Peter and Wendy is a novelisation of J. M. Barrie's play Peter Pan. The excerpt (above) occurs when, in a confrontation with Captain Hook at Marooner's Rock in Mermaid Lagoon, Peter Pan is wounded and left alone on the rock as the tide rises (96). In the inner thrill of this rare moment of fear, Peter hears the oft-quoted words, ‘to die will be […] an adventure’. In dramatisations of the story, typically, Peter utters the words to signify his defiance of Hook and his indomitable optimism. Also overlooked in many adaptations of the Marooner's Rock episode is the Never Bird, who rescues Peter by desperately paddling her nest to him and abandoning her two eggs. Peter manages to raise a flag on the nest and shift the eggs to a pirate's hat so that he sails away and the eggs are saved (Barrie 1996, 100). The Never Bird rejoices and Peter crows and more adventures ensue. An unlikely bridge to the film industry in Queensland it might seem, yet Peter's survival is no more remarkable than the industry that now flourishes.

The story of Peter Pan, a touchstone myth of adult masculinity, is filtered in this chapter in accounts of two films made on Queensland's Gold Coast, namely The Coolangatta Gold (Auzin 1984) and Peter Pan (Hogan 2003). The fortunes of the productions and the quests of heroes, both, like Peter, near-naked boys, and of their mentors and enemies, are compared as fables of adventure and choice. The Coolangatta Gold dates from the shady years of industry start-up under the later disgraced state government led by Joh Bjelke-Petersen. The film was conceived with the aim to showcase the Gold Coast to the world. Peter Pan was produced in the sunshine years of the Gold Coast as a ‘local Hollywood’, as the term is coined (Goldsmith et al. 2010).