It’s time to say hello again to Goodbye Paradise
Part political satire, part film noir, Aussie classic Goodbye Paradise was filmed on the Gold Coast in the early ’80s and is about to be re-released.
When my family moved to Queensland in 1986 it was like entering a different country. To some extent it was: specifically, the People’s Republic of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, with its own unique language, political system, culture and customs, much mocked by the rest of Australia, although that didn’t stop them from moving here.
We know now that Sir Joh’s reign was soon to come crashing down on the twin tremors of the Fitzgerald Inquiry and the Joh for PM campaign, but that wasn’t the case in the early 1980s, when Goodbye Paradise became the greatest Queensland film ever made.
The movie was, it must be conceded, mostly the work of Sydney-siders. It began with actor-turned-writer Denny Lawrence, who came up with the notion of a Raymond Chandler-esque mystery set on the Gold Coast starring former 4BH radio announcer turned British TV star Ray Barrett.
Lawrence pitched the concept to fellow writer Bob Ellis (Newsfront), who responded enthusiastically. They researched the script together on the Gold Coast, which is nice work if you can get it. The story of Goodbye Paradise revolved around alcoholic ex-cop Mike Stacey (Barrett), whose search for the missing daughter of a Labor senator leads to much murder and mayhem, climaxing with a plot to secede part of Queensland via a military coup.
Goodbye Paradise is full of many recognisable Bob Ellis themes – humour and sentiment mixed with sex and melancholy, plus references to cricket, the Labor Party and old songs, along with (less winningly) nubile young female characters who find middle-aged men sexually irresistible.
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The script has far more discipline and narrative structure than a typical Ellis work, however, which can be attributed to Lawrence.
In the early 1980s Australia had a strong tradition of police shows on television, but there had never been anything like Goodbye Paradise, a comedy/mystery/action film/satire/noir, with its boozy, verbose hero staggering his way through various stratas of Gold Coast society, high and low: the club hoppers, retirees, newspaper delivery boys, Salvos, hippies, grifters, drug addicts, pensioners, landladies, sleazes, Japanese tourists, surfers, bludgers, neo-fascists, cult leaders, nepo babies, theme park workers, union apparatchiks, strippers, soldiers, boozers, drag queens, hookers, nudists, creepy doctors, pimps, separatists, millionaires, corrupt cops and cockatoos.
The script attracted a first-rate crew including producer Jan Scott, director Carl Schultz and cinematographer John Seale, plus a superb cast full of old faces (Guy Doleman, Don Pascoe, Tex Morton), new faces (Grant Dodwell, Janet Scrivener), new-ish faces that looked old (Paul Chubb, John Clayton), and theatre royalty (Kate Fitzpatrick, Robyn Nevin).
And if most of these people came from Sydney, well, at least the lead was a Queenslander: the hard-living, pockmarked, dulcet-toned Barrett, who knew he had the role of a lifetime, and rose magnificently to the occasion.
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The bulk of Goodbye Paradise’s budget came through the NSW Film Corporation, in part due to the personal intervention of Labor Premier (and former actor) Neville Wran, who enjoyed the idea of a satire of his great northern rival, Sir Joh. If only more acts of political vindictiveness left such a culturally rich legacy.
The film’s originality was its blessing and curse – after a relatively smooth shoot on the Gold Coast in 1981, Goodbye Paradise struggled to find a distributor and did not reach cinemas until amost two years later, despite winning several AFI awards in the meantime.
The sun-drenched, corrupt, mineral-happy, authoritarian, media-and-public-service bashing world of Goodbye Paradise is perhaps not as distant from our present as we might like to believe
The film never found a large audience and was hard to source on VHS and DVD for many years. It didn’t help that it was part of a parcel of NSWFC-financed films sold off to the Panamanian-based company Pepper Distribution, a deal that resulted in an investigation by ICAC (Independent Commission Against Corruption).
However, the movie always had its fans, word did spread and over time a genuine cult emerged around Goodbye Paradise. The film is being given a proper big release soon by Umbrella and looks terrific, with its lush colours, stunning production design and superlative cast performing one of the greatest Australian screenplays ever. (Full disclosure: I moderated the audio commentary.)
The Sir Joh era has inspired a number of splendid works on stage (Joh For PM: The Musical; The Incorruptible), television (Boy Swallows Universe, Joh’s Jury) and film (Joh: Last King of Queensland), but few match Goodbye Paradise. This is, in part, because satire can capture something – a tone, a mood, a feeling – that conveys truth in a way not available to strict reportage or dramatisation.
Only a few months ago the richest person in Australia, who inherited her fortune via birth, railed against lazy “woke” culture-cancelling bureaucrats and urged us to turn into Hungary, a speech eerily similar to that given by secessionist Sir Ted Godfrey (Tex Morton) in Goodbye Paradise, where he rails against “the tea sipping time wasting bloodsucking bureaucrats everywhere”.
The sun-drenched, corrupt, mineral-happy, authoritarian, media-and-public-service bashing world of Goodbye Paradise is perhaps not as distant from our present as we might like to believe, and we are blessed to have this film to remind us of that fact.
Goodbye Paradise will be re-released on July 9 as part of Umbrella Entertainment’s Ozploitation Rarities Vol. 3, along with Scobie Malone (1975) and The Empty Beach (1985).