For some it takes just one look. For others it’s a wild encounter. The Courier-Mail’s best writers share the sweet, funny, mad moments they fell in love their city.
Matthew Condon, assistant editor
I fled a painfully conservative Brisbane in the mid-1980s thinking life was elsewhere. I left behind a rented Queenslander in Taringa with a deck as big as the landing strip on an aircraft carrier, and settled into a permanently dark terrace house – a former brothel – in a rough inner-Sydney suburb, where the cockroaches literally moved the pots and crockery in the sink at night, and desperate men rang the doorbell and pressed their noses against the flywire looking for a long lost callgirl called Legs North. The yard of the terrace was too small for a vehicle, was grassless and treeless, and the rear view was of a factory wall covered with graffiti. In Sydney, I had my car broken into a dozen times, got king hit in Kings Cross and robbed of my wallet, wined, dined, huddled in my house during a suburban police siege, witnessed three naked men skate past my front window during Mardi Gras, married and divorced. Almost 20 years later I came home to Brisbane and got a job back at the newspaper I’d left behind as a young man. On my first day, a secretary who had been there in the mid-80s, gave me a hug, and asked me – did you have a nice holiday? She then resumed a conversation I presumed we’d been having before I went away – roughly 7000 days ago. I moved into a house with a giant Chinese oak in the yard, palm trees, a jacaranda, a fig, and a rogue lemon tree. Then a few weeks later I took my child to a park in Ashgrove. As he tumbled across a wobbly bridge and climbed onto some rubber mushrooms, a man approached and asked me how I’d been going. His name was Joe, and I’d last seen him in class in grade 9 in the mid-1970s. We talked as if not a day had intervened. That’s when I genuinely fell in love with Brisbane, this town wrapped in a city, where you can reach out and quite literally touch the past. We come home. And we can breathe again.
Paul Syvret, assistant editor
A 12-hour road trip north from Sydney in a 1970 Valiant is a hard and thirsty slog. And so it was 20 something years ago my then girlfriend and I finally arrived in my old home town of Brisbane – the overgrown country burgh I couldn’t wait to leave behind while growing up – early one Sunday evening. “It’s quiet,’’ she said. And yes, the constant glare of neon and the rivers of tail lights crawling along Sydney’s arteries seemed a long, long way from Brisbane circa 6pm and its shuttered shops and cafes and almost eerily quiet streets. We deserved a couple of drinks; maybe a take-away six pack or a bottle of wine. No dice. Liquor licensing laws of the time precluded take-away sales after 6pm on a Sunday. You could find a pub or club still serving over the counter and get suitably hammered on premises before driving home, but no bottle-o’s. A gloom descended in the car. Brisbane being Brisbane though, I knew a bloke, a bloke who happened to run a pub I used to drink at. Fingers crossed. “Come around the side,’’ he said, where we duly swapped a $10 note for a couple of brown paper bags, and even though it was that God-awful Brisbane Bitter swill (thankfully a brand long-deceased), it was one of the sweetest beers I’ve ever had. That’s Brisbane: entrepreneurial, practical and not afraid to bend some silly rules. And home is where you will always know the ropes.
Frances Whiting, columnist
I had been away for three years. I’d had a moonlight picnic beneath the Eiffel Tower, spent three months sleeping on a rooftop in Santorini, ridden through Rome on the back of moped with exactly the sort of boy my mother warmed me about. And now I was 25 years old and coming home. As the plane touched down, the pilot said “Welcome to Brissie” and I started to cry big, whopping tears of joy and relief that everything and nothing has changed. It was the “Brissie” that did it, of course. Not “Brisbane” or the later popular “Brisvegas” but “Brissie”, my hometown. Brissie, like the girl in the corner who turns out to be the life of the party, and where, two nights later my friends take me back to Cafe Neon in Paddington to celebrate my homecoming and a girl I know (because this is Brissie and everyone knows everyone somehow) says to me beside the hotdog stand: “I haven’t seen you around for a while, have you been somewhere?”
