But if the brutality and hardships of Canungra were extreme, so too was the respite. At weekends, if you weren’t on punishment duties, you got leave, and there was a bus that conveyed us directly down to the glistening towers and white beaches of Surfer’s Paradise.  The town was a narrow strip between the thudding Pacific Ocean beach and the once marshy waterlands that had now be turned into meandering canals. Here the resident had two garages, one facing the street for his car and one facing the water for his boat. It was a place to which rich folk retired, mostly from Victoria they reckoned. But throughout the year the burgeoning population of wealthy retirees was always far out-numbered by the floating population of tourists.
    In the streets by the beach and below the hotels were innumerable bars and restaurants, and in and about them, girls in bikinis wandered, looking for whatever it is those girls look for. To be suddenly plunged from the barbarism of Canuangra into this paradise took quite a bit of adjustment.

Oscar Wilde, the greatest of Victorian literary ratbags, only wrote one novel but what a novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. A beautiful young man does a Faustian deal in which his portrait ages while he remains his youthful self. As a bonus, all of the corruptions and cruelties that he inflicts on others in real life are spared from his countenance and add into the picture instead. As a work, it is all about Wilde’s beliefs in beauty and aesthetics and, as is to be expected, witty quotes abound, mostly from Dorian’s friend, mentor and unstated lover, Sir Henry Wotton. In the excellent 1943 movie, Hurd Hatfield was the prettiest man they could find while George Sanders did the quotations with great flair.
I choose my friends carefully.
Forgive me for the intelligence of my argument; I’d forgotten that you were a Member of Parliament.
I like persons better than principles and persons with no principles better than anything at all.
It’s an odd thing, but every one who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world.
There’s only one way to get rid of temptation, and that’s to yield to it.
If I could get back my youth, I’d do anything in the world except get up early, take exercise or be respectable.
    The film was made in black and white, with the exception of the before and after scenes when the painting is dramatically revealed. When Dorian finally looks at the horror of the painting and we get to see it, the shot of the painting itself is in hideous Technicolor.
    But mostly, Oscar was famous for his plays, of which the stand-out was about some little mix-up over being, or not being, Earnest.
Oh, it is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn’t. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t…
… The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility…
… You don’t realise that in married life three is company and two is none…
…To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness….
    And so on – you’d end up quoting half the play before you get to the last line…
…On the contrary, Aunt Augusta, I’ve realised for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.
    Even more famous than his writings was his lifestyle, and he eventually got into deep trouble over an issue of sodomy with the Marquis of Queensbury. His disdainful arrogance and sly jokes did not go down well in court, and he condemned himself by trying to defend homosexuality, rather than himself. So into the slammer he went, and if that curtailed his excesses, if didn’t impede his writing.
Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword.
    They put Oscar Wilde in prison at their peril, for the result was that he wrote a superb poem about his experience there that was to shake them to their very foundations. The Ballad of Reading Gaol is often regarded as Wilde’s greatest work, certainly his most effective.
The warders strutted up and down,
And kept their herd of brutes,
Their uniforms were spick and span,
And they wore their Sunday suits,
But we knew the work they had been at,
By the quicklime on their boots.
     In telling the truth of the cruelties of prison life and raging against capital punishment and all done in splendid rhyming poetry, Oscar’s words rang in the minds of the powers that were until capital punishment was abolished and prison reform set in train. In these days of gay liberation, it is Oscar’s sacrifice that is best remembered—his revenge has passed into history along with the forces that he railed against.
They hanged him as a beast is hanged:
They did not even toll
A requiem that might have brought
Rest to his startled soul,
But hurriedly they took him out,
And hid him in a hole.
    Still, the experience of his trial and prison term knocked the stuffing out of him, and he faded away and died soon after, probably little realising, despite his prodigious ego and arrogance, just exactly how successfully he had been at making his point.
    Films of Oscar’s life keep rolling out and so they should. Robert Morley and Peter Finch did him, he featured in several television pieces, and most recently Stephen Fry in probably the most accurate—and therefore poorest— portrait. Among about thousand interesting witticisms from the man, my own personal Oscar favourites are:
We are all in the gutter, my dear, but some of us are looking at the stars.
    And the one when he passed through US customs:
I have nothing to declare but my genius.