"QUEENSLAND'S Gold Coast hosting the 2018 Commonwealth Games risks bringing shame upon Australia.
Commonwealth nations will judge our country by this one ugly aberration - by this tawdry tourist trap.
I write as an expat Queenslander whose happy early childhood family holidays were idled away on the Gold Coast in the 1960s.
Who learnt to swim at Surfers Paradise, in the Pink Poodle Motel's pool.
Who is now saddened and sickened by every fleeting visit to a place I once loved.
Like the title of John Milton's epic poem, the Gold Coast is Paradise Lost, although the most apt descriptions are of the second to fourth circles of hell - lust, gluttony and avarice - from Dante's Inferno.
Hyperbole? Hardly. Swig the poisonous cocktail of Cavill Ave any day or night to see how far from grace and good taste humanity has fallen, hereabouts.
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Here it is possible to see how a once pretty strip of subtropical coastline has lost its soul, how cashed-up developers have created the peculiar kind of concrete ugliness and artifice only money can buy.
Walk along Main Beach in the early afternoon - in the gloomy shadows of the tacky apartment towers - to fully appreciate the total absence of sensible town planning.
The only good thing to come out of the Gold Coast is the M1 (the Pacific Motorway) which veers close enough for viewing the high-rise horrors from a safe distance, while swiftly delivering motorists from Brisbane to the more civilised stretches of northern NSW. Or vice versa.
There are, however, redeeming features to the Gold Coast's winning bid for the Games.
Many of the sporting venues are sufficiently removed from the high-rise hideousness, but others- such as at Broadbeach, Labrador and Runaway Bay - are too close for comfort to the epicentre of the whole catastrophe.
The timing - April 4-15 - is fortunate, as the Games won't clash with the Gold Coast's lowest tide: Schoolies week in November/December.
Our best strategy for making the most of this sorry situation is to swiftly entice as many Games visitors as possible southward, then by good example encourage them not to judge all of Australia by what they saw and experienced on the Gold Coast.
It is time to do everything in our power for all our friends throughout the Commonwealth to discover the true paradise Australia has to offer - everywhere, anywhere, except the Gold Coast.