Phil Brown, lifestyle writer
It was 1986 and I had escaped the culturally barren Gold Coast for the big smoke. Holed up in a bachelor pad in Plunkett Street, Paddington, from a vantage point on the side of the hill overlooked by the stunning St Brigid’s church I surveyed the weatherboard jungle spread beneath me. I lived in a classic workers’ cottage on stilts with a small terraced backyard. It was crowned by a mango tree that squeaked with fruit bats all night long. In the evenings I would sit on the veranda and take in the vision splendid – I could see Lang Park and beyond that the XXXX factory sign illuminated my horizon. I worked at the Daily Sun in Fortitude Valley at the time and I took my morning coffee at The Cosmopolitan café, sharing tables there with characters who would later become infamous at the Fitzgerald Inquiry. I was a reporter on a racy tabloid and there were a thousand stories in the naked city just waiting to be written. I loved the subtropical ambience, the fecundity of the foliage, the hubbub of the newsroom, the shabby-chicness of my suburban eyrie and I fell in love with the place I now call home.
Sandra Killen, U on Sunday editor
It was a fuchsia pink two-piece suit that did it. It was the 90s and I was on a business trip to Melbourne. I can vividly remember how I felt rocking up in my striking skirt and matching fitted jacket … ridiculous! What was I thinking? This was Melbourne. I stood out like a neon sign on a dark night. Everybody was in head-to-toe black. Why, oh why hadn’t I packed my black jacket, black pants and black boots? In the flat Melbourne light, the outfit that had looked pretty cool under a bright Queensland sun was all wrong. That’s the moment I realised how much I loved Brisbane. It’s the light here. Colours take on a different hue – they’re more splendid. More colourful. They look right. I eventually ditched the hot pink suit. Even in Brisbane, it lost its mojo. But I own a lime green cardigan, orange, pink and purple scarves, and turquoise jeans. And I’ve taken to fuchsia again – but never in Melbourne!
Michael Westlake, sports editor
Nearly 20 years ago, I was a cadet sports reporter standing on the sideline watching South Queensland Crushers training with a bus load of school kids. Midway through the session, and with the kiddies getting restless, a fellow reporter strolled over to the kids and, pointing over at me, said “Why don’t you kids go and get an autograph from Geoff Toovey?” Set upon by a swarm of 10-year-olds, I tried to deflect their outstretched hands and sugary sweet greetings of “Hello Mr Toovey” while desperately denying I was the NSW State of Origin halfback. The kids though would not be appeased. Even after five solid minutes of even more solid denials, the autograph requests were still coming thick and fast. Finally, breaking point – for the kids, not me. “Why don’t you just sign it?” one kid snarled, cramming his exercise book under my nose. “Because I’m not Geoff Toovey,” I replied, exasperated. The kid glared at me. “I don’t want your autograph anyway, you Blue (expletive).” With that, the crowd was silenced, and they traipsed away behind their four-foot tall, potty-mouthed spokesman. How could you not love that?
Jane Fynes-Clinton, columnist
The Ekka and strawberry ice creams are what sealed it. I had been raised on stories of them and not long after moving here from north Queensland in the 1980s, I threw my teenage self into both with gusto. Rides and ice cream blurred into a whirling dervish. Sadly, I realised too late you can have too much of a good thing. Specifically, it was aboard a ride called the rock ‘n’ roll – I puked strawberry ice cream through my nose onto the boy of my teenage dreams. Yes, I had fallen in love with Brisbane, but I also learnt that love can be messy.
Marg Wenham, opinion editor
One of the strongest memories I have in my life is walking out the door of the plane at Brisbane’s Eagle Farm airport, one beautiful, clear spring morning. It was October 1981 and I was 21. It was before the days of sky bridges. They just opened the doors and there you were, home. And you could see your folks and friends madly waving from behind a wire fence. And you could suck in the clean, crisp air and take in the true blue sky that went on forever. I’d just had seven months in Europe and the UK. The last couple had been difficult – I’d been sacked by my insufferably up themselves landed gentry employers – and then for three weeks it had rained. Not the big, cold, heat-breaking stormy rain born of massive thunderheads that I knew and loved. But faint, pathetic, misty drizzle from a miserable grey cloud base of, seemingly, 500 feet. I will never forget how I felt my spirits soar that October morning. And I knew then that, while I loved to travel and would again, Brisbane was my home and where I’d always want to live.
