Book Review: Brisbane

John, the government employed town planner, suggested Matthew Condon’s Brisbane as the first book of 2011 for the Blokes’ Book Club. Being men, the Blokes are comfortable with non-fiction. The suggestion was received with some warmth.

Brisbane is as much personal and family memoir as it is a history of a city. John Oxley’s identification of the site for a city is the historical moment about which the book revolves. For Condon, the moment does not take its significance from the symbolic further extension of empire upon further Indigenous terrain. Rather, significance is drawn from subsequent mis-identification of the spot by a tendentious lawyer, teacher, academic administrator and historical society figure, Francis Cumbrae-Stewart. Cumbrae-Stewart was, as the detective work in Brisbane unveils, responsible for locating a monument to mark the discovery at the North Quay which the city’s founders settled on.

The true spot was further upstream and made most recently famous by a restaurant once called Oxley’s On The River. The restaurant then became Drift. In mid-January 2011, floods tore Drift from its moorings at the spot chosen by Oxley. Thus, the restaurant spent its last hours before disappearing between the river of the river city living the name it had been most recently given.

The Cumbrae-Stewart story is a fascinating vignette of local history. It has extra appeal in that correcting the error of the monument’s location sparks a further journey with the original symbolic European discoverer. For Condon, however, Cumbrae-Stewart’s uncorrected error becomes a symbol of a city that cares little for truth or its own history. Brisbane becomes a city without an index.

The search to restore the index is entwined with the portrait of the author as a ten year old boy growing up and then searching for the lost illusions of childhood. The search is also one for forgiveness and understanding for the native who abandoned the childhood home for more glamorous climes as part of the rites of growing up.

The stories in Brisbane are full of interest. The thesis of loss and re-discovery that tie them together is not the story of Brisbane that this reviewer would choose. It is not the narrative I would choose to tell. Nor is it the wrapping of myth I would choose in which to wrap the assorted shards of memory and hearsay that comprise my idea of this town in which I have lived since 1967.

It is not an appropriate criticism by a reviewer that the author did not write the book the reviewer might have written had he the talent and courage to write a book. Books about one’s home town, however, do encourage opinions. And, when talking of cities, as Italo Calvino taught us, perspective is the key to all. I suspect I am half a generation older than Mr. Condon. I grew up in rural Queensland as the son of a school teacher. When Brisbane became my home from 1967, I was still 13.

The author is also one of those Queenslanders who left when they reached adulthood and did or did not return. There are many famous Australians who fled provincial Queensland and made their way in the real world beyond. I was one of those with insufficient imagination to find the way out and plodded on at home.

For me, neither Oxley nor the mistakes of Cumbrae-Stewart matter one whit. Brisbane is clearly delineated in our memories of mango trees that dominated back yards and littered the ground in spring with falling blossom and in summer with over ripened fruit. Brisbane is world of falling wooden fences held together by meandering choko vines. Brisbane is defined by worker’s cottages and Queenslanders, as much by their renovation beyond recognition as by their tasteful retention and restoration. Brisbane needs no index to guide one to its realities.

The Blokes met to discuss Brisbane after the floods on the back deck of a house in a well settled street in The Gap. The treed front yards marked a modern Brisbane street in the same way as, forty years ago, the same streets were marked by closely mown green grass rectangles with only a concrete path down the centre and sparsely planted rose bushes or zinnias to disrupt the constancy.

Every one of the Blokes other than me had unmitigated praise for Brisbane. A good book, of course, starts, not ends, discussion. We each searched to find the definitive marker of the city for our respective generations. We shared hummus, cheese, wines and cups of tea. Our discussions were interrupted by a Brushtail who callumped up the back steps and took a share of biscuits as her due.

We also read Matthew Condon’s brilliant magazine article on Brisbane and the floods. The heat of a February night kept us company.

Brisbane had found us. We had to look no further.