For those who read my other post about the flooding in Brisbane, here is an appendix, not particularly related to events of the past few days.
I grew up in a street in Brisbane called Glenwood St, and my mother still lives in my childhood home. It’s a quite short street, a few hundred meters long with maybe 70 houses. If you look at it on Google Maps you’ll see it runs next to the river (thus the three floods in 50 years), and has a lovely park on the riverbank at the end of the street (currently underwater!). This is a beautiful area of old homes and tree-lined streets and I was very lucky to grow up there.
It’s quite rare these days that I walk through the neighbourhood, as I’m usually driving in to visit my mother. Bits of the street are relatively unchanged, yet slowly the old houses are being ripped out and replaced with modern monstrosities. This street was built just a little too late (WW2) to have the grand old Queenslander houses that fill the rest of the suburb, so it isn’t considered to have the same heritage value and blocks here are sought after by young professional couples who want to demolish and build, not renovate. Land value in the street is well over 1 million $AU per 1/4 acre block.
As I walked up the street yesterday trying to find a way around the floodwaters and back to my car I glanced into one of the few remaining original weatherboard cottages and saw a familiar figure on the veranda. It was Greg, who had been a year below me at school. He was a lanky, bright, shy guy who occasionally played with the other kids in the street but pretty much kept to himself. Greg’s father was killed in an industrial accident just after he was born, and his sister was at least 10 years older than him, so he grew up essentially as an only child with a single mother. I hadn’t seen Greg since I moved out of the street almost 30 years ago.
I called out to him and as I walked up to the house to talk to him, it was obvious that something was very different. He had long, greasy hair and seemed very vague and confused in conversation, repeating the same few declamations over and over. After a minute of this, his sister came out of the house and motioned to me to follow her back to the street. There she told me his story. Twenty years ago he had a great job and was in a good relationship. Then one night he went out with some friends and took a tablet that he was told was Ecstasy. It wasn’t. Whatever it was fried his brain and from that day he has needed full-time care. He has lived with his sister for the last 15 years and they just moved back into their mother’s house a few months ago when the mother moved into aged care. The mother was apparently completely broken over what happened to her son and has spent the past 20 years in deep depression.
I stood on the street in shock at this news, but then I looked around and realised the number quiet tragedies that had been played out in just this small, leafy slice of a small, leafy city.
Pretty much over the road from Greg’s place live the Rush family. Their son Scott is famous in Australia as one of the Bali Nine, arrested in Indonesia as a 20 year old boy and sentenced to death for his part in a heroin deal gone wrong. It was commuted to life and he is still in prison there 17 years later. Two of his co-conspirators were executed by firing squad.
A few doors up lived a boy, David, who was in my year at primary school and committed suicide in his early 20s after years of drug addiction brought on by the sexual abuse he received from his father. On the corner lived a single mother with three boys, all of them violent thugs. One of them committed suicide 20 years ago in a stand off with police and the other two have spent most of the past 30 years in and out of prison.
Back down our end of the street and over the road lived my best mate Dave who died suddenly from fungal meningitis a few years ago. He was 47 and had four daughters. A couple of houses up from our place lived two brothers who were five or so years older than me, so they were slightly out of our cohort. Regardless, one has had a succession of brain tumours that have left him severely impaired and the other has ended up, broken and reclusive, back at his mother’s house after several decades of failed marriages and health problems.
One small street, one era and so many sad stories. The only kids in the street from that time who have escaped unscathed are my brother, myself and my next-door neighbour (who is still a very close friend of mine).
Scary stuff.
…and powerful stuff. Never been down that street, but I recognise it well enough – the kind of street that makes living in Brisbane such a pleasant experience, by and large. Living there made me realise that suburban wasn’t necessarily a dirty word.
