My dad pulled us off the highway into the carpark, my mother in the front seat, and me in the back, sitting in the valley between the twin thrones of Japhy (3) and Scout (5) in their enormous car seats. “Here we are!” said someone with great enthusiasm. I couldn’t get out of the car until my parents unbuckled their grandchildren, so I sat, knees up, waiting.
At the sign-in ledger at the edge of the carpark, my phone wouldn’t open the QR code page for the COVID register, and I was left stranded on the threshold of the wooden boardwalk, waving my phone around trying to lasso the WiFi signal as everyone else headed on up. My dad, an energetic and frequently shoeless 72-year-old, hollered back at me, “I signed us all in! Me and four dependents.” I put away my phone, a 39-year-old child, and hurried on up to see the Big Banana.
*
It’s hard to say exactly when bananas became Japhy’s thing. Certainly, mashed banana was one of his first foods, at one point making up most of his food pyramid. For all I know his consciousness simply came to one day with a banana in its hand — you rarely see him without one. He loves bananas on paper, banana toys, banana pancakes, the “Bananas In Pajamas” song, crescent moons (“banana moon!”), yellow things generally (banana color). I am accustomed to the sight of my husband arriving home after a long day and so many miles to plonk a bag of bodega bananas on the bench. “Anything for my boy!” he’ll say. Back in normal times in Brooklyn, we didn’t know that this would be the year of the great banana pilgrimage.
As you will recall, most of the planet was booted into exile around March 16. To be a parent at this time felt like keeping full-grown children in your kangaroo pouch. We circled the apartment until summer, then decided to make a break for it, and held our breaths as we flew over the Pacific (via New Jersey, via Los Angeles, via New Zealand) to Australia. Having escorted us to the edge of the earth, my husband flew back. On the far side of the rubicon, state border closures conspired to make it near impossible to see my sister, the famed Aunty Millie, so we cooked up a road trip to the dotted strip of land south of the Queensland border where we could legally commingle. My parents had rented an Airbnb in that scenic limbo of surf shops, stubbies, beaches the color of clouds, and Norfolk pines. It just so happened that the seven-hour drive north would take us past one of Australia’s premier tourist attractions: the Big Banana. (Fate.)
There are a number of these landmarks in Oz; I grew up by the Big Merino, a concrete sheep whose udders house a gift shop. After a highway bypass cut off the flow of tourists, the sheep was towed on the back of a truck closer to the action, and now looks with narrow eyes upon a dribble of business. There is the Big Pineapple, the Big Prawn, the Big Trout, several Big Apples, and a saggy replica of Uluru with a petrol station underneath that burned down some years ago not far from where my parents now live. These are, for the most part, places to go the the toilet more than they are destinations in themselves.
The Big Banana felt different than its cousins, so long have bananas been the unit of creation in my son’s universe. The Big Banana was his Pemberley, his rosebud, his White Whale, his Eden. For me, the ferryman, it was a quest I would not quit. Parents will do anything to get their child to the promised land — witness the queues to meet Elsa at Disneyworld; the pile-drives through the door at Target toward the Hatchimals on Black Friday; the mom refusing to give up the swing at a crowded park despite her baby being oblivious to being swung; the sociopathic parents who created fake photographs of their kids rowing crew to get them into the right university.
I am persuaded by the Freudian idea that we all have a drive to return to pre-birth, a utopia where we don’t eat or drink or pee, but just exist in a glowing, floating orb, or a Jason recliner. The idea that we have been expelled from paradise and must spend our lives trying to find our way back was of course a thing for John Milton, whose “advent’rous Song,” Paradise Lost, I read in a half-distracted manner in grad school: “what cause / Mov'd our Grand Parents in that happy State, / Favour'd of Heav'n so highly, to fall off,” the narrator asks, and don’t we all wonder that of our parents at some point, as they wonder it of their parents, and their parents’ parents?
