Vive la difference

THIS fun park involves lots of water with everyone wandering around in a swimming costume; unspeakably terrifying for women of a certain age.

I'M begging the kids to muck up for I've somehow promised to take them to Jamberoo Action Park and now need any excuse not to.

Because it involves lots of water with everyone wandering around in a swimming costume; unspeakably terrifying for women of a certain age. Thank goodness we're now allowed to wear boardshorts for they hide a multitude of sins, but I'm still not convinced.

"You're coming on the Taipan ride with us," sing the boys in ruthless glee. "How about the Science Centre?" I throw in lamely. A withering look. Those little buggers are onto me, are as good as gold - no naughtiness will jeopardise this trip. Meanwhile I'm sweating it out in a hotel room, praying for rain.

Forecast: perfect. Excruciating.

NSW's largest theme park emerged from the bones of a failing dairy farm to become an unheralded Aussie success story. After the quota system was introduced the owners couldn't make a go of milk production so they got creative. Diversified. Wildly, for 1970s Wollongong (I know, I grew up in it).

The dramatically sloping land was opened to grass skiing; now there are 50 hectares of pools and chutes and rides surrounded by native vegetation and peopled by a veritable army of beachy young Aussies all in their iconic yellow and red.

We're greeted by a life-sized White Pointer mascot; the boys are off. The five-year-old's happy with a giant platypus in the toddler pool so I'm given a blissful reprieve - can just laze on a sunlounger and absorb. It's all, unexpectedly, moving. Because it feels like the whole world is here and it's testament to how far Wollongong's come. I was firmly of the Anglo tradition amid a grand and jostling social experiment fuelled by the great roar of steelworks and coal mines. At school there were "the wogs" on the fringes of the playground but to my shame we never interacted meaningfully; it was just how it was. Our lot were unthinkingly incurious, entitled, blinkered, removed. Yet now, before me, are all races, colours, creeds; every one of us reduced to looking distinctly Aussie in that oh-so-casual national dress of cossie, hat and thongs (except for a group from India, women all firmly in jeans and tops even as they immerse themselves in the water; they have no idea, I'm sure, that they look far more erotic in wet clothes than any of us do in bathers.) But the point is, everyone's mucking in together here, laughing, shrieking, having a ball.

It's a world removed from our nation's shock-jocks bleating their old-world fear and paranoia of anyone in a leaky boat or headscarf. This is reality, and this way is winning. "I opened my eyes and here was the world. Here was this great human and divine enterprise," the Russian writer and philosopher Vasily Rozanov said. At Jamberoo I feel how I used to in London's Soho: that the whole world is in this place, in an energising, dynamic, harmonious way. It feels like the future; far removed from that narrow-eyed little existence of suspicion and separation I grew up in. A future that will be much more international, mixed, fluid - that our children will intermarry more easily and move around more confidently, not just from city to city but from country to country.

One son has a beloved schoolmate from China, sent by his parents to live with his aunt for a better way of life; another has a best friend from Slovakia, who's here for the same reason. The kids are leading the way.

Their easy, unthinking way of interacting with difference seems so evolved compared to my own, fenced childhood. All the children at Jamberoo are testament to this; it's a state of grace before cynicism, fear, paranoia, anger, doubt. Long may it last. I know it will. I saw it in London, and again at a former dairy farm near Wollongong. It's the future, whether the old guard likes it or not.

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