Sydney V Brisbane: Is Life Cooler Up North?
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday May 28, 1993
ALL evening yuppie voyeurs at footpath tables ogled the passing parade -ghostly Gothics, sandalwood-scented greenies, straitened methadone addicts, weaving alcoholics, gorgeous gays and pairs of stiffly strolling young constables.
Council buses spewed diesel fumes and new diners onto the footpath; cabs decanted more, until Cafe Europe's tables covered the pavement for the entire block. Two girls jived to piped Fleetwood Mac, while Shirley Bassey hollered Climb Every Mountain from the bar of the Empire Hotel opposite, where it's the transvestites' night. Yes, jelly-wrestling Wednesday night; strippers Thursday; and an excellent rock band, Cow - sometimes assisted by the Sirloin Sisters - on Sundays.
A carnival of characters squeezed by our tables: art students en route to a happening; Julian Clary lookalikes heading for gay bars; Chinese hurrying to yum cha in Chinatown. Acid jazzists buzzed by in baggies; Italians sauntered past in cashmere sweaters. A paddy wagon eased up to a disoriented dero. Let's take a ride in a police car. Three Aborigines settled on the hotel steps to watch this phenomenon of middle-class young whites taking their pleasure.
This is seamy-side Brunswick Street, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane's newest, thriving addition to the city's burgeoning cafe society. It's the latest example of how, in just five years, Brisbane has metamorphosed from a sleepy, sub-tropical capital to a cosmopolitan, exotic young city.
Brisbane has every reason to be confident. South-east Queensland (largely Brisbane) demographically has the fastest-expanding population in Australia, and Queensland has the nation's best economic growth. According to census figures, from 1986 to 1991 south-east Queensland became more cosmopolitan, with the proportion of overseas-born people, mostly interstate migrants, rising by 2 per cent.
The flight north, which began a decade ago, continues unabated. In the September quarter of 1992, Queensland gained nearly 11,000 new residents; Victoria lost 6,900.
The attraction is the climate, the more natural pace of life and the lower cost of living. Brisbane real estate remains attractive to both investors and home buyers. House prices in Paddington, in Brisbane, are half those in Sydney's Paddington - a comparable suburb - yet for investors the rent received in Brisbane is only 25 per cent less.
Scratch a recent immigrant and they'll tell you they sold their house in Sydney and bought one in Brisbane and one on the coast as well.
The contemporary age of Brisbane, a 168-year-old penal colony, may be measured from Expo 1988. Until then, the people had never taken possession of their home. They languished in a humid torpor, waiting for the city to evolve, resentful of, instead of revelling in, the climate, harbouring an unresolved core of inferiority towards most things southern. They watched other capitals build opera houses, acquire European cuisines and become vital tourist destinations.
Expo 88, and its irrefutable success, bred a fresh confidence among Brisbanites. They decided they liked alfresco dining, variety food and theme entertainment in their lives. And they saw with new eyes the Brisbane River, girding the city in magnificent reaches.
When Expo closed and the site - 16 hectares on the south bank of the river opposite the city - was put up for commercial development, the people revolted and demanded the party continue, or something like it.
Peter Goldston, the hydro-electric engineer who built Expo, flew around the world with the Expo chief, Sir Llew Edwards, looking at interactive public parklands. The closest they found to Expo's spirit was Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen.
Today Brisbane has South Bank, a sophisticated village green-cum-entertainment precinct, a family paradise, through which six million people have passed since June 1992.
"What's so good about it?" I asked some mothers. "For $2 you can spend the whole day here," they said. What was the $2 for? "Parking |"
Goldston, who now manages South Bank, delights in visits by interstate ministers. "They can't believe we've done it," he says, grinning. "They compare us with Darling Harbour in Sydney, but theirs is far more commercially oriented and their open spaces don't have our people-friendliness."
South Bank and the adjacent cultural complex have given the public unfettered access to the riverbank, a panorama embraced by the arms of the Captain Cook Bridge and Grey Street's William Jolly Bridge.
