Off to the Women In Media 2019 conference - from Adelaide with love

Virgin has made everything easy for our departure to Coolongatta.

Smiling assistants at the Adelaide Airport electronic checkins mean that there are no queues of touchscreen fumblers; a good omen for the trip to the 2019 Women In Media Conference on the Gold Coast.

I am one of the world’s worst flyers, so these things are significant. Like valium.

For some technical reason upon which the pilot does not expand, our flight is lower than usual, skimming the top of clouds and according a good view, especially when we

come to the Queensland bushfires.

They have been headline news for more than a week now. Wicked raging fires, deliberately lit but fuelled by drought and climate change.

Oh, my.

And there they are. Lots of them. The scale of the tragedy and the number of small fires as well as huffing huge ones is most distressing and one’s heart bleeds for the hapless wildlife, already stressed by drought.

We pick up a grey Mitsubishi Outlander from Budget, turn on Google Maps and drive what is a surprisingly long distance along busy broad roads lined by interesting tropical vegetation among modern suburbs and townships to Broadbeach where, with help from Expedia, I’ve booked us into the Ultiqa Air hotel apartments. Gorgeous, sleek

little self-contained and fully-equipped digs with the Pacific Ocean stretching to blue infinity outside our 17th floor windows. Yes. Happiness.

The hotel carpark is above the Oasis shopping centre next door and the receptionist warns us that it was a high level and a very curvy drive up. She understated. Curvy? It is one of the most

convoluted and challenging claustrophobic carparks of our experience with impatient locals tooting and speeding heedessly around the narrow hairpins. It seems to take forever as we gingerly find our way to the hotel's allocated places in a cement loft way up the top behind an electronic gate. But how to open it? We have swipe passes but there is no sign of a connector. We get out and explore the gate and the surrounding walls. Confounding. Do we turn around and go back? Ring the hotel? Then I spot it some distance behind us on a pillar. Grief! At last we’re in. We have to find spots marked with a yellow dot. Phew. Here’s one. Once the car is parked, we take a deep breath and swear never to take it out again. And down the ramp we toddle to the lift. It is shared with the Oasis shopping centre and has signs prohibiting taking shopping trolleys. The swipe passes access the lift momentum. Now which way? Do we go up to go down or is it down to go up? We go up and arrive at a long gleaming lobby on the hotel’s 4th floor. Then we have to find our way along passages to the actual hotel lifts and use the swipe passes to go up to our floor.

“Fffnthffnn” says the lift as it stops at 17. This is the first lift with a speech impediment we have encountered. Much hilarity. One is almost tempted to keep travelling just to hear her speak. Instead, we sort out our luggage, purr at our quarters, swoon some more at the view and head out for food.

Beside the hotel the Oasis Shopping Centre holds not only a large Woolworths and BWS booze shop but lots of classy boutiques, a post office, a medical centre, newsagent, souvenir shop, travel bureau, ice cream stand, etc. Um. Woolworths has some novel signage.

An exit arcade leads one to a mall outside which is a solid row of verandahed restaurants. Take your pick. Any nationality you like. They’re fairly empty. It is late for lunch. We choose Nanh Thai and sit down to a long overdue meal. We’re eating Keto, no sugar/no carbs, so we order beef salad and green chicken curry, no rice. It is wildly spicy and lovely and charges us up to go shopping for provisions - gin and wine top of the list. And thus, stocked, I message my valued fellow Women In Media SA (WIMSA) committee member, Arna Eyers-White, who has also invested in attending this historic conference. We liaise an evening get-together before I head out to look at the beach.

Oh, the beach. Golden sand and firm for walking near the water. We shuck off the cobwebs of travel and stride it out. Lots of interesting things for newcomers. Not just lifesaver stations but jellyfish. Lots. Never seen their like.

We plan early G&Ts and, traumatised by the carpark adventures, I don't offer to pick Arna up in the car. Mistake. She is staying at an Air B&B at Burleigh Waters and it later eventuates that she has a devil of a time finding transport.