I’m a terrible student, but I recall the naughty thrill Milton felt for Satan, the fallen angel who couldn’t help himself and had to fuck it up for everyone else. (Every bad influence in child since time immemorial: “Why then was this forbid? Why but to awe; / Why but to keep you low and ignorant, / His worshippers; he knows that in the day / Ye eate thereof, ye Eyes that seem so cleere, / Yet are but dim, shall perfetly be then / Op’nd and cleerd, and ye shall be as Gods.”) If you set a child down in Eden, they’d make it five minutes before breaking a sacred directive. (On the other hand, the angel Raphael has a real first-child “mom and dad said not to!” quality in Paradise Lost.) So we each have set up in our lives the thing we spend our days trying to recover, the original obelisk shrouded in vines and bracken.
My own personal Mecca was a “Care Bear Experience” set up inside several floating plaster walls at the far end of the Grace Bros. sofa section at Belconnen Mall circa 1986. It had a rainbow boardwalk, some clouds for landscaping, and an array of animatronic Care Bears jolting back and forth. I recall being spat out of the exhibit by the queen-size beds and thinking I had just visited heaven. For other people, it’s Ted Nugent’s ranch or the corn castle in Iowa. For my dad, the Sydney Boat Show. For my mum and aunts, it’s Century 21.
The Big Banana (not to be confused with “Big Banana,” the all-powerful fruit lobby) was built in 1964 halfway up a hill in Coffs Harbour, on New South Wales’ north coast. Bananas are grown on hillsides because, I have learned, the plants “walk” upward, growing a new crop out of the stalk on the uphill side of the plant (which is really a single stalk). Vanity has visited the Big Banana in the years since; it now boasts a gift shop, games arcade, educational theatrette, and fun ride park all annexing the original piece of rebar.
We walk around the Banana, which is hemmed in by a clear awning. People in ultralight vests mill about, and I find it is quite difficult to photograph my children and the Banana at once — the monument is really almost too big when you can only get 20 feet of distance for the camera, your children by then too small. The Banana lies on its back, the stalk and nub both lifted, as though it is struggling through an abdominal crunch, and it is hollow underneath, such that you can walk or run through its belly. Japhy is so excited he runs through several times, back and forth; Scout, who has previously declared that she doesn’t like bananas all that much, is amused, but not to the extent that she is performing a full interpretive dance inside.
The presence of the heavenly banana body, crashed here to earth on the side of the Pacific Highway, seems to fuel Japhy. He runs down the Banana’s innards and into the gift shop, where his short legs propel him to a display of plush bananas the size of his torso. I am photographing him clutching one to his chest (“Fixt on the Fruit she gaz'd”), the proud grandparents also capturing the moment on their iPhones, when a stranger enters the gift shop holding Scout’s hand. She is distraught, having been left behind when we all followed the glowing orb of excitement through the sliding doors. As my mum giddily rings up an enormous soft-toy banana for her grandson, I tug Scout through the gift shop, holding up banana pencils, banana magnets, banana squirt guns, banana notepads and combi vans and necklaces, imploring her to choose anything(!!) she likes.
“Who wants an ice cream?” asks my dad, who is retired but for whatever reason still paying for my treats. We retrace our steps over to the cafe. Both kids are quiet, everyone consuming snacks at a picnic table, my own overgrown-child angst suspended for a moment as I take in the highway from the deck, the steady flow of traffic moving in a gentle arc by us like rings around a planet. Then we buckle back in, and my dad pilots us further north, Japhy with his giant soft toy, and Scout clutching an inflatable banana over my mother’s head. We go a happy hour hour, then: “But,” says Japhy in a small voice, “I wanted to pick a banana.” The adults in the car pause. Indeed, we didn’t see a single real banana at the whole attraction. Neither the Big Banana Breakfast nor the Little Banana Breakfast had a banana between them. Everything in the gift shop, including the banana candy, was synthesized. By god, you could feel the car think, we will find Japhy a real banana to pick. Aided by a very large tank of petrol, Adam, Eve, and sundry descendants are on the way at top speed (in fact, five atheists strapped into a Landcruiser with a drooping ceiling). Some hours on, we ford the Clarence River as it meanders its way through a land of mulchy green, pressing on past the Devil’s Pulpit and Ballina into the tropics.
Aunty Millie is able to cross the Queensland border to join us by positioning a piece of officially sanctioned A4 paper under her windscreen. Much anxiety goes into obtaining this print-out, but it could have been an Amazon return label for all the attention the gatekeepers give it as they wave her by. Safely inside New South Wales, she joins the quest as our guide.
