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September 14, 2007
When I was in Brisbane yesterday I came across an article at Barb and Mal's place in Wilston by David Malouf on modern Brisbane, which was published in the Weekend Australian. The post I wrote there on Malouf and urban life using the Apple Macbook Pro was lost for some reason.
Sadly, I am unable to find the Malouf article, with its emphasis on his roots in literary Brisbane, online. However, I did came across Malouf's talk about the complexity and diversity of modern cities at the Brisbane Institute.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, on the Ferny Grove line, Brisbane, 2007
Malouf weaves complexity and diversity together in an interesting ways by linking them to public spaces and their shared social life.
He says:
Think of the map of your own day, your own week; the way we dip, according to our needs and interests, into the pool, the way by changing what we find useful in the cultural mix, we change our personal culture, or extend it by adding new interests to the old, opera or chamber music, for instance, to an older interest in pop or jazz. That interaction with the various elements of what the city offers is for any one of us, I’d suggest, every bit as complex as the transport system, as we would see if we had some means of laying side by side the two diagrams or maps.
He contrasts this with the conservative understanding of a society whose culture is uniform and single, where men and women share the same values, all of them undisputed, and the national culture was just itself and uncontaminated by outside influences or contradiction or conflict.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, lunchtime, Riverside Centre , Brisbane, 2007
Malouf defends the complex, diverse city that modern Brisbane has become:
that sort of complexity, that sort of cultural diversity, is worth defending, because it is often attacked: as being somehow impure; as being merely eclectic; as being a trivial form of culture for which the true model is the supermarket, with all its associations of instant appeal and glitter, and ultimate disposability.
Malouf says that one of the signs of the modern city is the creation of public spaces that are designed, in their very architectural form, to encourage a sense of shared social life, of active citizenship, that may be exhibited as clearly in play as in other more serious ways.
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Gary, its the Ferry Grove line . . .