I like the watch your head pic.
Beattie? Who's that?

Les,
dunno.The 'watch your head poster, was everywhere on the platforms.There were some posters about 'watch your feet.' And plenty of Workchoices advertisments. I kinda like the Central Railway Station in Brisbane.

There was plenty of graffiti on the walls along both sides of the railway line out to Wilston.

Gary,
David Malouf has written about the literary Brisbane. He says that he grew up in an Australia that was impoverished and that Brisbane was really the capital of poor white Australia. He talks in terms of the long depression which in some ways lasted from the end of the 1890s right through almost to the outbreak of the war in 1945.

Pam,
the Malouf article that I read, that had been cut out of the Weekend Australian, talked about the difference of Brisbane in terms of the moisture in the air, the quality of light, life under the house, the storms in the afternoon, and rain on the tin roof at night.

Gary
David Malouf’s novel Johnno is full of images from 1940s and 50s Brisbane, like the tramways, brothels and gardens. Malouf sees Brisbane as exotic and it is Dante in Johnno who lamented that Brisbane was a place "where poetry could never occur".

His view of the city is telescoped into a landscape which with its ramshackle inner city dwellings, muddy, mangroves and its ‘ordinary’ life that seemed the apotheosis of life in exotic foreign locales. This impression is cemented by the fact that much of early Qld architecture aped that of Europe, and so echoed those distant vistas without ever feeling able to present the ‘real thing’.

Malouf has written some evocative descriptions of this place eg ‘Brisbane is so sleepy, so slatternly,
so sprawlingly unlovely… It is simply the most ordinary place in the world’ (p 72). And he has Dante deliver a fierce diatribe against this Brisbane: ‘It was so shabby and makeshift … a place where poetry could never occur.’

Pam
I recall reading somewhere that Malouf reframed the vastness of the bush and questioned the way that it had been reframed as an vast, empty, unforgiving, barely explored expanse .

He said that once upon a time --(the 19th century?) Australians found that emptiness to be very frightening, and there was that emptiness as nothingness or deadness that was emptiness, and that it represented an emptiness in us as well.

Malouf's reframing says that we feel that emptiness anymore, as he doesn't see any reason why one should be anything but positive about Australia. Australians I have created a society in which we've learnt to live together in very complex circumstances and that everything in our past would tell us that we have developed the resources for facing crisis and getting over them really quite well.

Was that in the Boyer lectures in 1998?