Category: Places
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The forsaken house where Queensland was proclaimed
There is a forgotten house nestled precariously high above Adelaide Street in Brisbane between Queen and Wharf Streets. It was centre stage in the birth of the state of Queensland and its separation from New South Wales in 1859. It is number 410 Adelaide Street, right next door to St…
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Brisbane’s tropical rainforest
Australia is blessed with world heritage-listed Tropical rain forests in north Queensland. They are some of the oldest on Earth. Some of them would have been witnesses to dinosaurs. Tucked away on the slopes of Mount Cooh-tha in the inner west of Brisbane, seven kilometres from the CBD, is a…
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Workmanlike Messiah for the 2017 festive season
QPAC hosted an All-Australian version of Handel’s Messiah in early December. The Messiah is a stirring, wonderful piece of music; technically an oratoria in which the orchestra supports a choir, soprano, mezzo soprano, tenor and baritone. The music steadily works through the Christian church year, from Advent through to Pentecost,…
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Captain Patrick Logan: haunted by ghosts of the Peninsula Campaign?
Seldom has a man who achieved so much been so vilified as Captain Patrick Logan, the second commandant of the penal colony at Moreton Bay, and some say the founder of Queensland. And that vilification is not the result of applying 21st Century sensibilities to events 200 years old. Logan…
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The First People of Brisbane
You do not see many Aborigines in Brisbane. They are around of course. Official figures show there are over 53,000 in southeast Queensland, about 1.2% of the City’s total population. There was a whopping 22% increase in the number of indigenous people in Greater Brisbane between 2006 and 2011, over…
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The man with the golden trumpet
At 200 River Terrace, Kangaroo Point, from where you get a glorious view of the city skyline across the river, there stands an immaculately tended Mormon temple. The modern classically styled flat-roofed buildings are clad in plush polished grey granite. A short palm tree-lined boulevard splits the two main buildings.…
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Plus ca change …
This is a photograph of a photograph that was taken in a Queen Street studio sometime in the 1850s. It shows how little teenagers have changed. These four Aboriginals have ‘attitude’, in the most positive sense. The pic was taken at the Museum of Brisbane, which is really worth a…
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Muller’s mischievous grotesques
Art too often takes itself too seriously. It takes itself even more seriously when it feels unappreciated and when experimentation is frowned upon. It was ironic then that that most staid of institutions, the University of Queensland, should have been poking benign fun at it in the august portals of…