A heritage architect, Richard Allom, likens Brisbane's renaissance to a three-minute rock video clip - exciting, innovative and irreverent.
"Brisbane's character is also long grass, fecund nights, rising dust, peeling paint and people queueing along the shadow of a telegraph pole because there's no bus shelter," he says.
When the Queensland Art Gallery's director, Doug Hall, arrived from Bendigo in 1987, he was immediately struck by the city's laid-back lifestyle. "Between November and March the humidity slows people to a less flappable state," Hall says. "It's not lethargy; things get done. It just brings life back to a more sensible kilter."
Brisbane began acquiring a cultural identity before Expo 88. On the south bank, the Art Gallery opened in 1982, the Performing Arts Complex in 1985, the State museum in 1986 and the State library in 1988. The Queensland Conservatorium of Music will get a home on-site in 1995, and the Royal Queensland Theatre Company in 1996.
David Williamson, who has chosen to premiere his last two plays in Brisbane, remarked over lunch recently: "Gee, this is a nice city. I mean, it is, isn't it? It's beautiful."
What did he mean? "Brisbane is a human-sized city, now become sophisticated," he says. "A million people seems around the right number."(Brisbane has 1.2 million.)
Civic fathers have long sought to restore life to Australian city centres deadened by sterile commercial development. Until 1988, Brisbane was no different, an echoing canyon on weekends as the populace fled to the Gold or Sunshine coasts. Today Brisbane boasts a score of venues which lure hundreds of thousands into town on weekends to discover the pleasures of exploring their city.
South Bank is the largest manifestation of the new Brisbane, but its construction coincided with a succession of events that gave the city a sense of maturity and pride. The first tentative step came in 1982 when the Labor council gave the public back their city centre by creating a central mall for the Commonwealth Games. But it was not until Expo, six years later, that Friday-night shopping brought the city alive.
On summery evenings in Queen Street, the atmosphere in this packed mall becomes a mixture of Piccadilly in London and the hot anticipation of Panama. Up to 30,000 people an hour - shoppers, cinema-goers, diners, bands and buskers - turn the strip into a fairground.
It has become a focus for the young, flashing their Nikes and razored hairlines. And, like grandchildren around grandparents, the young rejuvenated the city for the adults.
Shortly before Expo, the entrepreneur-restaurateur James Penny flew around the world looking for development ideas and saw nothing to better Transvaal Avenue, Double Bay. He took one block of a domestic street - Park Road, in inner-suburban Milton - and created Savoir Faire, the city's first avenue of courtyard cafes.
Different clientele frequent adjacent coffee houses - student trendies at Aromas, the Italian clique at La Dolce Vita, $10 diners at Plovers. "We didn't expect it to be so popular," says Penny. "You can't get a chair most nights."
About the same time, Peta Hackworth, a restaurateur, gazed on the open spaces around the Harry Seidler-designed Riverside centre and imagined them filled with a craft market.
Today, on Sundays, up to 300 marketeers draw big crowds to Riverside on the north bank. And this year Hackworth expanded to a craft village at South Bank, including markets by lantern-light on Friday nights.
"Twenty years ago I liked Sydney, but it's become too frantic and ... vicious," says Hackworth. "Brisbane used to be a big country town, but now has added style and variety to a wholesome quality of living. It's ideal."
In 1987, the year before Expo, the then Lord Mayor, Sallyanne Atkinson, tried to resurrect the dying Fortitude Valley shopping area, long the locale for vice and crime in the manner of Kings Cross. Just as Tony Fitzgerald, QC, was scaring sin from the Valley, Atkinson closed Valley streets to traffic and encouraged the Asian shops and cafes to become a Chinatown.
It was only moderately successful at first, but she also closed Brunswick Street, the other side of the block, and in 1990 turned it into a mall. Initially it declined into a haven for drug-takers, alcoholics and the socially disadvantaged.
BUT when Labor's Jim Soorley toppled Atkinson in 1991, he immediately freed up the city's health laws and even before the new regulations were installed, encouraged restaurants to take to the footpaths with their tables.
