Award-winning author and UQ lecturer Kim Wilkins tells us what she likes and dislikes about Brisbane:
I love the variety of architecture in the inner city, and I especially love GOMA and the State Library. I’m super excited about the Queensland Writers Centre moving there next year. The traffic and parking, however, drives me mad.
by Kathleen Noonan
It is the sound life makes when all your real friends go home and no one is left. It’s the sound left when all the fruit and bread and shoe-repair shops are gone and only coffee shop chains and 24-hour gym chains and tanning studio chains are left.
It’s the sound of gritty urban Brisbane dying in the shiny buzz of the newly urbane city. Old pink art deco apartments on the river. Gone. Authentic butcher shops. Ripped from their stumps. Multicultural, diverse, messy West End. Under siege.
In the last 10 years Brisbane has laid back, closed its eyes and thought, not of England, but of all that lovely property money.
And when it has opened them, it’s been well and truly pillaged. What’s resulted is a bunch of spiky glass towers, floors of empty office space while still more were being built and developments I wouldn’t let my dog live in.
We lost sight of what a city is for. Cities are for humans. They need to be human paced. They need to excite, service and delight us, not bombard and railroad us. Ever taken an elderly person or a small kid to town? After half an hour they hate it, begging to go home or as cranky as hell. Plenty of the teenagers hanging outside Hungry Jacks on the mall – that crowded soup of humanity on Saturday and Sundays – look miserable, bored and baking in black in the sun. People using certain parts of this city look unhappy. That should tell government and council something.
The city streets, in the middle of summer are as hot as Hades thanks to lack of shade, overhang and trees. And in winter are a series of freezing wind tunnels thanks to bad planning. Brisbane might be a sub-tropical city but be damned if we are going to plant enough trees.
You can escape it like Alice down a rabbit hole. Thank god, we’re finally started to embrace our own laneways with planned cafes and little live music venues. That’s a vast leap.
We need places in a city that nurture us, delight us, put something back into our souls without costing the earth — The Troubadour at the Valley, Archives second hand bookshop, Mowbray Park late in the afternoon when the day’s lost its sizzle and the tide is turning.
I love the wild places like under the Story Bridge. Not its view from the top. But the secret urban space of its undercarriage. It has a wild, away feel to it. Standing under 22,000 tonnes of steel, this cantilevered structure’s concrete feet rumble like you’re between the paws of a purring sphinx.
I love glorious unruly places like the old Queensland Museum in Bowen Hills. Built 116 years ago with un-Brisbane-like flamboyance with soaring turrets, and it looks bereft and beautiful. We need to find new ways of using every bit of it.
I love the Gallery of Modern Art — inside, thanks to what director Tony Ellwood thoughtfully fills it with, and outside, because someone wise kept the big tree on the river in front of it and that makes all the different in the world — its branches an anchor from human to city.
I love the narrow, scruffy, hard-working little back lanes of West End endangered by plans to make this unique suburb part of the densest residential area in Australia. It is a working village. It is human paced. Great cities like New York value, protect and nurture its villages. We’re intent on destroying them.
And while we’re on the subject of bad planning, take a stroll through the redevelopment of our City Hall Square. To me it brings to mind a vintage piece of Michael Leunig scribbling: “Every night and every day/The awfulisers work away/Awfulising public places/Favourite things and little graces/Democratic, clean and lawful/Awful, awful, awful, awful.”
What I love about Brisbane’s inner city and some things I would like to see changed — by Malcolm Snow, CEO South Bank Corporation
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I love Brisbane’s evocative, sensory landscape, its sinuous river promontories each with their distinctive place characters and communities such as New Farm, West End, Kangaroo Point and South Bank. It is the relationship between the physical elements of our inner-city and how we interact with them that define its special qualities and differentiates it from all other cities.
We need to be sure that the qualities valued by current residents are not being enjoyed at the expense of future citizens.
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Things I would like to change or see happen would include (in no particular order):
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Singer, songwriter, veteran performer and West End local Leah Cotterell shares her views about what she likes and dislikes about Brisbane.
