MAS215 Theorising Media Essay Two S2 2017
Q.3 Critically analyse the short film ‘Across the Marshes: Plumstead to Cross Ness’, by Nick Papadimitriou and John Rogers (2011), and the extract from Matt Condon’s Brisbane (2010) from a psychogeographical perspective. You may like to discuss such psychogeographical concerns such as: walking; marginal/marginalised urban spaces and experiences; the re-enchantment of the cityscape; spatial history and ‘the past’; trauma; and socio-cultural critique in your comparative analysis. [You may find ‘Across the Marshes’ at https://vimeo.com/18843258]
Nick Papadimitriou and John Rogers (2011) ‘Across the Marshes: Plumstead to Cross Ness’ [https://vimeo.com/18843258]
Matthew Condon (2010) Brisbane, University of New South Wales Press: Sydney (extract)
I have know it all my life – the large, dull, rectangular granite obelisk that marks the exact location where explorer and New South Wales Surveyor General of Lands, John Oxley, set foot on the northern bank of the Brisbane river in 1824 and proclaimed a settlement site. This was the white birthplace of my city, the Caucasian holy ground, and although I had never stood before the obelisk, it had always been there for me, somehow, like an unremarkable freckle on the body.
[...]
I take some photographs of the obelisk, just like Hurley. I imagine Oxley clambering up those moist banks, though sharp walls of vine in his leather shoes, in his velveteen jacket, his hat off, his side levers beaded with sweat on that steamy spring afternoon.
And still the wording and location of this obelisk trouble me. In Brisbane you don’t have occasion to read many monument plaques. We have bronze statues of footballers. We have a space needle owned by hairdressing entrepreneur, throwing eerie blue laser light across the river each evening. We have street effigies of swagmen boiling billycans, left over from the World Exposition of 1988. We have electrical power boxes covered in amateur portraits of a former premier or stick figures or childish coloured patterns. The actual history of the city though is, by and large, a nameless jigsaw, a book without an index.
So I turn to the works of prominent local historian, John Steele. In his 1972 book, The Explorers of the Moreton Bay District 1770-1830, he reproduces extensive extracts from Oxley’s Field Books regarding his journey up the Brisbane River in 1824. Oxley writes in his entry for Tuesday, September 28, the date on our city’s obelisk: ‘... and we proceeded down the river, landing, about three-quarters of a mile from our sleeping place, to look for water, which we found in abundance and of excellent quality, being at this season a chain of pounds watering a fine valley. The soil good, with timber and a few Pines, by no means ineligible station for the first settlement up the river.’ Then Oxley sailed his government cutter to the mouth of the river where it flushed out into Moreton Bay.
In his footnote attached to the word ‘landing’, Steele writes, ‘probably at Frew Park, Milton. See Truman, op.cit.’
What does he mean, Frew Park, Milton? Frew Park today is a derelict, empty inner-city plot of land, the former home of Milton Tennis Centre that was purchased in 1915 by ‘Daddy Frew’, the longtime president of the Queensland Lawn Tennis Association. By 1999 Tennis Queensland, crippled with debt, had sold the centre to a developer. For months the abandoned tennis courts and wooden
MAS215 Theorising Media Essay Two S2 2017
stadium became home to vagrants. In April the following year it was torched by a 14-year-old schoolboy. The development never eventuated. Frew Park is a kilometer up the river from the obelisk at North Quay. Landing. The word used on the plaque attached to the obelisk. At Frew Park? And who is Truman?
There is an earlier reference to Truman in a section of the book examining the choice of the site of Brisbane. While Oxley favoured Breakfast Creek as the settlement site (later rejecting it for the fresh water and strife with local Aborigines), he was also partial – according to those Field Books – to the ‘chain of ponds watering a fine valley’. T.C. Truman, the passage reveals, ‘convincingly argued in Brisbane’s Courier-Mail in 1950 that the site of the ‘chain of ponds’ was in fact Milton, an old riverside suburb and home to the famous XXXX brewery in the city’s inner-west. ‘The incident has sometimes been construed as the discovery of the site of Brisbane,’ writes Steele.
So if the discovery of the site of Brisbane was at Milton, what was the obelisk doing at North Quay? [...]
Now, as a middle-aged man, I decide to go down to the Milton landing site and follow the line of the old creek in search of Oxley’s chain of ponds. As Truman writes: ‘I am told by old residents that there were a chain of waterholes connected by the Western Creek which had its rise in a swamp with the picturesque name of Red Jacket Swamp which has since become Gregory Park next to the Milton State School. This creek used to flow through the areas now called Frew Park and Milton Park and came out at Dunmore Bridge, on Coronation Drive. The last part of it has been converted into a drain’.
I am quietly excited because the boy in me is discovering his city for the first time, tracing the steps of his hero Oxley, erasing the fib. With the infinite confidence of a child I am convinced I’ll be able to see beyond my time, beyond the office buildings and block of units and bitumen roads and computer stores and tanning salons, and at the very least feel the shape of the natural landscape that the surveyor general first stepped into. I can clearly imagine the landscape of my childhood in Brisbane, 47 years ago, and what I remember is not fantastically different from what I can see in the city today. The river hasn’t moved. The hills and gullies of the inner-west haven’t gone away. So why couldn’t I go back less that another 150, and see Oxley’s valley?
