Benjamin Law

St Peters Lutheran College, Queensland’s largest private school, is so vast you actually need to drive between some of its facilities. Before dawn, parents drop off children from Audis and Range Rovers to various stadiums, but the school’s hallowed domain is its heated outdoor 50-metre pool. Members of the Australian Olympic swim team are training here in the lead-up to London. There is Leisel Jones, pumping her legs on an exercise bike. Stephanie Rice is doing crunches, shadowed by a television crew from 60 Minutes. And here, jumping rope furiously, is Nick D’Arcy: Australia’s best butterfly swimmer, a serious gold medal prospect, and the most loathed athlete in the country if magazine and online polls – not to mention Australian Olympic Committee sanctions following last month’s media beat-up over Facebook photos – are any indication.

There are legitimate reasons to dislike D’Arcy. In March 2008, shortly after qualifying for the Beijing Olympics, he knocked out fellow qualifier Simon Cowley, a triple Commonwealth Games gold medallist, at a Sydney bar. Cowley’s injuries were gruesome. X-rays revealed breaks to his jaw, eye socket, cheekbone and nose, as if a metal pipe had been rammed into his face, rather than a human fist. Most of Cowley’s teeth came loose.

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If director–playwright Simon Stone were to write himself into one of his plays, his entrance would read:

SIMON STONE, a scruffy man of about 27, although he looks five years older at least, from years of drinking and various other unseemly pursuits …

Stone stops himself and grins, clarifying the bit about “unseemly pursuits” is only an embellishment, though I may need more convincing. Otherwise, he’s just about nailed it. Australian theatre’s boy wonder is happily unkempt – a cross between handsome lad and friendly dog – and while he does look slightly older than 27, the fact remains: Stone is 27. Widely tipped to take over Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton’s Sydney Theatre Company gig when they bow out at the end of 2013, Stone was only born in the mid 1980s.

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Seven pm and the Bondi sun is still caressing surfers, bikini girls and topless males pulling up from their cliff-top runs. Near the lifeguard tower, 30 men have gathered for their twice-weekly rugby training. The men have nicknames suited to the game, or prison – Jay-Z, Killer, Jumbo, Fezbot, Big Girl – and range in age from 18 to 50-plus. Nearly all of them are gay.

Don’t act so surprised. Any gay man will tell you that out of all the ball sports, rugby is particularly laden with homoerotic innuendo. It’s not just the shorts. There’s the language, too: ‘hookers’, ‘tackle’ and ‘back line’. Men constantly ‘go down’. When players lock shoulders for a scrum, they position their butts at provocative angles before man-handling each other like Greco-Roman wrestlers. One member of this rugby team – sidelined because of a wrist injury – tells me that whenever he got into this position in high school, he’d have to think hard of something soft.

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Here is how you cook a pig’s uterus. First, visit your local abattoir’s Vietnamese section, where they will happily take requests for ‘special offal’ – which includes intestines, gall bladders, warm blood and reproductive organs. Sows’ uteri come blanched, with a similar colour and texture to tripe: creamy and soft but with a cartilagey bite. Braise them in pork stock, along with smoked ham bones, onions, garlic and wine. Simmer on low heat for two-and-a-half hours, add peas and butter, and serve with jus. The uteri should now have the texture of squid, with a slight crunch.

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From the outside, the Snoezelen Room at the Gold Coast’s Mudgeeraba Special School (MSS) doesn’t look like much. The room’s padlocked entrance is almost creepy, resembling a fire exit that’s been bolted up. As she fiddles with the large master locks, head of curriculum Nicole Belous explains this actually used to be a garage. I think to myself that if I were a kid being led into this room, I’d probably be freaking out right now.