What I like about Brisbane is the generosity and easy going nature of my artist associates and the inclusive inner city community in West End. Our climate has historically promoted a relaxed and inclusive lifestyle.
What I would like to see changed is the sense that too often our tax-payer funded institutions (responsible for public programming and resourcing of the arts) anxiously measure local artists against a perception of global ‘best practice’. At times this pressure exerts a new, more sophisticated cultural cringe, making it seem safer to back perceived winners and imported talent. I wish we could develop a more positive sense of self, empowering and facilitating our diverse artistic communities and supporting a long-term vision for healthy cultural self esteem. All sorts of improbable and exceptional things happen when we have faith in ourselves.
We asked our speakers to send in their reflections on what they like and dislike about Brisbane’s inner-city. Author and journalist Matthew Condon (who is speaking at our first forum, Create Our City’s Heart & Soul, on Saturday 24 October) was first to share his thoughts.
I remember as a boy going into “town” with my grandmother on a tram. I may be making this up, or distance may have coloured my recollections, but I see in my mind’s eye a long pale green tram and slatted wooden seats and broad windows, and I’m watching Brisbane go by to this symphony of squeaking wheels and electrical bursts on the overhead wires. And we would get off at City Hall that, as a child, I thought was the seat of all power and grandeur on earth. I loved the lions and still do. I loved the horse King George V rode on, and still do. Only yesterday I was in that square, more than 40 years later, watching the workers completing the square renovations, and it no longer resembles that deliciously ramshackle focal point for all demographics of the Brisbane community. Places like city squares, to my mind, emerge from people’s needs for a civic space, not somebody else’s idea of those needs. They should be more than a nice place for office workers to sit and have lunch. Maybe I’m being romantic, but the “new” square looks yet again like a makeover by committees that don’t have a firm grasp on what this space is trying to say to them, what it’s calling out for. So we’re landed with another workable but inappropriate shaping of space, like a shirt that doesn’t quite fit the shoulders.
I have always loved the Brisbane River despite having kayaked on it as a 12-year-old with a friend in a two-man honey-coloured wooden canoe, overshot the landing point, and ended up in Goodna when we should have disembarked at St Lucia. And I think the city has finally opened its eyes to the river that, for decades, we as Brisbanites turned our backs on. The beauty of the river is in its wild turns, especially the great wheeling about it does at Gardens Point and then Petrie’s Bight under the Story Bridge. If only we could remove the Riverside Expressway and return the banks to the city itself. Poet Emily Bulcock once wrote a verse about the river for the 1924 Centenary of Oxley’s founding of the city. One line says: “Our lovely stream has fired no poet’s song.” I would argue that this is still possible, if we haven’t achieved it already.
I love taking my children to South Bank and the gallery precinct, the state library (which I think is the best state library in Australia) and the recreational southern end. I have a feeling this entire precinct is in the early stages of becoming one of the country’s more outstanding art and cultural zones, but I’m wondering if the northern and southern ends of this precinct are actually complementing themselves. Is it part fun park and part artistic feast? What is it all saying about the city and its people? Is it a definition of what Brisbane people desire? Who knows? South Brisbane on the river was historically a pleasure precinct, so maybe that mix of high and low brow does actually work. I know I feel I’ve crossed an invisible border, however, when I walk from the Queensland Art Gallery and down to the gardens and water features.
I love the restoration on Government House on the ridge atop the Botanic Gardens, and think we could go even further and return the magnificent Parliament House to the gardens itself by removing the little tongue of George Street in front of the House and giving it back that wonderful run of parkland down to the fountains. The gardens, to me, are one of the city’s great historical epicentres and now seem to be running second cousin to the Mount Coot-tha Gardens and South Bank. I’d love to see its glory returned. You can’t manufacture the feel of those gardens and the role it has played in the life of Brisbane.