When she does arrive by bus and after hours of frustration, I don’t know when I’ve ever seen anyone in more need of a G&T. A few drinks later, we meander down to that paradise of handy restaurants below. They are busy now.

We pick Mario’s Italian and are seated deep inside where we are fussed over by a sweet young Kiwi waitress and have a pleasant, unhurried meal and lots more wine. Bruce has a mountain of tiny octopi in red sauce. I have a delicate veal masala dish with prawns over almost raw green beans. Arna has a veal variation. We totter back to the apartment for a final wine and I put Arna into a homegoing Uber since she has not yet organised the joy of Uber for herself. We go to sleep with the door open, lulled by the magnificent roar of the sea.

With its miles of open length and constant rolling layers of waves, it is a mighty resonant presence.

Thanks, WIM.

Choosing choices

Choice.

It is a terrible thing to undermine our ability to choose - whether it be clothes, political views or groceries.

Hence, the big two supermarket chains of Australia are performing a profound disservice to the people with their campaign to swamp their shelves with own-brand.

It not only threatens the viability of smaller producers and manufacturers but also removes choice for the customer.

Already it has become hard to find Australian-produced canola oil. The globals are in ascent and with them, more and more foods and cosmetics prepared in China. In itself, this is scary, given China's history of contamination and corruption. I was very impressed with Woolworths when it led the way in trying to remove trans fats from its stores, starting with its home brand but, its marketing man in Singapore once told me, setting an example to all food manufacturers.

That fine stance looks a bit wobbly a decade later. I see China-produced confections for children clearly labelled as containing partially-hydrogenated vegetable oil. Lovely, tempting, delicious treats for Australian children - loaded with potentially damaging trans fats.

My respect for and loyalty towards Woolies now wavers. It has removed Evian water from its stock - never bothering to so much as answer my letter on the subject.

The water choices diminish - like all the stock choices.

Coles aisles, similarly, are less stimulating to peruse. The big excitement is seeing how many more varieties are turning up under their own label. There are knock-offs of everything. Just look at the growing range of own-brand flavoured tunas - which are the chic snack de jour - sitting there competing with the brands who may have brought such ideas onto the market in the first place but can't market it as cheaply. Long-term prognosis would have the cheaper brand killing off the original more expensive brand - and the choices declining.

America manages to run supermarkets where the choices are utterly daunting in their scale.

The first time I walked into an American supermarket the impression was definitely "super" everything. Even in small town outposts of New Hampshire or North Georgia, the supermarkets are consumer paradises of choice, variety and invention.

And nothing prepares one for Fairway, the supermarket to end all supermarkets. Like Niagra Falls, nothing can prepare one for its towering scale, its brilliant management, its endless variations on all themes, its fantastic hot and cold food prepared on the spot.

I found it in a rather dowdy old semi-industrial backstreet of Stamford, Connecticut.

Stamford, with its slogan "The city that works!", is not a huge city. With about 123,000 in population, it is only 8th largest in New England. It is an important rail hub servicing New York.

Fairway is a regional supermarket chain - there are other stores around New York. It's slogan is "Like No Other Market". How true.

One can design and have gourmet salads made to eat on the spot or take home for dinner. The supermarket has a cafe - in which I had what may have been the best clam chowder in the USA. Move over Legal Seafoods. The store describes its nearly 85,000 wonderful square feet of pure gastronomic joy as "an amusement park of food".

The aisles were so broad with such beautiful, well-stocked and maintained arrays of goods that one went almost into overload. But staff were on hand to assist and advise. Real, live, helpful, employed humans. "Service".

This is not to say that Woolies and Coles don't have fabulous, well-informed and helpful staff. The staff is one of the very best things about them.

But we Australian shoppers are being short-changed by their corporate policies and we need to stand up - or at least, walk away to Foodland and IGA.

They don't have the scale of Fairway but they give small companies a fair exposure to the consumer. They enable access to our gourmet producers, specialist products both local and imported.

They also listen to their customers and will endeavour to stock things which are requested.

We can't do things on the scale of the American model. But we can look at what the American model offers. And it is all about choice.