In retrospect, we had been adequately warned. Days before we arrived at Wooroolin’s Peanut Pullers and Backfatters Ball — an annual Bachelor & Spinsters’ event in rural Queensland — I’d spoken to one of its organisers over the phone. “B&S balls used to be a big thing in rural areas,” Jodie Butcher told me, “so all the single farmers and farmer’s daughters could meet someone. It was a proper sit-down meal in a hall, then you’d have a dance.” When asked exactly how B&S balls had changed, Jodie laughed. “Over time,” she said, “I guess it’s gotten a little bit … feral.”

As such, the invitation for Backfatters featured a sketchy illustration of a giant peanut happily having sex with a pig up the rear. I understood where the committee had gotten ‘peanut-pullers’ from: Wooroolin, a township with a population of roughly 200 people, lies just outside of Kingaroy, and the entire region is known as Australia’s peanut farming capital. ‘Back-fatter’, I discovered, refers to the local piggeries. Jodie told me that a sow at the end of her breeding cycle will become so enormous that locals call them backfatters: “It’s the committee taking the piss — that all we’ve got out here are peanut pullers and backfatters.”

It’s 4.20 am in Kingston, 30 minutes out of Brisbane, and already the place is a hive of human activity. In the darkness, people haul crates out of a huge delivery truck – the words “Tribe of Judah Care Services” printed on its side – and into a warehouse. A muscular Pacific Islander man reverses a packed forklift through the gate, when a bikie named Terry – tattoos, goatee, belly – rushes out to direct him. “Over here, Pete!” he hollers, gesturing like an airport tarmac guide.

In a few hours, 4000 to 5000 people from all over the Logan shire – an area that houses nearly 200 ethnic groups – will be lining up outside to receive bags of free groceries: 70 tonnes in total. The queue will be so long, it’ll stretch beyond the oval-sized car park and into the streets. Today is Free Food Friday, an event that The Tribe of Judah – an unlikely mélange of Christian church, Harley motorcycle gang and charity organisation – holds several times per year.

People might flock to the Gold Coast to feel alive, but it is increasingly also a destination for the dead. Drive inland, away from the scorching beaches, breakneck theme parks and thumping nightclubs, and you’ll eventually hit the quiet, bushy hinterland that locals affectionately call “the green behind the gold”. One of the suburbs here is Mudgeeraba, a place that is becoming widely known for its cemetery.

Gail Webb, a softly spoken funeral director from A Gentle Touch Funerals, leads me through the company’s cemetery, which ranges over nine hectares. “Quite beautiful, isn’t it?” she says as we walk among the headstones. Here, the burial ground is divided into two sections: a clippered-lawn cemetery to our left, with flat plaques in tidy, graph-like rows, and a monumental cemetery to our right, where a spectacular convergence of money and grief has taken place. Some of the memorial shrines are so large that they double as stone benches.

At the registration table for Lovelinx, a national conference run by a Christian organisation, an array of educational books and DVDs are on display. Titles include The Battle for Normality, The Courage to Be Chaste, God’s Grace and the Homosexual Next Door and Healing Homosexuality. Their variety risks being overwhelming, but mums and dads can turn their attention to one clearly targeted book, a practical-sounding volume titled A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality.

Lovelinx is taking place in The Factory, a church in Melbourne’s outer-eastern suburbs, which used to be a furniture workshop. The two-day conference aims to share the gospel “in the midst of the homosexuality conflict” and comes with the backing of Exodus Global Alliance, an international organisation representing a range of Christian “member ministries”. Exodus claims it is possible for people to free themselves of their homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ.