WEST End is a scattering of a dozen or so cottages. George Street is a narrow dirt track. North Quay is an orderly regiment of large homes and churches ringed by green fields and scrub. It is, it seems, a picture of a nascent village.
The shot is from Spring Hill’s Wickham Terrace in 1862, a sombre, grainy image which, apart from the snaking river, could be anywhere. The image has a scale and distance that appear at odds with the views and perspectives of modern Brisbane. The photograph is among the first in a new book of historic Brisbane images and Lost Brisbane and surrounding areas 1860-1960 is arguably the most comprehensive collection of such pictures ever published.
Lost Brisbane is the brainchild of QBD The Bookstore director Steve Robinson, who got the idea during a visit to the London Book Fair where he saw a copy of Lost London, a pictorial journey of the UK city’s forgotten landmarks.
On his return to Brisbane in November 2013, Robinson approached the Royal Historical Society of Queensland and pitched the idea for a similar book for Brisbane.
The society could select and curate pictures, research and write the historical notes, while Robinson could publish and distribute the final product and, thereby, cut out the middle man.
The Toowoomba-born businessman says he is no history buff, just passionate about the city that shaped the person he is.
“I grew up in southeast Queensland and am passionate about the region,” Robinson explains. “Because QBD is a family-owned business it is possible to do this kind of project.”
With a network of 55 stores nationwide, 22 in Queensland, QBD took the reins to finance the book’s publication and control distribution. As a result, Robinson is able to retail the dust-jacketed hardback at just $30, including printing on heavy art paper.
Six researchers – experienced historians from RHSQ – spent eight months trawling through the society’s bulging trove of 22,000 photographs to select just 500 images for publication.
The book’s commencement date of 1860 was chosen because cameras were just coming into use and 1960 made a neat century end date, also marking the time when colour was about to make inroads in the 1970s.
The historians’ aim was not necessarily to document lost and forgotten views of Brisbane, but to chart the evolution of the city – the golden decade of the 1880s, the financial crash of 1893, amalgamation in 1925, the Great Depression of 1929, the war periods, post-war prosperity, the rise of the region’s coastal playgrounds.
RHSQ president Dean Prangley hopes the book provides a greater knowledge and appreciation of Brisbane’s development and its growth into suburbs and outer areas, such as the recreational destinations of both Sunshine and Gold coasts.
“I hope it gives people an understanding of where and how generations lived and worked, their recreational pursuits and how they were influenced by and coped with the environment, political, administrative and technological changes and world events,” Prangley says.
For those early settlers it was a hot and humid environment – a new and exotic subtropical home that was sometimes in drought and often in flood. The book devotes an entire section to floods, particularly the devastating events of 1890 and 1893, the latter so-called “Great Flood” claiming 35 lives and cutting Brisbane off for days.
Fires also feature, particularly the three major fires of 1864, one of which destroyed 50 buildings and ultimately sparked the reticulation of water from Enoggera dam to the city as well as the building of Brisbane’s first fire station in 1868.
RHSQ research historians broke down their massive task into three themes – the city, the river and the people within which they created subcategories, such as bridges, floods, wharves, transport and recreation.
Two further chapters, Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast, were included because Robinson believed the coastal recreational destinations were inextricably linked to Brisbane life.
“I really wanted it to be about southeast Queensland and not just Brisbane, because growing up in Brisbane, we all experienced southeast Queensland as a whole – the places Brisbane people found iconic,” Robinson says.
While several earlier attempts of similar theme have been made, Robinson argues Lost Brisbane is the most comprehensive and highest-quality attempt at a pictorial record of Brisbane’s history. With 2000 of the 9000 printed copies of the book already sold, Robinson says he will hand over right to the book to RHSQ after three years.
LOST BRISBANE AND SURROUNDING AREAS 1860-1960
QBD The Bookshop, $30
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