During inland travels, we stop in Uki, a near-invisible town down a road to nowhere, dotted with heavily tanned Phoenicians in tie dye clothes and crates of “free” oranges. We retrieve mysteriously good coffee from a hole in a wall of post boxes, and, partway along the street, my parents are waylaid by a tawny local with a thick canopy of curly hair. I’m lightly embarrassed by their naïveté, which I, as a New Yorker, have long since sanded away. I learned to ignore strangers after a woman tried to yank my hair off my head working home from work in the West Village one afternoon. My sister and I wander further away as our parents remain in smiling conversation with the shoeless prophet, who by now seems to be schooling them on the seven-step path to nirvana.
“Judy’s son in law!” they announce as they rejoin us. Parents are good for reminding you that everyone is someone’s son.
We turn down an alley to find a table tennis fixture sitting out in a field, like a chessboard in a Dalian landscape. My mum patiently bonks the ball over the net to the kids, who watch it sail by then swing furiously at the air with their paddles. Above us, the craggy top of Mt. Warning blows in and out of view as clouds snag on the pinnacle. Afterward, we drive deeper into the valley, intent on reaching the hiking trail up the Aonian mountain, but find it has been sensibly roped off, preventing Man from dragging his mortal curse to the upper heights of the hinterland until the R-0 drops to a more acceptable number.
We are near the Margaret Olley gallery, points out my sister, thinking of Scout, whose personal odyssey is about finding a really good piece of art to study. But the opening hours during COVID are useless to us. I look up some of Olley’s work online:
On a snaking green ridge closer to the sea, we pull into Tropical Fruit World (formerly “Avocadoland”), marked by a Big Avocado on a pole. Concession would have been $100, inclusive of a two-hour plantation “safari” and “wildlife boat tour” (on a hill?), but everything is shut due to COVID, so we amble around for free and stumble on a short banana plant dangling a pristine bunch of bananas. Japhy is beside himself, struck by excitement and fear. Three is really too young to face a peak experience. He poses for a photo, but is too scared of the dangling bell — center of universe, source of all bananas, lightly upholstered in spiderwebs — to touch. My dad lifts him close to it, the two of them tense with the importance of the moment.
The farmer working the fruit stand hears that there is a mega fan on premises, and gives Japhy a banana blossom to take home. It’s a maroon bulb, like an oversized tulip, one layer of bracts peeled back to reveal a neat line of tiny banana florets tucked in like babies in a nursery. We take it out and put it on the table at the Airbnb. Japhy watches it, but still won’t go near. “What are the plants that look like stubby hands?” I ask my parents, having seen these over and over on the drive up. A deal more translating is required before my mum figures it out. “Oh, frangipanis!” In winter, the leaves fall off, leaving behind a bare skeleton that looks to be shaking its fist at the sky. We adults plonk ourselves on the couches, and the kids zoom around, occasionally pasting their bodies across their grandfather, grandmother, and aunt like rogue palm leaves, then peeling themselves off with the winds of a fresh idea for something destructive. For dinner, we find that each of us has bought a bottle of wine, so we pour it all into the great cauldron that is the Manley drinking habit.
The final day is spent going on little quests: my mum wants to buy the kids some t-shirts, my sister wants a good coffee somewhere we can go for a walk, my dad wants somewhere he can enjoy a beer with his family. We find an estuary of quietly sinking sand where the kids work for an hour to dig a hole that will stay. A tall man paddles past, standing six feet over the water. Somewhere just north, a shark takes a bite out of someone. My dad finds a beer hall with an attached indoor playground. We sit in the dining room watching the kids popping their heads gopher-like in and out of tubes and slides as we hold our drinks, taking in the now-miraculous event of a grown family sitting in the same space and timezone, magic perpetuated by my parents, Australia’s stringent quarantine, and a 15-year-old SUV. “Is that one of ours?” asks my mother, as we attune our ears to a squeal rounding a series of orange conduit. I listen. “Someone else’s.” We talk about the man eaten by the shark, and I think it makes us feel luckier somehow to be enjoying potato wedges here and now. My mum has on her customary expression of contentment as she works away on a fillet of battered fish that extends beyond the edges of her heavy bistro plate.
