State of wonder

Trent Dalton heads to the tropical north and samples the sights and tastes of the region while reflecting on his admiration for a Spanish immigrant cane farmer.

It’s over the rainbow, somewhere. The story of Jose Paronella and his true love dream is beyond that north Queensland summer raincloud and over those emerald hills and past that deep blue sea and along that sugar mill rail line that snakes between cane fields that still whisper her name. Margarita. Margarita. Margarita.

The things a bloke will do for love. In 600BC, Queen Amytis, wife of King Nebuchadnezzar II, gazes upon the arid landscape of what is now Iraq and longs for the lush, green hills of her native Media, prompting hopeless romantic Nebuchadnezzar to construct an ancient engineering miracle of ascending tiered gardens of vibrant flowers and vines known as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. In 1631, Mughal emperor Shah Jahan spends 20 years employing some 20,000 artisans, building an ivory-white, 73m-tall marble mausoleum in memory of his dead wife. It’s called the Taj Mahal. In 1927, Wisconsin architect John Hammes watches his beloved wife every night after dinner going to the trouble of scraping food scraps onto newspaper and wrapping them up and trudging them to the bin. In a flash of inspiration and adoration he builds a device that allows his wife to grind the scraps and dispose of them straight down her sink drain. He calls it The Insinkerator.

Two years after that work of modern wonder, a big-dreaming 42-year-old Spanish immigrant cane farmer named Jose Paronella stands deep inside a virgin rainforest flanking spectacular Mena Creek Falls, south of Cairns, explaining to his Catalan wife, Margarita, exactly how he’s going to build her paradise. It will be called Paronella Park. Margarita’s very own Hanging Gardens. Her Taj Mahal. There will be a Spanish castle, he says, like the ones built for kings and queens back home. There will be a vast ballroom for Margarita to dance in. There will be a restaurant serving the finest foods south of Barcelona. Friends and family and travellers from across Australia, he says, will boat around the park lake and they will kiss beneath Mena Creek Falls and they will all, then, know a love like theirs. Jose’s right hand moves across his body making a sign of the cross. “This is the most beautiful place on earth,” he says. The things a bloke will do

for love.

I want to see what Jose saw in that forest. I want to see this rambling, twinkling, sweltering, jaw-dropping pocket of quintessential Queensland through the eyes of a dreamer like Jose Paronella. I’ve been zipping around for five days in a four-wheel-drive between Townsville and Palm Cove, 30 minutes north of Cairns, with a copy of The Spanish Dreamer, the biography of Jose Paronella, and a playlist of travel songs with the same central theme: wonder.

Because wonder is the central theme of Jose’s biography. He walked through Queensland like the wide-eyed alien he was; the boy from dry olive country in north-eastern Spain planted in the “green heart” of the deep north. He could never comprehend the volumes of rain that fell so hard and so fast in this region just as he could not comprehend the depth of the green in the leaves of every tree when the sun came out only seconds after the rain. A green so rich and full and radiant it felt like it was painted on. “Soil was the colour of ploughed chocolate,” he said. Purple bougainvillea vines so thick you could suffocate in them. Ripe mangoes and paw paws as big as Spanish church bells. A coastline like a sapphire and diamond necklace with sand so pure and white it looked like hourglass sand and time must have stopped because all the hourglasses in all the world were surely empty.

I’m searching for the wonder. I’m searching for that pure Judy Garland high note. I’m searching for Across the Universe and A Day in the Life and McCartney’s wild euphoric heart-on-the-sleeve end to Hey Jude. I’m searching for that giddy crescendo in Under Pressure where Bowie comes back in behind Mercury’s vocal: “’Cause love’s such an old-fashioned word … and love dares you to change our way … .”

That’s what it feels like to stand at the foothills of Walsh’s Pyramid, south of Cairns, the highest freestanding natural pyramid in the world. It feels like David Bowie and Freddie Mercury in full voice. That’s how big it is. Nine hundred and twenty-two metres of pure music. Pure wonder.

Wonder, of course, is a choice. A way of seeing things. I’ve been writing brief notes on any random wonder to be seen with Jose Paronella-type eyes across this region of Australia.

Big wonders. The old architecture of the masonry buildings along Flinders Street East in the heart of Townsville. Sunset from Castle Hill lookout; standing beside a genuine World War II sheltered command post overlooking the city of Townsville and wondering if Johnathan Thurston is one of those dots all the way down there on that oval practising banana kicks.

The snorkel trails off Nelly and Geoffrey Bays on Magnetic Island. The shipwreck of the SS Yongala, one of the best wreck dives in the world; a whole rainbow universe of hard and soft corals, marble rays and giant gropers from another dimension, gathered around a passenger ship that disappeared in a 1911 cyclone and remained undetected for half a century.

The story of HMS Pandora — the doomed ship sent by the British Admiralty in 1790 to capture the mutinous crew of William Bligh’s Bounty — that unfolds through a spine-chilling, put-yourself-there exhibition in the Museum of Tropical North Queensland.

