Although it’s been uni break over the last week, I’ve been a busy boy. I now have a date with destiny for my doctorate – I’m presenting to a final seminar on 30 October. This is the internal examination stage of phd completion according to the QUT rules – it’s a bit like a viva voce where you talk about what you’ve done and found and are questioned by a panel of senior academics (and the audience!) – in my case from QUT’s Humanities Program (once was a Faculty…) I more or less wrapped the thing up on Friday, did a little revision yesterday, and lazed around last night and watched Maggie Cheung movies on dvd, and today and tomorrow before the teaching and marking onslaught resumes, I’m giving the thesis a final spit and polish.

So I’m very chuffed!

Folks might also remember I’ve been doing a bit of travel writing – of the insider’s guide to where you live variety. I filed my copy for that and sent in the invoice on Tuesday arvo, and it was a really neat gig. On Monday, I went for a wander around Paddington and took some photos – not for the project itself – but as an aide memoire. It turned out to be a dodgy day to be walking – 35 degrees maximum. But it did also prompt me to decide that walking for about an hour a day was a good custom to be revived – so I’ve been doing that ever since – in the late afternoon on cooler days and at night on hotter days. Anyway, here’s the photographic record of my Paddo perambulations. It’s a really nice part of the world, and somewhere I wouldn’t mind living. But the real estate market would really have to collapse before I could contemplate buying there!

White picket fence II by *phenomenologist on deviantART

If you’d like to see a larger image of the photos, click on them then click on “full view” once you’re inside the gallery.

Steep streets by *phenomenologist on deviantART

Miss Posh Poodle I by *phenomenologist on deviantART

Miss Posh Poodle II by *phenomenologist on deviantART

Colourful cottage by *phenomenologist on deviantART

Paddo house II by *phenomenologist on deviantART

Sassafrass by *phenomenologist on deviantART

Kiln gallery by *phenomenologist on deviantART

Paddo houses by *phenomenologist on deviantART

Spring by *phenomenologist on deviantART

Grey shop by *phenomenologist on deviantART

Kookaburra Cafe by *phenomenologist on deviantART

Paddo shops by *phenomenologist on deviantART

Colourful shop by *phenomenologist on deviantART

Photo credit: me. A larger version of the image can be seen here by clicking on full view once inside the gallery.

The latest issue of Griffith REVIEW – Hidden Queensland – touches on a number of subjects close to my heart. In framing the issue, editor Julianne Schultz opens her introduction with a quote from a “well-connected insider” who expressed puzzlement in the lead up to the 2007 federal election – what did he know of Kevin Rudd and the rest of the crew from the North who might soon be moving into the Canberra corridors of power? Had they been from Melbourne, Sydney or “even Adelaide”, they’d have been on the radar. But what had been happening to transform a bastion of illiberality into the new centre of the “reforming Centre” in the two decades when he hadn’t been looking?

Schultz makes the point – one reinforced and treated in some detail by Ray Evans in his contribution – that the canon of Australian national history is replete with texts which devote a scant few pages at best to Queensland’s place in our common story. While Schultz is concerned to argue that the state often lampooned for its scorn for education in fact harbours a considerable intellectual tradition, other contributors also throw some light on why the Sunshine State might perhaps be a place of secrets and darkness. Maybe as she suggests in her opening essay ‘Disruptive Influences’, the attitude of reluctance to cast pearls before swine, and the chip on the shoulder that is the mirror image of Southerners’ contempt, have been traditionally attributed to the sub tropical climate. But the sense that Queensland’s an elusive sort of place is teased out in greater detail in both that essay and the issue as a whole.