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Someone should make a reality TV show called Tuckshop Ladies. The drama would be explosive. Elimination episodes would take place at Parents &Citizens’ Association (P & C) meetings, where parents and tuckshop convenors would battle it out in the style of the Jerry Springer Show. In one episode, the entire tuckshop staff would be made redundant; in another, an irate parent would hurl abuse at the new tuckshop convenor for taking pies off the menu. The stakes would be high – some tuckshops have annual profit margins of $500,000. There would be tears, award ceremonies and, of course, cooking.

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In retrospect, we had been adequately warned. Days before we arrived at Wooroolin’s Peanut Pullers and Backfatters Ball — an annual Bachelor & Spinsters’ event in rural Queensland — I’d spoken to one of its organisers over the phone. “B&S balls used to be a big thing in rural areas,” Jodie Butcher told me, “so all the single farmers and farmer’s daughters could meet someone. It was a proper sit-down meal in a hall, then you’d have a dance.” When asked exactly how B&S balls had changed, Jodie laughed. “Over time,” she said, “I guess it’s gotten a little bit … feral.”

As such, the invitation for Backfatters featured a sketchy illustration of a giant peanut happily having sex with a pig up the rear. I understood where the committee had gotten ‘peanut-pullers’ from: Wooroolin, a township with a population of roughly 200 people, lies just outside of Kingaroy, and the entire region is known as Australia’s peanut farming capital. ‘Back-fatter’, I discovered, refers to the local piggeries. Jodie told me that a sow at the end of her breeding cycle will become so enormous that locals call them backfatters: “It’s the committee taking the piss — that all we’ve got out here are peanut pullers and backfatters.”

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It’s 4.20 am in Kingston, 30 minutes out of Brisbane, and already the place is a hive of human activity. In the darkness, people haul crates out of a huge delivery truck – the words “Tribe of Judah Care Services” printed on its side – and into a warehouse. A muscular Pacific Islander man reverses a packed forklift through the gate, when a bikie named Terry – tattoos, goatee, belly – rushes out to direct him. “Over here, Pete!” he hollers, gesturing like an airport tarmac guide.

In a few hours, 4000 to 5000 people from all over the Logan shire – an area that houses nearly 200 ethnic groups – will be lining up outside to receive bags of free groceries: 70 tonnes in total. The queue will be so long, it’ll stretch beyond the oval-sized car park and into the streets. Today is Free Food Friday, an event that The Tribe of Judah – an unlikely mélange of Christian church, Harley motorcycle gang and charity organisation – holds several times per year.

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People might flock to the Gold Coast to feel alive, but it is increasingly also a destination for the dead. Drive inland, away from the scorching beaches, breakneck theme parks and thumping nightclubs, and you’ll eventually hit the quiet, bushy hinterland that locals affectionately call “the green behind the gold”. One of the suburbs here is Mudgeeraba, a place that is becoming widely known for its cemetery.

Gail Webb, a softly spoken funeral director from A Gentle Touch Funerals, leads me through the company’s cemetery, which ranges over nine hectares. “Quite beautiful, isn’t it?” she says as we walk among the headstones. Here, the burial ground is divided into two sections: a clippered-lawn cemetery to our left, with flat plaques in tidy, graph-like rows, and a monumental cemetery to our right, where a spectacular convergence of money and grief has taken place. Some of the memorial shrines are so large that they double as stone benches.

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At the registration table for Lovelinx, a national conference run by a Christian organisation, an array of educational books and DVDs are on display. Titles include The Battle for Normality, The Courage to Be Chaste, God’s Grace and the Homosexual Next Door and Healing Homosexuality. Their variety risks being overwhelming, but mums and dads can turn their attention to one clearly targeted book, a practical-sounding volume titled A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality.

Lovelinx is taking place in The Factory, a church in Melbourne’s outer-eastern suburbs, which used to be a furniture workshop. The two-day conference aims to share the gospel “in the midst of the homosexuality conflict” and comes with the backing of Exodus Global Alliance, an international organisation representing a range of Christian “member ministries”. Exodus claims it is possible for people to free themselves of their homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ.

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