The street art and public murals that can be seen from Charters Towers to Townsville to Cairns. In Ingham — north Queensland’s “Little Italy”, found between Townsville and Cairns — there is a place called Mercer Lane where 2000 locals have come together to form a sublime 50m mosaic tribute to the sugar cane industry that allowed Jose Paronella to realise his dreams in the first place. What started out as a small mosaic workshop in the home of local artist Kate Carr exploded into a full-blown public art project where hundreds of locals turned up to place mosaic tiles on a wall to tell the vivid story of their town.

Small wonders. The way a beer goes down at 5pm in a north Queensland summer. The taste of the lychees and passionfruit and bananas in old school trust payment carts on every road north. The stained-glass windows in the Mother of Good Counsel Church in Innisfail. The mesmeric mixed blues on the heads of the cassowaries of Etty Bay. The man who walks along the Palm Cove esplanade with a rainbow lorikeet on his head. The peanut butter gelato in the Palm Cove gelati joint. Tiny ants on towering trees and the electric blue wings of the Ulysses butterfly that flap haphazardly through all of it. And the people. All those laidback, self-effacing, nothing’s-too-much-trouble people of the sunlit north.

“What do you most love about life in Queensland?” Margarita Paronella once asked her tireless husband.

“I guess it’s the easygoing friendship,” Jose replied. “’Mateship’, they call it. You always help another bloke if he’s in trouble or has problems. You mightn’t even know him, but you still help.”

Jose had his troubles. Jose had his problems. His dreams were too big for his bank account. But he made the dreams he dared to dream come true. He built that Spanish paradise for his beloved wife. He built it out of cement imported from Germany and bent and buckled discarded reinforcement rails from the local cane fields and scavenged timber from abandoned homes in the Mena Creek region. He built Margarita a Catalonian castle with a ballroom that could transform into a picture theatre. Huge Spanish landscape pictures hung on the walls of the ballroom overlooking elaborate furnishings and a deep red curtain across a performance stage. A 1270-piece mirror ball spun on the ceiling as bands of Spanish musicians played for dancers in twirling summer dresses. He built her fountains powered by a hydro electrical plant. He built her a museum and tennis courts and a wishing well and a bridge crossing over the endless falls. He built a walkway cutting through the park just for lovers who would exit the “tunnel of love” at a private space where guests could kiss and propose and dream big like Jose Paronella.

It’s all still here in the forest. Parts of it are falling down, old concrete slowly dissolving over time, and parts of it are in a permanent state of restoration. To walk into Paronella Park is to walk into a Spanish cane farmer’s fantasy; to walk into his wonder.

Here, on the castle balcony, is where Jose played his Spanish guitar for Margarita. There, in the place he called “the Secret Garden”, was where they’d sit for hours listening to water tumble over rocks fringed by gardens filled with umbrella trees and spermwoods and Chinese fan palms and silver quandongs and damson plums and rose butternuts and milky pines and Australian nutmegs. Jose would marvel at all the small native wonder surrounding him, all the marvellous creatures that never left. The green and gold Cairns birdwing, Australia’s largest butterfly. The golden orb spider with its web so strong and vast it can catch small birds. The spectacled flying fox fruit bats who squabble among the palm groves. The orange-footed scrubfowls who find a mate and keep it for life. That’s all Jose Paronella ever wanted to do. Find a girl and keep her for life. His dream park was designed to help him do that.

Truth is, of course, us blokes can get it all arse about sometimes. Margarita didn’t need the castle or the ornate gardens or a bridge across a waterfall. She didn’t need Jose to be down in that forest every day toiling away inside a rock tunnel; down on the lawn fretting over a fountain water system beneath a blazing sun. She just needed him in her arms. And that’s where he ended up. He died in 1948. Stomach cancer. He was skin and bone on a bed in his final moments, wrapped in the arms of Margarita.

But the love he had for Margarita is still here in this daydream park paradise. It’s in every step of the grand staircase that leads you down to the picnic area beneath the falls. It’s in the arc of the water that shoots in the lawn fountains by the tennis courts and ornate refreshment rooms. It’s in the palm groves and the bamboo forests and the small stone bridges that cross over streams where baby turtles play.

It’s in the remarkable avenue of towering Kauri pines planted long ago by Jose and Margarita that run

for 60m to the back end of the park in a line so straight it could be a wedding aisle in the most ornate cathedral nature ever built. You stand in the middle of

that aisle of wonder and you tilt your head up from the base of those mighty trees all the way to where warm dappled north Queensland sunshine breaks through the cathedral’s green leaf rooftop and you see birds. They are happy little birds and they are up so high, maybe as high as rainbows reach, and you can’t say if they are coloured green or red or yellow or blue.

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Produced in association with Tourism and Events Queensland, The Storyteller Series shines a spotlight on the state as never seen before. Next month, country musician Adam Brand visits the Gold Coast.

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