Home to Brisbane

I've been thinking about home.  Not so much the place as the concept.  I know people who never return to the place they spent their childhood, don't think of that place as 'home'.  I think I've been fortunate to have two places that I think of as home.  Well, three really, when I add in my current home.  I have the valley up the creek from Laidley where I was born, the home of my ancestors, where my siblings and I spent all our school holidays after the family moved to Brisbane.  I think of this as the place of my 'belonging'.  

Because of its distinctive landmarks, it doesn't appear to have changed over the years.

My other home is Nudgee, just 13 km north of Brisbane CBD but when I grew up, it was an outer suburb.  My parents lived there for many, many years and now lay at rest in the local cemetery.  I called in to have a little chat with Mum and Dad when I arrived in Brisbane on my road trip in June.  These days a highway which bypasses Brisbane to provide access between the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast runs alongside Nudgee.  The word Nudgee is believed to be derived from the aboriginal word meaning 'home of wild ducks'.   There is a still a waterhole, but it has been manicured and tidied, nothing like the place of my childhood.

Step away from the old Nudgee and Brisbane is vastly different from the place I grew up.  My youngest sister, Janet asked when I was staying with her if there was somewhere I'd like to go for a drive, any old haunts I'd like to revisit.  My plans were already in place for a visit to Laidley, so I immediately replied I'd like to see the city again.  I'm not a city lover, can't even remember when was the last time I visited inner Brisbane.  Janet lives so close, the view of what she called the Tower of Power from her deck had whetted my appetite to see the changes.

The Tower of Power, 1 William Street, completed in 2016, is filled entirely with Queensland Government public servants.  It is the tallest in the city.  I thought it looks better from the distance than it did up close.

I was much more delighted to see so many of the old buildings I remember as being old when I was young have been well preserved.

Treasury Building, where my brother Denis worked for years.

I do so wish I could remember the name of this lovely old building.  My sister, Esme, worked there when she first left school.   

 Dwarfed but not diminished

In some streets it's all skyscrapers.  Yet turn a corner and the traffic seems to disappear and you are in a suburban-like tree lined street.

The memories flooded in when I saw the McWhirters building, in my day a department store, now a shopping centre and apartment building. When I was a child, on the very rare occasion any of us was sick enough to be allowed to stay home from school, we'd make a remarkable recovery if it was on the day the McWhirters man called on Mum with his catalogues.  Anything new that came into our home was bought through one of those catalogues and delivered by the McWhirters man.  I guess there were a number of them over the years but they are all the one man in my memory.  A smiling man who made a fuss of me and gave me a little gift.  Although I can't remember what the gift was it was enough to entice me to McWhirters for my first purchase (and many more) after I started work.  I'm sure, had I encountered the same man on my "grownup" visit, I would not have made such an outrageous purchase.

After the CBD we ventured down to the riverside at New Farm/Teneriffe.  (I don't know where one ends and the other starts or perhaps they are the same.) 

There the old wool stores of my memory have been restored to their former glory (if ever a wool store could claim such), the whole area has been transformed into some of the city's most sought-after real estate.  I think of it as gentrification.  It's an upmarket place with the shiny and new sitting comfortably beside the contrasting old and solid.  It portrays itself as having "first-class dining, trendy bars and well-loved cafes".  Janet and I enjoyed a stroll along the riverside walkway.

Most of my photos that day were taken on my phone, either through the windscreen or out the car window.  Very rarely did traffic allow my sister to slow down to allow me time for a decent shot.  This one is even worse than most but it has to be included because for the summer of my fifteenth year I spent most Saturdays and quite a few school day mornings here swimming training.  The swimming pool my school used had salt water that was flushed in and out with the tides and this was where I swam after school.  Then I attended an interschool swimming sports at the Valley Pool (below) and discovered I was slower in the chlorine treated pool.  That was devastating and humiliating to me.  I've never been a morning person but I often got up in time to catch the first train of the day (shortly after 5 am) into town, walk the half mile to the pool, do my laps then walk back to the railway station and catch the train to school.  I was a self-taught swimmer and had never heard of a swimming coach let alone met one.  And I was never as good a swimmer as I wanted to be.

The Valley Pool served another more important part in my life.  One of those Saturdays I got talking to a fabulously handsome young man and we came to be friends.  He married one of my closest friends and they are happily married to this day.  Our children are friends.  I had caught up with them a couple of days earlier.  I got them to sit apart so I could get a photo of the scrub turkey helping itself to leftovers on the table behind us.  

Below is another city view, this time from the corner of the street where my brother, Denis lives.