– Matthew Condon
We are very excited to announce the line up for the first of our forums: Create our city’s heart and soul. Our panel will explore where Brisbane’s cultural heart and soul lies, and how we can keep it alive. Joining us on the day will be:
Matthew Condon — journalist and acclaimed novelist. Matthew was born in Brisbane and left in 1986, not returning for 20 years. He lived in the UK, Germany and France. Educated at the University of Queensland (and at the Goethe Institute in Germany), Matthew has worked for some of Australia’s leading newspapers. He is one of the finest feature writers around, and is regularly published in The Courier-Mail’s Q Weekend magazine. His latest novel is The Trout Opera. He is currently writing a book on the city of Brisbane as part of the University of NSW Press’ series on Australian cities.
Kim Wilkins — novelist and writing teacher. Kim was born in London, and grew up at the seaside north of Brisbane. Despite a short-lived career as a bass player and singer in the 90s, she has devoted her life to writing. Kim has degrees in literature and creative writing, and teaches at the University of Queensland, and in the community. Her first novel, The Infernal, a supernatural thriller was published in 1997. Since then, she has published across many genres and for children, young adults and adults. Her latest books, contemporary epic romances, are published under the pseudonym Kimberley Freeman. Kim has won many awards and is published all over the world. She lives in Brisbane with her husband and two small children.
Malcolm Snow — CEO of South Bank Corporation. Malcolm is one of Australia’s leading public planners and landscape architects. He has won more than 30 national and state awards for urban management and design excellence. For a decade until 1998, he was Head of Design for the City of Melbourne, a position that saw him win the Prime Minister’s Award for Urban Design for the Melbourne CBD Revitalisation Strategy.
Kathleen Noonan — popular Saturday columnist and feature writer with The Courier-Mail. Kathleen began her journalism career in Mackay before working in South Africa and the UK. She has written for The Australian and The Courier-Mail, and regularly writes about the inner city and its surrounds in her philosophical weekly column in The Courier-Mail’s ETC (entertainment, travel and culture) liftout.
Leah Cotterell — One reviewer said Leah Cotterell could “sing the shopping list and melt you heart” (Rhythms magazine, June 2002). Brisbane audiences have melted over this talented singer/songwriter’s performances for the past 20 years. In recent years you may have heard her on ABC radio and TV, or seen her performing as a singer spanning many genres including jazz, country, hillbilly Gospel and traditional music. Leah has also appeared in professional theatre productions for La Boite, TN! and QTC and has also earned outstanding reviews for her four appearances in the review series Women In Voice. In 2005 with her musical partner Helen Russell (Double Bass), Leah completed Foolish Things, a history of popular music in Brisbane which debuted in the Queensland Music Festival at City Hall, and became a Story Hall exhibition at The Museum of Brisbane. A West End resident, Leah is firmly entrenched in Brisbane’s inner-city music culture.
Kelly Higgins-Devine will be the MC for the event. Many of you will know Kelly as the irrepressible Drive program presenter from 612 ABC Brisbane. Kelly’s passion for her job is not just about exploring the issues of the day, but also about sharing her love for the Brisbane Lions and for the song, Devil Went Down to Georgia, with the largest number of people possible. Kelly joined ABC’s NewsRadio network a decade ago, and has been with local ABC in Brisbane since 2004.
So come and join us at the Ithaca Auditorium, Brisbane City Hall, on Saturday October 24, from 1pm-3pm. Entry is free and there will be music and entertainment for the whole family.
The Brisbane Institute is honoured to have opera singer Maroochy Barambah singing a blessing song, ahead of a performance by Daki Budtcha / Turrbal, as part of the welcome to country by the traditional owners.
Musical entertainment will also be provided by the Tropical Dance Duo, while audience members have the opportunity to re-imagine Brisbane on inner-city maps.
If you feel inspired before the day, leave us a comment to tell us what you think is important to sustaining Brisbane’s cultural heart. Or you can have your say by completing our survey.
Shape Your City Heart is a Brisbane Institute initiative, and is proudly supported by the Brisbane City Council.