn't have to wear a poxy uniform (another of my absolute hates). I started work the year my old classmates were having conniptions and breakdowns studying for their HSC, and I couldn't have been happier. 

It says something about me, or the high school I went to, or the culture in the place at the time, that I have a lot of trouble thinking about it in any affectionate way. I read the regular bulletins I get in the mail from the place and am constantly astonished that there are so many 'old girls' who view it with love. For me it was a prison, and one I was grateful to finally escape from.

Sorry Nan, but you were wrong. xx

A post for which The Pedestrian Council will hate me

What is it with people when they are in a pedestrian role? Is there a sudden brain shift that gives us, walking down the footpath, a sense of total superiority to people driving cars? And makes us exercise that superiority simply because we can?

Like many of us I am both driver and pedestrian as the occasion demands.

When I'm in pedestrian mode, I am aware of people in driving mode, and I am mindful of them.

Let's take a zebra crossing for instance. If the road is clear in one direction, and there is only one car coming in the other, with no other cars in sight, I will NOT simply walk out onto the zebra crossing and make the poor bastard grind to a halt. I'll wave him on or stand back from the crossing.

Why? When I have the right to make cars stop for me?

Because it's polite is why. I can wait another couple of seconds for the car to pass and cross when the road is completely empty. It's easier for me to come to a stop than the car.

Additionally, when that car grinds to a halt for me, it has to take off again afterwards, and cars in low gear use a lot more fuel than cars running in a higher gear at a higher speed. It is a minor bit of karma (or carma) I'm doing for the environment by waving the car on.

I never see any other pedestrians wave motorists on at zebra crossings. Countless times I've been the one car driving down the road who has stopped at the crossing when there is no other bloody car in sight. Anywhere.

Another beef is busy pedestrian crossings. Some of these - in Eastwood, Sydney for example - have signs at the side encouraging pedestrians to wait and cross in groups to aid traffic flow, as Eastwood is super-busy. Do they wait and cross in groups? Do they hell! Nope, you'll sit there while a couple of dozen people amble in single or double file across the road, nice and slowly, while cars bank up in both directions behind them. Once that group has crossed one, perhaps two cars will get to go before the next person strolls out onto the crossing, solo and proud of it. Sitting at the Eastwood crossings reminds me that there is no slower, dawdling pedestrian than a teenager in a school uniform, except perhaps an elderly person. The elderly, however, have an excuse for being slow walkers, as do people with a disability. Able-bodied folk have no excuse for the 1km/h speed over zebra crossings.

Finally, there are the school kids. Here in NSW we have 40 km/h school zones which are active twice a day, even when there isn't a child in sight. 40km/h is a nice slow speed which enables teenagers in particular to play chicken and run across the road in front of you, because they are too lazy/impatient to walk to the nearest zebra crossing or traffic lights. This scares the hell out of me when I'm driving. I was driving down Lane Cove Road in Ryde two years ago when two teenage boys in school uniform decided to bolt across all six lanes of it when traffic was moving at a relatively good peak hour pace, i.e. 30km/h. They ran straight in front of my car. I was shaking afterwards. There were traffic lights only 100 metres behind me, but oh no, the kids couldn't be bothered walking up there and crossing safely. And if anyone had hit them, it would have been the motorist's fault even though the kids had put their own lives at risk with their stupid behaviour.

There is a law in NSW which pedestrians break if they cross the road within 20 metres of traffic lights or a zebra crossing, rather than using the lights or crossing. Every afternoon at my local high school this rule is smashed to smithereens despite a zebra crossing having been installed last year right outside the school gates. Prior to that, it was like dodging Brown's Cows as the teenagers ran or walked, even dawdled, across the road any old how. There is a set of traffic lights 100 metres up from the school and another zebra crossing 200 metres down the hill. But why use those when you can simply run in front of cars?

Seriously, people, think before you cross the road. Don't make one poor sap stop just for you if the rest of the road is clear. When you do cross, walk quickly so cars - on whose territory, the road, you are currently traversing - can get moving again. And at busy crossings, show a bit of consideration and try and cross with others. In short, do someone behind the wheel a good deed.

And it doesn't hurt to give a little wave or nod to people who do stop for you. Yes, I know it's the law that they have to stop, but it's nice to acknowledge that they actually saw you and stopped, particularly if it's that one car on the road, with nothing else in sight, who stopped for you.