I begin at the old Western Creek outlet on the river, as Oxley did, and work in the reverse of Truman’s description. The drain that empties into the river, near the restaurant workers’ cigarette tin, runs beneath Coronation Drive and the Oxley Centre. From a walkway underneath the drive it’s still possible to see wooden fragments of the old Dunmore Bridge. Once under the Oxley Centre the broad drain then passes beneath a stretch of road and railway line before it emerges again, as a canal, running along the edge of Milton Park. In historical ignorance, I have brought my young son to this park dozens of times: there is a metal children’s train he enjoys clambering over.
The grubby watercourse then takes a slight dogleg, turning to the north, and disappears beneath Milton Road and the dilapidated open field of Frew Park and the former site of the Milton Bowl bowling alley (where my mother played in a league for many years prior to its demolition) before running beneath Gregory Park (and its cricket pitch and phantasmagoria of children’s swings where I have also taken my boy too many times to remember). Gregory Park adjoins Milton State School, where both my mother and grandfather were pupils. Grandfather and his wife, Freda, lived in nearby Beck Street. So my maternal grandparents spent most of their life a few hundred metres from the chain of ponds.
MAS215 Theorising Media Essay Two S2 2017
Having been born in Brisbane, I left the city in my early 20s and remained away for two decades, returning to live in a house with my own family, also just a few hundred metres from the chain of ponds. In total, my life and family history have intersected with Brisbane’s birthplace for almost a century. I didn’t know it. I never knew the facts.
Today I walk the modern streets laid over Oxley’s landing place. I imagine the location of his campsite and the place where he jotted in his Field Book, possibly by the light of the fire, that here was a place ‘by no means an ineligible station for a first settlement up the river’. I continue on foot beyond Gregory Park to the sharp ridges of Paddington, in Brisbane’s inner west, and look south towards the river and delineate, for the first time, the scoop of earth that was Oxley’s ‘fine valley’. I go home, a few minutes’ walk away, to my house perched at the edge of a side gully of that valley. In a matter of hours, my view of the city has been altered forever.
Late in the evening, with the house and suburb, I sit out in the cold on the back deck and peer down the forested gully in the direction of the river. It is quiet except for the occasional scratch and hiss of possums through the Chinese elms and gum trees. In September of 1824 Oxley must have heard this too; the devilish guttural screech of the possums; the strange scampering of brush turkeys through the undergrowth. He must have smelled the wood smoke from the Aboriginal camps, not as sharp as his own fire, but spread and strained through the eucalypts.
I think about the obelisk. How are there are two sites claiming ownership to Oxley’s landing. How almost two centuries have passed and nobody has bothered to clarify the record; to set things straight. I wonder why nobody cared enough to do that.
I recall how historical landmarks in this city have often been demolished on quiet nights just like this – the Bellevue Hotel, Cloudland – and yet they left the obelisk. Here John Oxley Landed to Look for Water Discovered the Site of this City. Here, an outpost for recalcitrant convicts. Here, a penal colony built to take the pressure off another, more powerful, more robust settlement. A secondary place. Something that germinated out of a government order, not from those human wellsprings of hope, endeavour, courage. A harsh, hot tableau of public servants in their woolen uniforms and high boots designed for an English climate, out to please southern masters. A town for the sharp talk of spivs and murderers; a violent place built on deception and aggression; and with them the entrepreneurs feeding off this government project. And at the top of Queen Street – not far from the present-day Executive Building and seat of state government – was erected the huge wooden A- frame where early transgressors were publicly flogged. Government and citizen. Cruelty and fear. Fact of fiction.
I thought I knew my city. What else is there I don’t know? Then I have a thought that brings the cold of the night into my stomach. I also know absolutely nothing of my own family’s history in this place, beyond the two sets of grandparents. And even their stories are unclear, fuzzy at the edges with the omissions, diversions, false scents and often out-and-out obstructions offered by surviving family members over the decades. Have I shared the same collective Brisbane mindset that I couldn’t be bothered addressing the truth of the Oxley monument? Is this what we are like here?
I remember something Brisbane-born author David Malouf once wrote about this place in his essay ‘A First Place: The Mapping of a World’. He discusses the city’s topography – ‘walk two hundred metres in almost any direction outside the central city and you get a view – a new view. It is all gullies and sudden vistas.’ He then writes: ‘Wherever the eye turns here it learns restlessness, and variety and possibility, as the body learns effort. Brisbane is a city that tires the legs and demands a certain sort of breath. It is not a city, I would want to say, that provokes contemplation, in which the mind loses itself in space. What it might provoke is drama, and a kind of intellectual play, delights in
MAS215 Theorising Media Essay Two S2 2017
new and shifting views, and this because each new vista as it presents itself here is so intensely colourful.’
I understand, shockingly, at this moment on the back deck, that I have lived with some form of historical amnesia. That I have not contemplated; that I am in truth, disconnected from the place where I came into this world, when I thought I was a part of its fabric, that it was essential to who I am.
Here, on this night, I think of the obelisk over beside the expressway, the granite dark and gathering due on its river side;’ the words John Oxley on the plaque sporadically illuminated by vehicle brakelights where it faces the traffic, and wonder why my city of Brisbane grew up on a lie.
Essay 2000 words minimum
Theorising media -psychogeography
minimum 6 sources
minimum 20 references