Back at the beginning of 2011 I was travelling up the coast, catching up with friends who'd scattered far and away since the halcyon days of our youth. Last stop on my journey was a long overdue catch up with my bloody legend of a mate Benjamin, who a few years earlier had upped stumps and moved to Brisbane (or, as it has long been affectionately referred to in the Courier-Mail, "Brisrael").
I was working a very stressful job in the media at the time, and I was intent on using my sabbatical to avoid any sort of news stories at all. While I did a pretty good job of regaining my sanity and perspective, it also meant I flew into the city 48 hours before the peak of the most severe flooding in four decades, and didn't realise this until about six hours after I arrived, while I was in casual conversation with one of Ben's hippy housemates. I probably would've registered this information sooner, but I was incredibly disoriented from the humidity, and also because when I arrived at Ben's place in Toowong, he'd just wrapped shooting a promo clip for My Period is Late, a single by local punk outfit The Flangipanis.
The next afternoon we went to the Regatta in the early afternoon, because everyone in his house who was working was sent home for the day, before the train lines were washed out. A lot of people in the area didn't get the message and missed the last services out of Toowong, and with Milton Rd closed and nowhere else to go, resigned themselves to spending the afternoon testing the limits of their renal system. My God, people up there just drink and drink and drink like locusts in a cornfield. Whatever though, I'm not one to judge.
This place is obviously a local institution, a great view of the (then incredibly flooded) Brisbane River and the (then almost submerged) ferry terminal, as well as the city on the far bank. There's a great selection of beers on tap as well as all the local staples from the nearby brewery. Unfortunately the kitchen was closed while I was there, so I couldn't comment on the local delicacies, but the place gets full marks on vibe. Definitely none of the glass to the face recreational hazards that you get in places like the Valley, nor any of that fey Manic Pixie Dream Girl aesthetic that you see over in West End that gets so tiresome whenever it's ubiquitous. There's an interesting, diverse and friendly crowd there, great for a chat.
One weird thing that happened there - they've got a huge TV projection on one wall of the front bar, probably as big as the size of a modest house. They must use it to show the footy at certain times, however when I was there they had the flood coverage from Channel Seven news. When we got there at about 4 in the afternoon, they were just starting to show the flood waters coming through Ipswich from a cameraman in a helicopter, and whenever a car was washed away by the torrent of water, they started hooting and hollering like when Charlton Heston's captors discovered he could talk in Planet of the Apes.
Bloody Queenslanders. If I live another 7.6 millenia to the ripe old age of 9595, I'll never get my head around them.
* Look it up on YouTube, it's great. I don't know the band from Adam, and it's your usual pop punk fare, but the clip features a great parody of the shower scene in Psycho, stop motion footage of evil tampons and an incredibly gratuitous amount of fake blood. The reason it was disorienting was because after filming finished, he invited everyone to jump into his backyard pool and we all got tucked into the beers while the water slowly turned pink from all the fake blood on peoples' clothes. His housemates were pretty stroppy with him for the rest of the time I was there, but they were pretty good to me. My favourite was this guy who was on leave from the ADF, who'd just come back from a tour of East Timor and told me all these brutal stories about his time in Oruzgan while he kicked my arse in Call of Duty. When he came to the Regatta with us, he didn't talk much, he just sat at the table with his palm pressed on the surface and his fingers splayed, hitting the gaps between his digits with a pocket knife and speeding up his stabbing with every lap. Never understood military men, myself. read more