One of my last trips before the Covid19 pandemic was to Cairns, Australia. Actually, my real destination was the Great Barrier Reef ; Cairns was just where I went to, to get to the reef. After all, what other bucket list destination is better for a marine ecology-philic person, than the largest coral reef ecosystem in the world, hosting the kind of biological diversity that merited a UNESCO World Heritage Site classification? How can a tourist town be interesting, you ask? My first clue was Cairns International Airport.
I had first gone to Sydney , and then to Melbourne. In successive trips to the Pacific , I had generally chosen to transit at either one of those cities , because I have friends there. So I noticed the difference when I finally landed in Cairns. For starters, arriving in Cairns felt like transiting through Auckland. The border officers went through the same procedures as the other Australian airports, but it had a more laidback vibe.
I felt like I was just any other passenger. For another thing, the airport had Aboriginal art in parts of it. And it was only then that I realised, that Melbourne and Sydney did not. I spent about three weeks in Cairns. Some of it was spent on a liveaboard out in the Coral Sea, and I was busy with a volunteering program for much of the rest. So it took me some time to figure out why Cairns came across as unusually diverse in my head.
After all, Australia has a lot of different ethnic communities. Certainly Sydney and Melbourne can be considered diverse. And I myself come from a notoriously multi-ethnic country.
Surely, a diverse place would feel merely normal to me, and not stand out. Was it only because of how much more visible Aboriginal people are in Cairns, compared to the other cities? Surely that was not all it was. And then I realised it was the kind of diversity in Cairns that was different.