Probably of most interest to those concerned with matters political will be Schultz’s placing Kevin Rudd’s roles as a staffer to Wayne Goss and subsequently a senior bureaucrat within the context of the political dynamics of the time. I’m inclined to think that she’s a bit less critical than perhaps she could have been of the Goss government, and in particular there’s an implication which is not really developed that Goss really missed the boat in terms of doing anything to diversify and modernise the state’s economy. That urgent task that had to await Peter Beattie. The heavy emphasis on process is there, and it’s defended – with some justice – in terms of the urgent need to update and reform corrupt and ossified institutions and governmental structures. Though again I think there’s something missing in terms of recognising the aspects of the pre-Goss era in the public service that were worthwhile, and the heavy cost from the insensitivity with which many of these reforms were implemented by pollies and bureaucrats in a hurry.

She does capture well both the dialectic between the Joh era repression and its formative influence on a generation of bureaucrats, pollies and activists – a story that I think needs more elaboration – and the particularly closed nature of power and elites in Brisbane, something which as she rightly observes, hasn’t exactly shifted to the shiny new meritocracy that was envisaged as much as one might have hoped.

But nevertheless, Schultz’s essay is full of insight, and as I think she herself implies, it treats of themes about which so little has been written that it functions as an incitement to others to respond and to write their own versions of recent Queensland history. Her essay can be accessed on the web via this link.

Looking back over the issue as a whole, some of its most memorable moments for me came from reading the reminiscences and memoirs – particularly those by authors who like me were growing up in the Brisbane of the 1980s. I want to draw particular attention to Edwina Shaw’s story ‘Busted’ – a fine piece of writing and one whose characters and events will be instantly recognisable to anyone who was a lefty student a couple of decades or so ago. But I’d urge folks to get hold of the whole issue – it’s an excellently put together compendium of a number of different and compelling perspectives on its theme.

NB: There are a range of events around the themes of this issue at the Melbourne and Brisbane Writers’ Festivals, and at Gleebooks in Sydney. Details are here.

Age columnist Shaun Carney attracted a bit of ridicule recently in some quarters when he wrote a column making the rather tenuous and certainly debatable claim that the Rudd government faced a delicate balancing act between inner city and suburban voters on climate change.

The article itself was entitled “Leftists who sneer at suburbs betray Labor”.

Carney mentioned that he’d been spending time recently in Carrum Downs “for family reasons”. Writing as if he were an anthropologist in unfamilar territory, he informed his readers:

You cannot get to the suburb by train. There are connecting buses from Frankston that snake their way through the suburbs in between, making it a very long journey. It would be very difficult to get around if you lived in Carrum Downs and did not have a car.

Now, the funny thing about this whole “latte left v. suburban real Australians” thing is that I’ve never met any “leftists who sneer at suburbs” and I’ve met a lot of lefties in my life. Having read a really silly column – whose author I’ve fortunately forgotten – in the SMH earlier this year where the writer really did manage to convey the idea that no Fairfax reader had ever stepped foot west of some imaginary line running through, say, Marrickville, I am willing to believe that there are some very urbane snobs around the shop. But I’m not sure they’re actually lefties in any meaningful sense. Small l liberal toffs who vote Labor, perhaps. It might also be the case that I have a different view on all this because I grew up in the northern suburbs of Brisbane, and though I now live in the “inner city”, there really hasn’t been any such thing in this town in the same sense as in Sydney or Melbourne.

That’s got a lot to do with the city’s history, topology and climate and social forms that have grown out of them. The climate certainly didn’t encourage terraced housing, and the hills hugging the snake like turns of the Brisbane River led to a very heterogenous patterning of the built environment – with workers cottages in the valleys very close to grander homes on the cooler hill tops. Even post gentrification, you can still see distinct differences in the humility and grandeur of old houses on the same street as it rises and falls. All this led to both a much less closely settled and therefore more verdant urban landscape, and a much more fluid social pattern – where the rich and the poor lived – over a lot though not all of the city – in the same suburbs. The fact that the city’s economic history meant that heavy industry never established itself, and Brisbane remained an administrative and distributional hub rather than a manufacturing town also meant a far less fixed class structure. In a way, we were pioneers of the postmodern service industry centred civic economy.

