Love, Lust, Life and Landscape

Writing About Brisbane in the Last Twenty Years

Abstract

Brisbane is the kind of city that if it did not exist would have to be invented — and indeed it has by many of its writers. Its history of settlement and its political conservatism of the slash, burn and bulldoze variety has urged writers like Sam Watson in his novel The Kadaitcha Sung to depict it as a place of punishment, violence, racism and red-necked parochialism. The same sense of oppression informs David Malouf's mixed nostalgic references to the city as a place of beauty and boredom, a city you can love and hate in Johnno. In similar vein, Jessica Anderson in Tirra Lirra by the River, Angelika Fremd in The Glass Inferno and Janette Turner Hospital in both short stories and novels, depict Brisbane as a place one needs to leave but also a place where epiphanies are possible, and where the past haunts the present with a ferocious insistence. For novelists Rosie Scott, Janette Turner Hospital and Venero Armanno, Brisbane is simultaneously Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Many writers depict Brisbane as a great place to grow up in but you wouldn't want to live there — unless you are Hugh Lunn. Brisbane has been, and arguably still is by some writers, seen both favourably and unfavourably as a provincial backwater, unsophisticated and straight — still a frontier town in the popular and literary imagination if not in reality, a place where it is likely that you will know somebody who knows somebody you know. This is pointed out repeatedly by John Birmingham, author of the whimsical He Died With a Felafel in his Hand, by way of a distinguishing feature of flat life in Brisbane in contrast to other (Southern) capitals. In Brisbane, Birmingham writes:

Everyone's stories intersect, crossing over and through each other like sticky strands of destiny and DNA. (Birmingham, 42)