Watch: Trent Dalton’s emotional tour of Brisbane

Ahead of the launch of his new novel, Trent Dalton has taken us on an exclusive tour of the local places that feature so prominently in the new book – and tells us why they mean so much. VIDEO

Award-winning writer Trent Dalton has introduced armies of fascinating characters – real and fictional – to readers in his best-selling books and journalism. And the one constant “character”, central to almost all of it, is his beloved hometown: Brisbane itself.

His new novel, the stunning Lola in the Mirror, is a heart-stopping escapade through the city, the locations as vital to the plot as other familiar backdrops were to his life-changing debut, Boy Swallows Universe.

Ahead of the launch of Lola, Trent takes us on an exclusive tour of the places that feature so prominently – and tells us why they mean so much.

Flinders Parade, Sandgate

The nameless 17-year-old hero of Lola in the Mirror rides her bike along Flinders Parade on her way to the home of a kind and elderly heroin addict named Ursula Lang who likes to watch Nicole Kidman films when she’s high. Our girl sees and smells everything that I remember myself from Flinders Parade, having spent almost every summer Saturday of my youth riding to the Sandgate Swimming Pool with my brothers. The battered cod being fried in the fish shops, the buttered popcorn in the swimming pool canteen, the mud flats of Moreton Bay. Once she reaches Ursula’s house, our young hero is presented with the ultimate prize: Arnott’s biscuits. “One Iced VoVo, one Kingston Cream, two Spicy Fruit Rolls and a Venetian that I’m saving for last.”

New Street, Nundah

Where our girl from Lola in the Mirror makes a shocking discovery at the home of another elderly friend, George Stringer, a widower who lives for nothing more than Scrabble and mango and cream Weis Bars.

Trent Dalton by the Brisbane Rive. Picture: David Kelly

Third Space, 505 Brunswick Street, Fortitude Valley

The iconic homeless drop-in centre where, for the past 50 years or so, staff and volunteers have been serving up close to 3500 meals to Brisbane’s homeless and at-risk each month. I’ve documented this place journalistically on-and-off for 15 years and some of the very real and wondrous people I have befriended in its halls became inspiration for several of my favourite characters in Lola in the Mirror.

The William Jolly Bridge

Our girl from Lola in the Mirror likes to draw. She processes the violence of her mysterious past through the vivid illustrations that open each chapter of the book and give the reader clues to future events in the unfolding narrative. The girl has a dream about meeting Pablo Picasso beneath the William Jolly Bridge. Picasso paints a human heart on the concrete wall beneath the bridge and seeds a dream of a different kind inside the mind of our hero.

Victoria Bridge Abutment

It was beneath the Victoria Bridge Abutment, on a small rock retaining wall beside the Brisbane River, that I sat with Moana, one of the central real-life figures of my non-fiction book, Love Stories. Moana said she would tell me a love story in the time it took her to smoke a Winfield Blue and the story she told – the one about how the city of Brisbane saved her life – was so moving to me that I decided to use this very spot as the location to the most significant turning point in Lola in the Mirror.

The Victoria Bridge

I find something so romantic in the Victoria Bridge, particularly if you’re walking across it when the city’s gone to sleep after midnight. Squint your eyes enough and you could almost convince yourself you’re walking over The Seine. It’s a place for lovers to walk at night in my book Lola in the Mirror. And then, soon enough, it’s a place where lovers will have to run.

Trent Dalton’s new book Lola in the Mirror is set in Brisbane. Picture: Liam Kidston

Clem Jones Statue, Adelaide Street, City

Our girl in Lola in the Mirror passes this beautiful sculpture tribute to the legendarily forward-thinking former Lord Mayor of Brisbane. She sees the Bertrand Russell quote etched in the base of the statue: “One must care about a world one will never see”. To her, that quote doesn’t relate to the future. To her, it relates to the present and all the people in the street who feel so invisible, living in a version of the world many will never see. A few steps beyond the statue, she comes to a space beyond some ornate City Hall balustrading where a man has been found brutally murdered.

Brisbane City Hall

One of the great joys of my life was walking into the City Hall main auditorium – a place I visited as a school kid on excursion in the late-1980s – and seeing some 250 extras dressed in 1980s gowns and suits as a group of the best filmmakers in Australia shot the climax to the Netflix adaptation of my debut novel, Boy Swallows Universe. Our mighty hall naturally makes a cameo in Lola in the Mirror.

The corner of Adelaide and Albert Street, City

Up until maybe early this year, if you typed the words, “cnr Adelaide and Albert Streets”, into Google Street View, you would see an image of me in a dorky fedora at a desk with a sky-blue typewriter and a sign saying, “Sentimental Writer Searching for Love Stories, Do You Have One to Share?” This is the spot where I sat for two months talking to the 200 people who helped build the non-fiction book, Love Stories. It was the most profound and meaningful journalistic endeavour of my life and I now realise that it was, in fact, very much a research project for my latest book. I see Lola in the Mirror as the fictional sequel to the non-fictional Love Stories.

Starbucks, Myer Centre

The busy coffee joint where our girl from Lola in the Mirror will make the rendezvous of her lifetime, the one in which she may receive all the answers she is looking for about her troubled and mysterious past.

Darra

This is how Eli Bell sees Darra in Boy Swallows Universe: “Darra is a dream, a stench, a spilt garbage bin, a cracked mirror, a paradise, a bowl of Vietnamese noodle soup filled with prawns, domes of plastic crabmeat, pig ears and pig knuckles and pig belly.” To real-life me, it’s the place where I spent six of the best years of my life. It’s the place we brought our baby daughter home to in 2007. The place is sacred to me, for reasons far deeper than the fact Que Huong restaurant on Darra Station Road is the greatest restaurant in the universe.

Trent Dalton has given us an emotional tour through Brisbane of locations from his new book. Picture: Liam Kidston

Bracken Ridge

Where Eli and Gus Bell move to when their mum is forced to do her time in the Boggo Road clink and the boys are forced to leave their beloved Darra. My dad in real life raised my three older brothers and I in a three-bedroom brick public housing shoebox on Cramb Street, Bracken Ridge, that I look back on today as Camelot. I can’t wait for the world to see a semi-autobiographical version of my beloved dad inside that very house as played by the insanely gifted actor, Simon Baker, giving what I consider the performance of his life.

Torbreck, Highgate Hill

The iconic Brisbane apartment block on the crest of Highgate Hill where the hero of Lola in the Mirror has a fateful encounter with one of the scariest characters in the story. It’s not far from Torbreck that our hero finds the full-length magic mirror that changes her life. She finds it in a street pile in a Brisbane City Council kerbside collection dump.

Boggo Road Gaol

The notorious and inescapable Brisbane clink that Eli Bell’s mentor Slim Halliday – the “Houdini of Boggo Road” – managed to escape from twice. In one rather ambitious escape attempt, Slim threatened guards with a replica Colt handgun that he had fashioned out of soap and painted black. I consider Boggo Road Gaol one of the most historic and important sites in Brisbane. The dark and bloody history of Queensland crime remains etched across its cold walls.

Originally published as Watch: Trent Dalton’s emotional tour of Brisbane