Robyn Ironside, political reporter
I fell in love with Brisbane the first time I stepped foot in the Queen Street Mall. It was 1983, and the mall had opened a year earlier, along with the glossy three-storey Wintergarden complex. A covered, above-ground walkway connected the Wintergarden to David Jones and you could sit in Mrs Brown’s coffee shop and watch the people below. For a 14-year-old whose only exposure to a shopping precinct was Gladstone’s Kin Kora mall, it was heaven. There was no Tiffany’s then, no Queen’s Plaza or Chanel but it still seemed like the height of sophistication to swan through the Wintergarden with its “high-end” designer fashion stores, carpeted floors and full length glass windows. David Jones had staff, Jo-Jo’s was cool and Kiss a Cop was a New Year’s Eve tradition. As Brisbane grew up, so did the Mall. It expanded over Albert Street up to George Street and sprouted the Myer Centre and Queen’s Plaza. Today it is every bit as exciting for me to visit as it was for a wide-eyed 14-year-old from Gladstone. Mrs Brown’s is long gone, and the covered walkway, but the mall remains a place of surprises.
Michelle Collins, lifestyle editor
It was the shoes, or rather the lack of them. My family are “Mexicans,” having migrated from Albury on the NSW/Victorian border when I was nine years old – 43 years ago. A doctor recommended the warmer climate would help my mum’s chilblains. Albury was freezing in winter. My school uniform consisted of thick black tights, a woollen tunic, long- sleeved white shirt and a woollen blazer. It weighed a ton. My first day at Wynnum West State School I wore a sleeveless frock and sandals and felt like I was floating on air. That first year I was entranced by the sun. (Yes, that was me swimming during the June holidays. It would take a couple of years before we would drive past a beach in winter, see people in the water and laugh “huh, they must be from down south”.) At big lunch that first day, I couldn’t believe my eyes when the other kids took off their shoes to play tiggy. School with no shoes – how naughty. The safety police have probably stopped playing without footwear but my aversion to wearing shoes has lasted. I still walk around home barefoot and don’t tell anyone but when I’m at work I slip my shoes off under the desk.
Brittany Vonow, news reporter
A few weeks before I moved to Brisbane to study, sitting in my family’s loungeroom in Adelaide, I watched terrible floods overwhelm my future home. I wondered what I was getting myself into. But upon arrival, driving around the streets I had seen underwater just a few weeks earlier, I was struck by the unexpected calm. The damage was there, but somehow, the locals were still smiling, going about their day, taking back control. I think that’s when I fell in love with Brisbane – or rather, its people. In a way, it was love at first sight.
Jane Scott, Brisbane News editor
The moment is captured, in full grainy glory, on home video. A bit wobbly, and with that green-ish, night vision goggles look, it’s filmed from the porch of our first Brisbane home, and shows walnut-sized balls of ice pelting down and forming white drifts on the lush green grass of the front lawn. Hail. In summer. Just another example of the Queensland weather that fascinates, and occasionally frightens me. Before that November night, the last time I’d seen hail was in London, our home before we became Brisvegans 12 years ago. When it hails there, it’s cold and slushy and unremarkable. When it hails here, it happens on a warm summer’s day, it’s loud (thank you corrugated iron) and utterly incongruous. I know which I prefer. When it’s not being destructive, the weather is still one of my favourite things about this town – the sudden, thundering storms. The pristine, mild winter days. The warm, soft summer evenings on the deck. Humidity? Doesn’t bother me. This is where I want to be.
Sally Browne, lifestyle writer
There’s something sticky about Brisbane that draws you in. It’s like a deckchair in the sun, easy to sink into, hard to get out of. I’ve tried to break up with this town so many times but I keep coming back. Because falling in love with Brisbane is a bit like falling in love with your childhood sweetheart. You might have been together a long time, you might even be an old married couple now, but you realise there’s no one you’d rather be with.
Barry Dick, online sports editor
I can remember the date like it was my wife’s birthday: July 8, 1980. Like 33,000 of my fellow Queenslanders I walked out of the old Lang Park with a broad smile on my face after the Artie Beetson-inspired Maroons had beaten New South Wales in the first-ever State of Origin rugby league match. Bliss.
Jason Tin, political reporter
“Steamed dim sims and special chow mein?” I always thought the words that would finally make Brisbane feel like home would be more profound – wedding vows, a eulogy, the first uttered by a future child. I had already spent years in Brisbane, mostly in Taringa – but Cairns remained ‘home’. One day Jimmy answered the phone (presumably wearing the thick vest he dons over his shirts even in the summer months). A quick hello was exchanged and then he asked: “Steamed dim sims and special chow mein?” And that was it. For the first time, I was a bona-fide ‘regular’ ordering ‘the usual’ – a long-held secret wish of mine. Suddenly, I belonged here. Mum visited recently and I shouted her a special chow mein at Jimmy’s Chinese takeaway – partly out of loyalty but mostly because I wanted to show off that I finally felt part of this city. She told me to lay off the dim sims.