We bid my sister farewell the next morning after inspecting some $200 linen jumpsuits in a boutique that seems to be advertising empty spaces. She has taken us as far as she can (about 10 kilometers south of the border), so dispenses hugs and then watches as the five us us clamber back into the Landcruiser, not a job among us. As we pull out, my parents titter about when they can see her next. They gaze anxiously into the crooked rearview mirror as they work to pilot one daughter south, in the process putting more distance between themselves and the other.
*
Three-and-some-hours on, my parents and I prepare to stop back in at the Big Banana. We are doing it right this time, I decide. This time, my boy gets to pick a banana. I pay for five plantation passes, and the man at the booth informs me that we must sit through the educational presentation in the theater before we can proceed on the tour. “We just want to see bananas on a tree,” I tell him. “The next show begins in… seven minutes,” he replies, looking at his watch as we stand by an empty roadside attraction. Not another tourist in sight.
Seven minutes later there are no signs of life at the rope line, but we wait. Eventually, the same man comes out of the booth and greets us, surprised. “The show is about to start. When it’s done you’ll collect a banana from the tray at the exit.”
We sit in the dark, in the center of an empty theater. The kids are singing when an almighty paean to agriculture begins to boom from the speakers, silencing them instantly. The intensity of the presentation is better suited to Enron than fruit crops. It begins with Alexander the Great, and covers a lot of ground, from Italian banana farmers in Australia to Sikh farmers to the realm of the carnie operating the water slides next door. A banana glimmers into being from the star stuff of outer space, and a diorama is lit up behind the screen. At one point, it rains inside, the water pouring out of the ceiling into a drainage ditch between us and the screens — one can only imagine what the banana lobby (Big Banana) spent on this miracle. The children began the show in the back row, and finish it lashed into our laps in the front row. Once it is over, a pre-recorded voice directs us to the exit, where a wooden crate has been visited by five solo bananas. Japhy takes one; Scout does not.
The plantation “tour” is just a raised metal walkway that zigzags briefly among the plants; it is self-guided. Japhy wants to pick a banana, but the bunches have been wrapped in canvas — forbidden fruit! He runs to the next, also wrapped in a protective sack. I think about zipping one open, heaving my child toward his bounty — what difference will one banana make to a bunch, really? — but an absurd fear of the rules prevents me from doing so. The walkway goes only partway up the hill before turning for home and dumping us out in a banana sorting room. “Think we can skip this,” says my dad, who has his eyes on an ice cream. We exit through a set of double doors and find ourselves returned to belly of the Banana. Before we leave, the five of us buy everything you can possibly buy from the Big Banana; the kids choose a Big Banana golfball for Grandma, a Big Banana coffee mug for Daddy, socks for Grandpa, banana erasers for friends. I visited the Big Banana; it is written across all our souls.
*
Milton seemed to me ultimately optimistic about Man’s expulsion from paradise. Adam isn’t pissed off that Eve ate the apple, and instead makes her fuckup his (“Flesh of Flesh / Bone of my Bone thou art, and from thy State / Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.”). It is not lost on me that there would be no families without the tree of knowledge and free will, just two nekkid humans whiling away the days. I think Milton might have had a soft spot for the messy worlds we create ourselves: “then wilt thou not be loath / To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess / A Paradise within thee, happier farr.”
Notables + quotables
On Beth’s “lack of object permanence when it comes to other people,” and the fantasy of The Queen’s Gambit, in which the many bad things that could happen never seem to, this gr8 piece by Aaron Bady.
After Megan O’Grady’s look at The Talented Mr Ripley and our culture of impostors, I have to read the book: “The United States is the birthplace of Scientology, Don Draper and Donald Trump, Bernie Madoff and Enron, subprime mortgages, QAnon, flat-Earthism, birtherism, the anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers. American self-conception, that wobbly construct, has long depended on a good amount of delusional entitlement: the necessity to dream, to just do it!”
Today, we played under tree #1 from this old piece by the amazing Hallie Bateman.
And I cried w laughter at the bifurcation of all our souls (IMPOSTOR CULTURE) as seen in this Tiktok:
Thank you for reading! <3 <3
"I visited the Big Banana; it is written across all our souls." Perfect and hilarious. Japhy kills me!!