So, even though housing prices are through the roof here in New Farm, it’s still a heterogenous sort of place, and although I can walk to town in 20 minutes, and there’s stacks of galleries, bistros and all that sort of pizazz, it’s a suburb. It’s just urban enough really – in terms of people on the streets and a critical mass for bars and shops and restaurants, that it’s effectively the best of both worlds. And I find that really attractive, particularly living on a big block surrounded by georgeous fig trees and this city’s fairly unique urban fauna.

Nor, when I was in High School at Kedron in the 80s, in a much newer suburb (combining older areas with the start of 50s sprawl and outside the 5km radius), did I ever notice an absence of community and all the other supposed alienating features of suburban life. Quite the contrary.

Of course, Brisbane is changing, and quite rapidly at that. Intensive apartment development in some areas is creating something resembling an “inner city” outside the CBD. And the culture is shifting, though that’s a topic for another post, perhaps. But, anyway, while I was searching earlier tonight for something only tangentially related to this theme, I came across this post from Linda Carroli, a progressive urban planning consultant. I actually knew Linda a little in the late 80s, when she had a continuing association with 4zzz-fm and I knew her sister through student politics.

Anyway, I thought this piece on her blog was a fantastic reflection on some of what remains distinctive and beautiful about Brisbane, but also a timely and impassioned call for us to rethink the dumbness of automatic antagonism and judgement between inner city and suburban cultures (if indeed there are such things). The whole post is really worth reading, but I thought I’d excerpt this snippet:

In any western city most of us live in the suburbs and it’s the suburbs that decide governments. We, as a city, might like to learn to deal with our suburbs more constructively rather than over-investing in every square centimetre of the central business district.

The consolidation-sprawl binary is tired and worn out. The discourse simply produces more of the same. Inner city living is not a virtue just because government has invested in infrastructure there or opportunistic developers build highrise residential towers hugging the riverbanks. There’s a pressing need to think about the city’s structure and shape more complexly than a binarism affords, and there’s more important things to say and do than slag off suburbs and the people who live in them. A binarism closes thought.

There’s more to a city than the five or so kilometres surrounding the CDB. A city is its people and the suburbs are the city, not just the central towers of elite business and residences that dominate the street life below. In the suburbs, there is a hum of life – different kinds of life – sounded in a different key.

What she has to say is also interesting from the point of view of the whole Creative Cities agenda. We, for instance, have a “Creative Brisbane” policy, and as I’ve pointed out before, there has been a genuine attempt to take festival culture outside its normal redoubts of SouthBank and the Valley. But I wonder how much in reality the cultural policy of a city takes in the ‘burbs. As Carroli suggests, something is happening to the city’s north. Some of my colleagues at QUT have an ARC project on Creative Suburbia. I’ll be watching its outcomes with interest.

Carroli concludes:

I tend to think it’s how we live that matters so much more than where we live. If we really seek an imaginary that serves the city, that values its people and that provides a hook for its identity, we might want to think more critically about what and who we omit from the picture and story of our city and its citizenry.

Beautiful day in Brisbane, by the way.

If you’d like to see a larger image of the photos, click on them then click on “full view” once you’re inside the gallery.

New Farm Park CityCat by *phenomenologist on deviantART

Sunday picnic in the park by *phenomenologist on deviantART

The Pasifika Festival at the Powerhouse showcases cultural and aesthetic aspects of neighbouring countries, including those with a community resident in Brisbane. Today it was the turn of the local Indonesian community.

Pasifika Festival II by *phenomenologist on deviantART

Pasifika Festival III by *phenomenologist on deviantART

Pasifika Festival IV by *phenomenologist on deviantART

Pasifika Festival V by *phenomenologist on deviantART

Pasifika Festival VI by *phenomenologist on deviantART

Pasifika Festival VIII by *phenomenologist on deviantART

Private Poetry by *phenomenologist on deviantART