-
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…
-
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…
-
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,…
-
Corruption in the ‘Moonlight State’
Like many small towns grown large, by the 1980s Brisbane had become corrupt. Small towns do not start out corrupt, they just grow into it. What starts out as the necessity of looking out for each other and a rather less attractive distrust of strangers eventually becomes much more sinister.…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Evicted – Brisbane’s favourite painting
British artist Blandford Fletcher’s 1887 painting Evicted wasn’t trendy when the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) purchased it for 300 guineas in 1895. In the 1890s, the western world’s painters were in full retreat from naturalism or realism – an approach to art that pays attention to very accurate and precise…
-
Geoffrey Rush: trailblazing late bloomer
Is Geoffrey Rush Brisbane’s greatest living actor? If he is not I await nominations of who might eclipse him. He burst onto the international scene at the advanced age for an actor of 45 with the film Shine, in which he played the brilliant but troubled Australian pianist David Helfgott.…
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
