Essential English phrases

Hello / how are you. Not a question about the surf.

The Gold Coast. Used affectionately by locals and slightly mockingly by everyone in Brisbane.

Late November, when tens of thousands of school-leavers descend on Surfers Paradise for a fortnight. Locals leave, prices spike, and it is worth knowing before you book a November move.

Swimwear. Queensland and WA say togs, Victoria and SA say bathers, Sydney says cossies. Here you will be asked if you brought your togs roughly weekly.

The actual central business district. Surfers Paradise is where the towers and the tourists are; Southport is where the courts, the hospital, the council and most of the offices are.

Tweed Heads and the NSW side of the border, physically continuous with Coolangatta. Different state, different laws, and for five months a year a different hour.

The Pacific Motorway, the single artery joining the Gold Coast to Brisbane. Congestion on it is the defining local grievance and the reason the Coomera Connector is being built.

The rainforested ranges twenty minutes inland — Springbrook, Tamborine, Lamington. Half the reason to live here and completely invisible from the beach.

A bluebottle — the stinging siphonophore that arrives on north-easterly winds in summer and closes beaches. Not a jellyfish and not deadly, but a genuinely unpleasant introduction to the surf.

The single most important sentence on this coast. Red and yellow flags mark the patrolled zone. Outside them there is no lifeguard and rips kill more people in Australia every year than sharks, floods and bushfires combined.

A narrow channel of water flowing back out to sea. Looks like the calm gap between breaking waves, which is exactly why people swim into it. Do not fight it — float, raise an arm, swim parallel to the beach.

The emergency number. Say which service you need; 112 also connects from any mobile.