Category: Feature essays
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Tiger, brandy, oyster saloon: A new way to read the Brisbane Courier
It’s reboot time! It’s been eighteen months since I last posted here, and four years since I started my PhD. But my thesis now is nearly out of the way, which means I can return to more recreational forms of writing. It also means I can unveil what I have been working on to keep…
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Up hill and down Dale: Where did Elizabeth drown?
In the fourth episode of Uncovering Langsville Creek, I told the story of Elizabeth Dale, who on 31 January 1905 drowned in a waterhole in the Toowong Cemetery. I was intrigued by the notion that there was once a waterhole in this otherwise dry and barren land, so I set about trying to determine its…
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Uncovering Langsville Creek, Part 4 – Something to do with death
This page is part of a series: Previously, on Uncovering Langsville Creek . . . The first three episodes of this little mini-series have unfolded much like a daytime soap: the plot has thickened, but not much has happened. Well, without giving too much away, this is the episode where things happen. It is the…
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The history of the Coronation Drive Office Park
This post is all about the part of Milton bounded by the railway, Cribb Street, Coronation Drive and Boomerang Street. If you live in Brisbane, it’s a place that you have probably passed many times without really noticing. From Coronation Drive it presents as a row of office buildings and some Jacarandas; from the train,…
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The broken lands of Toowong
In an earlier post called The Waters of Milton, I explored a survey plan of Milton drawn in 1850. Survey plans are valuable historical artifacts because they generally represent the first efforts to capture the landscape on paper. They reveal natural features that have long since vanished, such as creeks, swamps and even hills. They…
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Uncovering Langsville Creek, Part 3 – The Headwaters
This page is part of a series: I started this series of articles about Langsville Creek as a distraction from my original mission of writing about Western Creek. My new interest soon produced another distraction when I stumbled across a dump of old bottles and cans while exploring Langsville Creek’s headwaters. When I finally finished…
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Topography shock: Postcards from the south
There’s nothing like a change in surroundings to cast your normal environment — that familiar place you call ‘home’ — in a new light. The closer you are to something, the easier it is to forget what makes it special or distinctive. For me, home has always been Brisbane’s western suburbs. I’ve lived in Bardon,…
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Bottles and cans: an adventure in suburban archaeology
Suburban secrets Since I started chasing lost creeks, I have been drawn to spaces that most people would tend to ignore or avoid. For example, I often find myself peering into drains, which in many urbanised areas are the only waterways left. I’m sometimes tempted to venture inside them, but I rarely do. Out in…
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Uncovering Langsville Creek, Part 2 – The catchment
This page is part of a series: The whole iceberg If you look at the Milton Reach of the river on any of the old maps of Brisbane, such as the one drawn by A.R. McKellar in 1895 (shown to the right), you will notice a creek with several winding branches that meets the river…
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Uncovering Langsville Creek, Part 1
This page is part of a series: This is the first in a series of posts about Langsville Creek, which was Western Creek’s upstream neighbour on the Toowong/Milton Reach. I do not intend to research Langsville Creek fully at this stage, as I have too much still to learn about Western Creek. But I couldn’t…