I’ve been raging about what’s been going on in Salisbury for several years, similar to the process you mention. Salisbury is a largely postwar suburb of Homes for Heroes – nothing special, but nicely designed houses on decent-sized blocks with plenty of green space. These are getting knocked down at an increasing rate, with the enthusiastic connivance of local estate agents, the blocks split and replaced by hideous boxes (two per block) that present a blank face to the world, built right up to the boundary with hardly any green space at all, relying entirely on aircon for cooling and heating, and all with double garages. Double driveways are also leading to loss of nature strips and street trees of course. When we sold our house in Salisbury we turned down an offer from a developer and managed to find buyers with a young family who just wanted to, you know, live in it. Felt like a result.
You’ll never get PP for that sort of malarkey in Mbah, fortunately…
That part of Chelmer is of a similar era. It was very much a working-class area at that time, unlike the other side of Chelmer which was and remains some of the most exclusive real estate in Queensland. When we moved there in ’73 (a couple of months before the ’74 flood!) the street was a row of low-set weatherboard houses, relatively devoid of trees. Most of them were still occupied by their first owners, grim men in their 50s who wore singlets, drank heavily and were tyrants to their wives. The kids from this lot had long left, apart from the occasional late mistake.
During my childhood, most of the houses were sold on to young families, such as my parents, and the street went through a pretty rapid gentrification as people realised that these elegant old wooden houses were eminently renovatable.
Today, nothing is renovated and these faceless, stuccoed nightmares have popped up all along the street. A lot of the owners have cultural aversions to wooden houses (especially Chinese Australians) seeing them as a sign of poverty. Last year a young couple demolished the house next door to my mother’s and built a particularly hideous example that literally runs from fence to fence, complete with a Gone With The Wind-style staircase inside that takes up at least a quarter of the floor plan. They have also figured out, too late, that they have no way of getting anything into their large and unkept backyard except through the house. They are now making overtures to my mother to access their block through her yard.
Amazingly, a few of the original owners are still there, widows of 30 years in their mid 90s surrounded by huge broods of great grandchildren. I actually think this is the happiest time of their lives.
Christ. That’s the kind of story that makes you pause, take stock and be grateful for what you have.
Living in Alice and having to travel to bush communities every so often makes me do that periodically anyway.
Very moving and well-written. Thanks for posting.
Indirectly, this prompts thoughts of where my father grew up in the 20s and 30s. By the time I visited in the 80s, Glen Iris was a highly desirable, almost inner, suburb of Melbourne, but when my father was young it was the very edge of civilisation. The tar seal on the roads stopped there; the houses were tiny and just sat in gardens indistinguishable from the open bushland beyond. After my uncle died a few years ago, my father acquired his collection of family photos. Going through those with him has probably been the best two hours I’ve ever spent with my father. As a chronicle, a visible record of a social history – my family’s social history – it made a strong connection. My grandparents had left Europe, seeing it as a dangerous, war-prone continent, and would have arrived with nothing. There are so many cliches about Australia being The Lucky Country or the Land of Milk and Honey, that they obscure how hard life could still be. There is inherited height in our family and I have only every known my father as a big well fed man, but those photos showed my ex-Tommy grandfather and his sons, scratching that garden out of the bush, shirtless and emaciated; safe and free, but also adrift from family support.
That two bed house was still there in 1988, but by the time my father made a final visit fifteen years later, it had been replaced by the inevitable ‘units’ and his Melbourne suburb was unrecognisable. I have a friend in Northcote on the north side of the city and she reports being the one holding out in her old style of family home in that part of town, but doubtless it’s just a matter of time before the whole scene has changed.
Developers have an unholy grip over this country.
Brisbane’s population is projected to grow by 20% in the next 8 years, so developers can always hide behind the need to house the extra 500,000.
You’ve probably got some of the developer vermin from the UK who have moved to the other side of the planet to escape the stench from the chaos and destruction they have inflicted upon swathes of the UK. Throw them to the box jellyfish is my advice, a hungry rogue great white would be far too swift a departure.
Days in Australia since last box Jellyfish fatality: 3
Days in Australia since last Great White fatality: 15
Sometimes this place lives up to its cliches.