Ink and flowing hands

I read in The Australian a week or so ago that writing implements may be on the endangered list, along with ties and hard copy diaries.

That's sad. I do love a good pen. There's something grand about writing with a fountain pen, for example.  I write letters to family members and old friends who haven't embraced the digital age, and take the trouble to use my fountain pen as it's about the only gallop it gets these days.

Even sadder on the handwriting front, there was a letter from a reader to the Oz's magazine stating that her grandchildren, in their early 20s, couldn't decipher their great-grandfather's WWI diaries, written in an elegant copperplate.

At school these days, it seems, kids aren't taught cursive/joined up writing. They learn a sort of italic printing but by the time they're in high school most of their work is via computer. Handwriting is not a skill that's desirable any more. Hence a generation who'll struggle to read the handwriting of their ancestors; they haven't learned how to form the shapes themselves.

There's a likelihood that cheques will go the way of the dodo as electronic banking buries them; that a signature written by hand won't cut the mustard at some point and that biometrics will be used to prove you're who you are. Handwriting, which has served us for more than a thousand years, will be more or less redundant.


That's a real shame.


Both my grandparents had elegant writing. Despite going to the same primary school their writing styles were quite different. Both slant forwards but my Pop's was copperplate, very neat and small, and Nan's was a flowing hand, big and generous. I write much like Nan, in a hand that lies about my age.

I grew up learning a very plain joined-up form called modified cursive, all the rage in NSW schools from the late 50s to at least the 1970s. It looked so plain and ugly - and even worse in my eyes, childish - beside my Mum's and grandparents' hands that once I was out of primary school and not marked on my handwriting any more I swiftly put loops on all the strokes I could and should. Fancy capitals, too.

I couldn't easily find an image of the cursive we learned at school on the net, so here it is, with my own cursive hand to show the difference.

I don't write by hand as much as I used to. My day book, beside my Mac, is covered with my scrawl, some of it neat, some of it all over the place as I take notes while I'm on the phone and/or pushing a cat out of the way.

This afternoon though, as work is getting quiet now with Christmas approaching, I did the annual Christmas card job, using my lovely fountain pen. I do have some fancy calligraphy I use when I'm handwriting, funky styles that I use for one-off cards, ie birthdays. It takes me a bit of time to do each card that way however, so with a pile of cards in front of me I elected for my usual handwriting, the one with loops and fancy capitals.

There really is something satisfying about writing by hand rather than simply tapping away at a keyboard. It means you have to think about what you're writing; you can't simply backspace if you change your mind half way through a sentence. Or misspell someone's name through being hasty. (Sorry to my cousin Louise, I really meant to put the 'i' in in the first place, not add it afterwards.)

There's some ink left in the pen; time to write a Christmas letter to my last surviving relation who doesn't own a computer!

Surfers' Paradox

I've just come back from sunny Queensland; in the heart of winter, you can wander around happily in a t-shirt up there. We flew up for my brother's wedding at the weekend, and stayed in Surfers' Paradise.

When I was ten years old my Mum and I went to Surfers for a holiday - my first ever holiday that took me more than an hours' drive from Sydney. I was thrilled and delighted and carried the memories of that seaside holiday in a town that was kitsch but fun with me for years after I grew out of the souvenir t-shirt.

That was a looong time again. I've been back to the Gold Coast three or four times since as I have family living there (but thankfully not in the heart of Surfers). I've seen it go from a seaside resort brimming with two-storey motels and a handful of high-rise holiday apartments and residential apartments to Las Vegas by the Sea. 

The Gold Coast is a party destination particularly for the under 30s who like to drink themselves stupid. There are stands and booths selling tickets to parties, or bar-hopping nights. Even in my 20s this kind of outing is something I would have run a hundred miles from. This sign encompasses all there is to know about Surfers Paradise circa 2010:

This part of the Gold Coast is a Mecca for school leavers at the end of the year. In November and early December wise people leave the district. There are shops that cater for the party crowd all year round, like this one:

What you see is what you get. The shoes were amazing - insane heels and platforms. People-watching late at night we saw girls clomping in their six-inch platforms to the nightclubs. There was a sign in "Trashy Shoes" which stated they offered a shoe minding service. If you wanted to wear your shiny, hot-pink and leopard-print stilettoes out of the shop and straight into the clubs, they will mind your existing shoes for you until the next day. Here I am showing off the merchandise, unable to keep a straight face.