Michael Madigan, senior reporter
I fell in love with Brisbane last February when I learned my 88-year-old aunt’s house in Wooloowin was among the first in the city to have an indoor toilet. “Having an indoor lavatory was a big selling point for houses when your grandfather brought the place just after the war,’’ my aunt explained, pride in that little deal-closer still evident in her voice. Soon after the revelation I had cause to use this very same toilet and, gazing in new found respect at the blinding white cistern, marvelled at a city that could take our family from the bogs of Country Clare to a Caroma’s ceramic splendour in just one generation. Infinity Tower can thrust its spires skyward, tunnels can shoot us across the city in minutes and the Gallery of Modern Art can burnish that gloss of sophistication we have recently begun to crave. But if you want to truly fall in love with Brisbane, know and accept that a mere 60 years ago she didn’t have in-house dunnies.
Kylie Lang, Qweekend editor
The year I moved back to Brisbane was the year a humble Brisbane bistro shocked the culinary snobs down south by winning the nation’s top restaurant award. So much for tinned pineapple, prawn cocktails and very, very bad wine. Queensland was on the move and as food and wine editor of the Courier-Mail, I was savouring the changes. It was 1997 and Philip Johnson’s lauded E’cco bistro wowed diners with something as ridiculously simple as field mushrooms on toast (a dish Phil hasn’t been able to take off the menu since). In the years that followed, visits by big gun chefs such as Gordon Ramsay, Rick Stein, Michel Roux and Jamie Oliver proved Brisbane was no longer a culinary backwater, and today, many of the most progressive chefs in Australia are here, rattling the pans for an increasingly savvy clientele. So when someone, typically a food snob from down south, remarks that Brisbane has come of age, I want to scream, in between mouthfuls of fabulous food and good wine: “where have you been?”
Robert Craddock, sports writer
Strange but true. It is possible to fall for someone before even setting eyes on them. It happened to me once. I was just 12 and fell for an older woman. A grand old lady called the Gabba. I read a book about the life story of Queensland cricket all-rounder Ken Mackay and became entranced by a chapter on the most famous game of cricket ever played – the Tied Test between Australia at the West Indies at the famous Brisbane ground. That the match was held an hour’s drive from my home in Caboolture besotted me and when I first got to see the venue after reading the book I went and stood on the spot where West Indian Joe Solomon threw the stumps from 12m out down to seal the famous tie. I looked small. I felt tall. It ignited a passion for the ground and the city which lingers to this day. In the mid-1970s Brisbane sport did not have much to crow about. Our brave but limited rugby league teams were consistently beaten by NSW. Queensland was yet to win a Sheffield Shield and Greg Norman was just another distracted surfie at Aspley High School. Brisbane’s big personalities were people like hairdresser Stefan who would reassure 50-year-old librarians on his high rotation television ads that their new hairstyle looked “just boodaful”. But we “owned” the best game of cricket ever. And still do.
Rod Chester, technology writer
My first Brisbane home was an old Queenslander I shared with four mates in a dodgy part of West End, just a ferry ride from the uni on the posh side of the river. Today that old Queenslander has been renovated (presumably the loo is no longer directly off the kitchen) and the dodgy corner store with a phone box is a cool café where people sip lattes and play with smartphones. I’m not sure when during those 30 years I fell in love with Brisbane but I’m reminded of it whenever I start the day with a run along that river. Sydney has Darling Harbour, deemed by locals a disaster. Melbourne has Docklands, kindly described as a dog. We have the South Bank strip from Goma to Kangaroo Point, where families embrace the best the city has to offer. I’m not sure when I fell in love with Brisbane, but I do know why. She’s easy to love.
Kate McKenna, news reporter
It was our weekly pilgrimage. The six of us – a mangle of push bikes and strollers – from our front yard in Windsor to the majestic fig trees in New Farm Park. As a child the playground was an extraordinary, magical place. My siblings and I would clamber along the branches, trying not to overbalance. As an adult, the park became a spot to return to with friends, carrying a rug and maybe a beverage. That’s what I love about Brisbane: the places that grow with you.
Paul Malone, sports writer
I’d been considering a job offer in Sydney for a few days. It was tempting. It would have been a good career move. But somehow the sight of the CBD’s buildings, looming into view on that arc of the freeway as you drive by Tarragindi, convinced me I didn’t want to leave. Brisbane works best for me for what it is, but also what it isn’t. Sydney is a mess if you don’t have the wealth to live in the eastern suburbs, the north shore or somewhere inner-city like Balmain. Melbourne is a wonderful place to spend a few days on holidays but there is something about their brand of bogan that I just couldn’t live with. Sydney doesn’t seem to be producing fewer spivs either. Brisbanites are my type of people, simple as that.