One of the first, 18 months ago, was Daniel Perchey, who left La Terrace in Maroochydore to open Cafe Europe. It is now so popular that Perchey and cummerbunded waiters enact a Jacques Tati comedy on busy nights, crossing clamorous Brunswick Street, carrying tables and chairs borrowed from the Empire Hotel. "Zis eez the perfect climate for outdoor eating," says Perchey in Gallic English. "But maybe one day I will go to Sydney, 'oo knows |"
On the next block, in the Valley mall, among a plethora of recently opened cafes, Marge and Bob Davis run the Rum Boogie. They owned La Belle Epoque, the castle-like restaurant at Wategos Beach, Byron Bay, before hearing of the Valley's rejuvenation.
The first night they set their footpath tables with white tablecloths and serviettes in cones - and were stunned to be shunned. Next night, they substituted plastic tablecloths and business boomed. "This is a voyeur's dream," says Bob Davis. "They love to see the seedy element of life, but they don't like brawls while they're eating. The other night three druggies jumped a fourth and it got a bit willing so we called the police. Turned out all four were friends because they were back the next night, all buddies."
Richard Allom, an architect whose office overlooks the Valley mall, likens it to Greenwich Village. "I've seen wads of cash thick as your fist being exchanged at one table and at the next a little old lady feeding breadcrumbs to the pigeons," he says. "When the birds get confident she goes whomp | into her bag. That's Sunday dinner, I guess."
The new health regulations applied everywhere because Brisbane has just one central council and pavement dining instantly appeared in Paddington, West End, New Farm, Wilston and Taringa. It is remarkable that one change of law can have such a liberalising impact on a population.
Not to be ignored in this urban revolution was the Goss Government's decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1990, which freed the gay community to contribute to the city's design, arts, food and entertainment ambience.
The Brisbane people themselves underpin the city's flowering. Built on a regional rural economy, Brisbane is a homogenised society with neither a strong working, nor upper class.
As Sallyanne Atkinson said: "There are no must 'dos' in Brisbane. No right places to be seen. No Susan Renoufs, Sonia McMahons or Lillian Franks. Pixie Skase was very disappointed when she moved here. She thought she'd be a social leader but there was no elite to lead."
Says Allom: "In Brisbane everyone sees themselves as equal, so they're prepared to speak their mind. They have a sense of humour, too, because they're not afraid of taking the mickey out of each other.
"We horrify southerners when we slap them on the back and say, 'Ah, don't be so bloody silly |' because they aren't used to people saying exactly what they mean."
Doug Hall noted when he arrived that the Art Gallery moved cautiously, looking over its shoulder to see what Sydney or Melbourne might say. "People in other cities seem to be aware of what's happening in Brisbane," he says. "So the city clung to a parochial pride which, at its worst, converted to bigotry and insecurity."
Hall saw part of his job as turning the gallery into a leader and, subsequently, Brisbane's attendances for the China exhibition were better than Sydney's and almost double those in Melbourne. "We didn't get the Guggenheim exhibition, but we did ToulouseLautrec, which Sydney missed, and we're opening Renoir here next year. Matisse in 1995 will go to Canberra and Melbourne, but not Sydney."
Hall says that, apart from high art, Brisbane also enjoys an abundance of experimental and alternative art. Sonja Litz, an arts student, confirmed this, rattling off a sub-culture of cafes, galleries and music scenes. "Art college students from Sydney have moved here because the art scene is so alive," says Litz.
Of course, Brisbane is flawed. Many decry the freeway spaghetti which alienates the city from the north bank of the river, though the former Davis Cup player Ken Fletcher, back in Brisbane after 20 years abroad, will not hear of it. "There's not many places in the world where you can return from a famous beach resort like the Gold Coast and drive right into the centre of your city, nine times out of 10 without a hold-up," he says.
Chris Pritchett, a computer businessman and a former New Zealander, has lived in Brisbane for five years. Sour after he was mugged in the mall late one night, he sums up the city with: "After all, it's only Hobart with sunshine."
And he thinks that's a criticism.
© 1993 Sydney Morning Herald