Of course there is still the family-friendly side of the place. Theme parks just up the road (not for me thanks) and lots and lots of bicycles about. Plenty of bike hire places too but we were a bit short of time as it was literally a flying visit. Next time I'm riding around the Coast though - it's flat and cyclists careen about confidently, especially this time of year as it's out of holiday season. 

While I saw literally dozens of bikes, either chained outside a shop waiting for someone to hire them, or tethered to bike stands faithfully waiting for their owners, I didn't take photos. Don't know why. Maybe it's a case of 'see one 3 speed cruiser, see them all'. Tons of cruisers. This is cruiser city. 

One of the nicer bits about Cavill Mall in the main part of town is a lovely mosaic with scenes of local life - surfing, enjoying the outdoors and cycling. 

Surfers Paradise is famous for its Meter Maids, curvy girls in gold bikinis who are employed to feed the parking meters so hapless motorists aren't fined by the local Council when their parking runs out. On winter nights, these delicate, stilettoed creatures wear gold leggings. I never knew anyone made gold leggings. Let's just hope they don't take off as a fashion item, eh?

Cavill Mall is the main shopping part of town, full of tacky touristy shops, and plenty of cheap cafes serving half decent coffee and breakfast. It's an assault on the senses though. Blaring out over the constant noise of construction as more high-rise buildings take shape is the music which every shop and cafe insists on playing. All different. All annoying. You can hardly hear yourself think as you sip your coffee. It was a real relief to turn a corner and hear, for a moment, relative silence. I think we get used to a lot of white noise in our life, but sometimes you can become really aware of it. Sitting in a jumbo jet is quiet compared to Cavill Mall.

And finally, the architecture. As I said, it's changed a lot. It's all high-rise now. Any advantages the first tall buildings in the 60s and 70s had have long been eclipsed. Building after building has ensured that only the extremely wealthy get a decent sea view, and everyone else sees into the windows of the apartment building opposite. We counted no less than four buildings under construction in the same block as our hotel. And the bloody construction workers start work before 7am, too- just what you want after a late night out at a wedding!

Here's some of  the view from our hotel:

That curved building in the right really is curved - it's not just the wide angle lens, but admittedly the curvature has been a bit exaggerated.

And finally, the beach. The reason Surfers has been a seaside legend since the 1920s. Well, because of the high rise, the beach has almost disappeared. It's had to be topped up at regular intervals by sand imported from up or down the coast. High rise developments like this lot affect the way the wind moves with the sea and the dunes. Oh, and because the beach faces east/west, after lunch you don't get any sun on the beach because of the high-rise apartments.

This is before breakfast - you can see the tyre tracks where the beach is groomed and smoothed out on a nightly basis. It looks pretty wide here but imagine this picture was an inch wider on the right - you'd see the water.

Here's looking in the other direction - always swim between the red and yellow flags, as that's the area monitored by the lifeguards. And swim people did. We didn't pack our bathers - didn't think we'd have time to use them, but did paddle in the water, getting our rolled-up jeans soaked to the knees. Mmm, a luxury to walk on a beach in winter and not shriek at the temperature of the water!

Overall though I wonder what's going to win out in Surfers Paradise. Is it going to be just a party town, full of rowdy drunks? Apart from the theme parks, is it no longer a family place? And what of the high rise buildings, growing determinedly in spite of a financial crisis and with apartment price tags starting at $600K+ for a one-bedroom apartment? Who's buying them? There are a lot of brand new apartments still to be had 'off the plan'. Locals don't go to Surfers these days; they shop elsewhere, they swim elsewhere. 

What I ponder on is the impression any overseas traveller gets of Australia if Surfers is one of the few places they visit. It's long been a holiday of choice for Japanese people, and now Muslim travellers flock there in winter (and complain the meter maids are too scantily clad. This blog isn't a vehicle for cultural differences, but really, if you visit a place you should read up first and know what to expect. If I visited a Muslim country I'm sure I'd be made cover up; my culture wouldn't be given any quarter). It's a shame if a key impression they get of this brilliant country is one of drunks staggering out of nightclubs and throwing up in the streets.