Trent Dalton’s Brisbane: Ekka dagwood dogs, Milton Brewery hops and amps turned up to 11
Brisbane is a bat-sucked mango wedged in your mower blades. How do you convey that in French?
My wife has several beautiful French cousins who I’m always speaking Spanish to. They come over to stay with us in my home town and I always try to explain what it feels like to live here. “Radiante!” I holler grandly, exposing the pea-brained, wolf-boy-done-good realities of my outer Brisbane fringe upbringing. Then I drop some Italian to describe what it feels like to eat crumbed local flathead and chips as the sun sets along the Sandgate beachfront. “Magnifico!” I announce with wide-eyed confidence.
“That’s not French, you knob,” my wife says. “Please don’t call me a knob in front our guests, honey,” I say, softly. “Ahhhhh, knob!” says my wife’s globe-trotting cousin, Melissa, pointing at me, joyously connecting another new word of English to its meaning.
But what is that word I’m looking for? What’s the French term for the smell of hops from Milton Brewery when it blows over Lang Park on a Sunday afternoon in 1989 and a blond-haired boy wonder named Allan Langer, who has a heart as fat as a XXXX beer keg, slots a field goal in the dying minutes of a Brisbane Broncos blinder? How does one convey in French that feeling of Gemma Palmer’s Hubba Bubba-flavoured lips against yours on the corner of Greil and Celles streets, Brighton, summer 1991, beneath the street lights that crackle with kamikaze night bugs smashing against plastic? What’s the French word for that feeling in your stomach when you wash an Ekka dagwood dog and a strawberry sundae and a packet of bacon crisps down with a can of Big Sars?
I try to describe Brisbane to these sweet-faced and patient Parisians. “Paris and Brisbane aren’t too dissimilar,” I posit. “You have the Louvre Museum, we have Bee Gees Way on Redcliffe Parade. You have the Eiffel Tower, we have Stefan’s Skyneedle. It was a gift from our city’s most beloved hairdresser.”
I try to convey the deeper meaning of Brisbane, the purpose of it. “You see, Melissa,” I explain. “Brisbane is more a feeling than a place. It’s less a state capital than a state of being. Brisbane is not only to be lived in, it is to be lived. Brisbane as verb, you know what I’m saying?”
Brisbane is a bat-sucked mango wedged in your mower blades. Brisbane is the deadly black and white beak of a nutjob suburban magpie bashing on your skid lid. Brisbane is three big-bellied cane toads dying slow deaths in a rusting Kelvinator freezer beside a six-pack of Sunnyboy ice blocks. Brisbane is a sun-beaten banana-coloured clothes peg falling apart in your fingertips. Brisbane is a six-pack of beers for the garbos on Boxing Day. Brisbane is the thick meat mince of a Yatala pie dripping on the hot tan vinyl seat of a Holden Kingswood heading south for Dreamworld.
‘Brisbane is not only to be lived in, it is to be lived’
Brisbane is all five senses working toward a sixth. It smells like mangroves and boiled mud crab and tubs of pineapple pieces on cannery conveyor belts. It sounds like a popped cork in the old Cloudland ballroom and spring rain and wild summer thunder and the Saints and the Finger and the Gurge shouting back at that terrifying sky with amps turned to 11. It tastes like a banana split on the summit of Mt Coot-tha and a juicy Chermside backyard mulberry that once housed the worm that now calls your belly home. It feels like your newborn baby’s fingers against your bare chest and the cool shade of a Moreton Bay fig and the sting of soap suds in your eyes on the slip ’n’ slide beneath the jacaranda and the ghost of Joh Bjelke-Petersen whispering: “Don’t you worry about that.”
No worries here, Joh. It’s all good. It always has been. Flood, fire, murder, arson, corruption, convict brutality, moonlight depravity. Don’t you worry about all that, because we just got the air-conditioning installed and we can always turn it off for the five days of winter.
“You have to feel this place, Melissa,” I say. “You have to believe in it before you can really see it.”
All five senses working toward a sixth; that sixth sense of something that can’t be seen or heard, only spoken about in random words the world invented to bring meaning to it. Kjaerlighet. Cinta. Ast. Amore.
“Amour!” I say grandly, because this word covers everything. And I point at the Brisbane sky at dusk. “Amour!” And I point at the low-tide mudflats of Moreton Bay. “Amour!” And I point at the crumbed flathead and chips as the sun goes down on the Sandgate beachfront. “Amour.” It’s French for Brisbane.
