literature

Andrew McGahan, 1988

The glow in the sky. Orange streetlights. Outlying suburbs. It was beautiful. The highway turned onto the six-lane arterial. We came in through Oxley and Annerley, flowing with the traffic. Then the city high rises were in view, alight, multicoloured. Brisbane. It was impossibly beautiful.

Andrew McGahan, 1988, St Leonard’s, NSW, Allen and Unwin,1995, p 308

Location

Brisbane, QLD

Australia

See map: Google Maps

1 January 1995

1 October 2010

308

Allen and Unwin

St Leonard’s, NSW

Brisbane, QLD

Australia

See map: Google Maps

David Malouf, Johnno, 1975

Brisbane is so sleepy, so slatternly, so sprawlingly unlovely! I have taken to wandering about after school looking for one simple object in it that might be romantic, or appalling even, but there is nothing. It is simply the most ordinary place in the world.

David Malouf, Johnno, St Lucia, UQP, 1975, p 51

Location

Brisbane, QLD

Australia

See map: Google Maps

1 January 1975

1 October 2010

UQP

St Lucia

Brisbane, QLD

Australia

See map: Google Maps

Nick Earls on Zigzag Street

There was a time when I, like a lot of other people, didn't appreciate Brisbane. It took me a while to work out that in terms of fiction Brisbane has a lot to offer. It's a great place to live, it has the colour and the characters and it's really coming into its own as a literary place to live. I love it here and I think that comes through in Zigzag Street.

Nick Earls, 1996

From Francis Whiting, ‘Fact makes great fiction’, Sunday Mail, 8 September 1996, p 21

Location

Zig Zag Street

Red Hill, QLD

Australia

See map: Google Maps

8 September 1996

1 October 2010

Sunday Mail

Zig Zag Street

Red Hill, QLD

Australia

See map: Google Maps

Literary mapping of Brisbane in the 1990s

The literary mapping of Brisbane underwent a major shift in the 1990s.

Queensland Bush Book Club, Annual Report, 1936

I have to thank you for the wonderful holiday. I haven’t been away for many years but I travelled far and wide with the last parcel. The perfect holiday they say combines escape inwards with escape outwards but when the latter is not forthcoming, it is still possible to obtain the escape inwards - for a member of the Bush Book Club anyway.

I have had the most entrancing holiday, visiting Java with Winifred Ponder. I have been admitted to Farthing Hall and watched the development of a romantic love story and enjoyed the domestic difference of two very likeable people.

1 January 1936

28 September 2010

Queensland Bush Book Club, Annual Reports, 1921-67, University of Queensland Library

Queensland Bush Book Club, Annual Report, 1926

I would like to thank you for your letters and your books. My husband’s mother must have been one of our first readings and she often spoke of the Club. It added such an interest to her life. I think she was the finest type of pioneer I know, and I would like to tell you about her.

She was born near Cunnamulla and during all her life I don’t think she knew a dozen women intimately. She only went to Brisbane twice. But please don’t pity her because she was the happiest woman I know.

1 January 1926

28 September 2010

Queensland Bush Book Club, Annual Reports, 1921-67, University of Queensland Library

‘A little bit of love for me and a murder for my old man’: the Queensland Bush Book Club

Life for a woman in the Queensland Outback in the early twentieth century featured relentless chores and many hardships.