Sue Wighton, columnist
A Brisbane girl, born and bred, it wasn’t so much one moment, but a series. Brisbane’s daggy charm crept up on me and spoiled me for anywhere else. Childhood days of endless summer when, with my friends, I explored the wilds of Geebung on my brother’s Tommy Wallace fixed-wheeler. Cubby houses among the paper barks along the creek, grapefruit fights in the park at the bottom of Akaroa Avenue – these moments began our love affair. Geebung girls favoured bare feet and hand-me-downs. In those halcyon days before helicopter parents, mum and dad were probably having a few beers down at the Geebung RSL while we were godknowswhere. Cloudland moments too symbolized Brisbane’s daggy charm. Who wouldn’t fall in love with this wondrously eccentric building, as she swaggered over the Bowen Hills skyline? Like a blousy old aunt, Cloudland had seen better days even in my youth; still, as the venue for school fancy dress balls and, later, rock concerts, it lodged in my heart. Ditto the Spring Hill Baths on a sweltering January afternoon or jacarandas exploding in New Farm Park at exam time. Today, GOMA, the cultural precinct and boutique coffee establishments all proclaim Brisbane’s sophistication. But me? I’m still in love with those moments of daggy charm – Cloudland, rain on a tin roof, huge back verandahs, bare feet and bikes.
Mel Buttle, columnist
Specifically, I love Samford. However, I’m reluctant to point out too many of its advantages because it’s hard enough to get a park in the main street as it is. Samford is home to one of the best chicken shops on planet earth. True story. It’s not all humble peasant food though, pack a nice shirt because Samford is a mix of upper middle class movers and shakers who got bored keeping up with the Jones in suburbia and decided to do their own thing on acreage. There’s hippies in need of a hair tie and a steak dinner living in overgrown share houses at Mount Nebo slowing everyone down on the range with their slow camper vans. On the weekends there’s hordes of latte ordering tourists who don’t know how the bakery line system works and, of course there’s a small number of actual farmers. Sure, Samford is serene, but the downside of serenity is isolation and lack of services. Posting a letter is a 40-minute round trip. Going to the gym means risking a yoga fart in front of everyone you’ve ever met. A hot tip for new players, the Samford petrol station is open 24-hours, which means it’s always pie o’clock. They don’t accept supermarket discount vouchers, but they will let you hang out there if you’re 14 and have nothing to do on a Saturday night. Don’t ever change Samford, well maybe a bit of broadband wouldn’t go astray.
Rose Brennan, news reporter
A common parting-shot from those headed through the exit is that Brisbane is too small. While I used to nod my head in miserable agreement I realised recently the thing I love about my hometown is this thing I used to hate. Sinking a few beers at the Regatta Hotel, I realised I was surrounded by my oldest friends and these relationships held true because of how small Brisbane still is. So the haters can boast of New York’s lights and London’s smog all they want – I always see them boomerang back to beer-loving, familiar Brisbane.
Baz McAlister, assistant night editor
My first job in Brisbane, and indeed in journalism, was on an entertainment rag and it didn’t take my editor long to gauge what I was into. “Have a listen to this,” he said, handing me a CD single. “I reckon you’ll like it.” It was the song FIGJAM by Butterfingers. Our mag was based in Fortitude Valley, and this band embodied Fortitude Valley. The song was fast, brash, funny, irreverent, clever-yet-crude – and it was my crash course in the Brisvegas laidback inner-city Valley trash bogan attitude. I played that CD so much I’m surprised it didn’t melt. The night of Butterfingers’ live gig at Arena, from my spot on the balcony, perched above a sea of bouncing, sweaty bodies, I remember belting out the words along with the band – and then, I realised, so was every other punter in the room. That was the moment Brisbane won my heart. I’d come all the way across the world. I was a hairy, pale Celt built for the cold, adrift in a hot country. I felt I had little in common with its people except a high tolerance for alcohol. But here, at the arse end of the Earth, I’d somehow latched on to something that made me part of a tribe, even if it was just for three minutes and 33 seconds. We were all strangers, but we were all revelling in the pulsating heart of Brisbane, we were all in this together – and everything was going to be all right.
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