Girl sitting in a crate of Queensland pineapples, 1924.

Collection of the John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland image 60864

Pineapple farms, Beerwah, 1903

Beerwah, QLD
Australia
1 January 1903
4 October 2010
4 October 2010

Location

Beerwah, QLD
Australia
Brisbane
Survey Office, Department of Public Lands
6 chains to an inch

Pineapple farms, Beerwah. To be sold by auction at the Land Office, Brisbane on Wednesday 28 October 1903 at 11 o'clock. Queensland State Archives

Sometime in 1924 in London, a little girl, of no more than five years old, I fancy, sat down in a crate of Queensland pineapples and smiled.

Cover of Vance Palmer's 1947 novel Cyclone. Published by Angus & Robertson. This novel, with Legend for Sanderson, is set in a fictionalised version of Cairns and regions.

'Queensland is notoriously huge: most parts of it are still unknown, except to the people who live in them', found Nettie Palmer in 'Southern Queensland: an emerging picture' in 1927.

Andrew McGahan, 1988

The glow in the sky. Orange streetlights. Outlying suburbs. It was beautiful. The highway turned onto the six-lane arterial. We came in through Oxley and Annerley, flowing with the traffic. Then the city high rises were in view, alight, multicoloured. Brisbane. It was impossibly beautiful.

Andrew McGahan, 1988, St Leonard’s, NSW, Allen and Unwin,1995, p 308

Location

Brisbane, QLD
Australia
1 January 1995
1 October 2010
1 October 2010
308
Allen and Unwin
St Leonard’s, NSW
Brisbane, QLD
Australia

David Malouf, Johnno, 1975

Brisbane is so sleepy, so slatternly, so sprawlingly unlovely! I have taken to wandering about after school looking for one simple object in it that might be romantic, or appalling even, but there is nothing. It is simply the most ordinary place in the world.

David Malouf, Johnno, St Lucia, UQP, 1975, p 51

Location

Brisbane, QLD
Australia
1 January 1975
1 October 2010
1 October 2010
51
UQP
St Lucia
Brisbane, QLD
Australia

Nick Earls on Zigzag Street

There was a time when I, like a lot of other people, didn't appreciate Brisbane. It took me a while to work out that in terms of fiction Brisbane has a lot to offer. It's a great place to live, it has the colour and the characters and it's really coming into its own as a literary place to live. I love it here and I think that comes through in Zigzag Street.

Nick Earls, 1996

From Francis Whiting, ‘Fact makes great fiction’, Sunday Mail, 8 September 1996, p 21

Location

Zig Zag Street
Red Hill, QLD
Australia
8 September 1996
1 October 2010
1 October 2010
21
Sunday Mail
Zig Zag Street
Red Hill, QLD
Australia

The literary mapping of Brisbane underwent a major shift in the 1990s.

The markers of how we remember in the landscape seem to be everywhere.

Syndicate content