Viva Briz Vegas

So, Brisbane, overshadowed by bigger cities Melbourne and Sydney but still grappling for cultural recognition and a reputation as more than just the Leeds of Australia. I quite like the comparison, personally, having just come from there. But Brisbane could, in theory, be mistaken for just about anywhere else in Europe. For a red dust vision of a wild Australia, don’t come here.

The Kurilpa bridge acts as your gateway between the vast, towering business structures of the city, complete with pedestrianised retailing and the central King George Square (named for George V and featuring these bronzed kangaroos). But head in the opposite direction and you end up in Brisbane’s arty South Bank, known as the Cultural Centre and home to the Queensland Art Gallery, the Gallery of Modern Art, the Queensland Performing Arts Centre and the Queensland Museum, all built in an oppressive 1980s labyrinth-style block structure which would see you open a door at one end only to somehow end up on the roof at the other. I wouldn’t have been completely surprised if Escher had a hand in the town planning.

My bag is taken from me as soon as I step foot into the Art Gallery, perhaps for fear of visitors casually making off with one of the Rodin sculptures. The Hans Heysen exhibition is lovely, covering his full scope of landscapes from his formative years in Europe through to his towering obsession with gum trees, all of which is nicely juxtaposed with the work of Aboriginal artist Joe Rootsey, who disregards the more traditional dot paintings of his people for more striking abstract landscapes of his own. But I’ve chosen to show you one of Peter Booth’s giant modernist paintings instead. It’s just called ‘Painting’ and differs slightly from his more grisly severed head motifs in being, well, nothing but black. Painted in 1974, the label claims that this is a statement piece regarding the ‘anxiety and pessimism of the Cold War and the Vietnam-US war’, but you could tag just about any sort of meaning to a statement like this. Booth just thought it was “strong and beautiful”, and I don’t see anything wrong in leaving it at that.

More great conundrums in the name of art can be found at the Gallery of Modern Art, which is another term strongly open to interpretation. There’s a Valentino exhibition on at the moment, something that will set you back $20. I can't help but feel that the exhibition says more about the glam-class of Brizvegas, which must boast an aspiring number of hot-heeled, seam-savvy fashionistas to rival both Paris and New York seeming as they are the only other cities that will be benefiting from this designer’s display. But the real fun is upstairs, however, because that’s where you’ll find Nam June Paik’s ‘TV Cello’.

Paik is a visual artist famous for using televisions in his work. So, here we have a stack of TVs, some playing sporadic edits of pornography in shock clips resembling something out of A Clockwork Orange, over which he has constructed the strings and framework of a cello, melding both ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture. I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to think here, whether the blurring of both classes is a good thing or a bad thing. It all feels quite sinister to me, so I’m going to say that Paik thinks that this is bad thing. Either that or he just really hates the cello.

Directly behind is Martin Creed’s ‘Work no. 189’, an installation featuring 39 ticking metronomes each individually set to a different speed. Creed’s idea is to create a ‘rhythmical cacophony’, which I‘d interpret more accurately as a ‘bloody racket’. Gradually, each one of the metronomes “lose their momentum and stop at unpredictable times… adding to the paradoxical humour of the work.” After some considerable time staring at giant hanging slogan T shirts, ticking metronomes and strangely placed chairs, I start to develop a slight fatigue as my eyes stumble upon a plastic doormat with a reinforced grip. I’m about to see what the piece is called before the doll-like steward returns and reclaims her spot on the mat. Shame, really, because it would have made quite a fitting installation. I would have called it ‘Disrupted Ambivalence’.

Another quick jaunt across the concrete set of Blade Runner and you’ll spontaneously end up in the Queensland Museum, which ticks every school trip criteria going with fossils and dinosaur bones, studies on the nation’s biodiversity and a top floor dedicated to Aboriginal history which thankfully doesn’t completely omit all the bad stuff. There are sections dedicated both to land rights and stolen generations, of Aborigines forced into foreign families or sent to religious schools. It's at the Queensland Museum where you’ll find the current Burke and Wills exhibition, the Englishman and the Irishman who, in 1860, managed to fail most spectacularly in plotting a route for a telegraph line from Melbourne in the south to the Gulf of Carpentaria in the north, a distance of around 2,000 miles across uncharted territory.

Out of all the horrific early explorer stories, Burke and Wills is the one told mostly to school children, probably as a way for them to fully appreciate the dangers of outback travelling, but also as a valuable life lesson in the imperative need to get on with your neighbours. There would be no questioning the mission’s success when the team set off from Melbourne with a huge scale street parade, consisting as it did of 23 camels, 23 horses, 19 men and 20 tonnes of supplies carried over six wagons. This was the most well equipped expedition through the guts of Australia ever conceived. Too equipped, obviously: after two months, they had only managed to travel 500 miles.

It is around this time that Wills first starts to get agitated by the company of the natives, or more specifically, the Yandruwandha tribe, who seem so eager to get him to 'dance' that he eventually fires shots in order to scare them away, noting in his journal, “[they are] mean spirited and contemptible in every respect.” Had Wills not jumped the gun, he may have noted that the so-called 'dance' was in fact a welcoming ceremony for their new white skinned visitors. But it’s the return journey which has since gone down in Australian legend, thanks mainly - in literary terms - to its cruel irony and neat symmetry.

Having separated camp at Cooper’s Creek, South Australia, to undergo the rest of the journey with a smaller number of men and an even smaller number of camels, Burke questions the severity of the illness that has befallen his travelling buddy John Gray. Gray’s complaining agitates Burke to the point where Gray is allegedly beaten up, which couldn’t have helped matters much, considering that he was actually dying of dysentery at the time. It takes a full day to bury Gray’s body due to their collective ill health, and by the time they return to the meeting point at Cooper’s Creek, they have missed the depot party by a matter of hours - a scene so brilliantly recreated in this crushing painting by John Longstaff. One of the museum’s many bearded assistants, whose name is Lance, explains this part to me with excited eyes suggesting that it's the bit of the story that he just loves to tell people: “According to some historians,” he teeters in anticipation, “the embers of the fire were still warm.”

Burke and Wills summarily perish in a defeated mess somewhere along the creek, but not before shooting (again) at the Yandruwandha, who eventually give up trying to help them. To bring the story to a nice poetic conclusion, only one man survives the trip, a certain John King, who is eventually found living with the Yandruwandha where he is nursed back to health. He returns to a heroes welcome in Melbourne almost 15 months after departing for the expedition. As there are few remains available to be displayed, the Queensland Museum mainly focus their exhibition on the role of the Yandruwandha in this story, with objects like replica boomerangs in glass cases somehow helping to punctuate the story. But the lack of any tangible scoop shouldn’t dismay people from going there to learn more about this horrendous tale of misfortune, and I’m sure even Lance, lounging idly by in slippers and socks, would agree with me on that.

The overall pace of Brisbane life, it must be said, it not too dissimilar to that found inside the Cultural Centre - I have noticed the same relaxed shuffling and need for coffee breaks here as I have on the streets, a sort of sleepy melancholy that comes from people who have experienced the cold recklessness of Sydney or Melbourne and prefer it here, thank you very much. You can see it in the way the South Bank weekend markets attract the meandering middle classes on the hunt for bohemian clothing and vintage posters, and the youthful bounding of boys practicing Capoeira on the grass to the background noise of a live pub band. It certainly doesn’t conjure up thoughts of a city in any great hurry, further supplemented by Streets Beach, which is an odd sight by anyone’s imagination.

Possibly due to being labelled as Australia’s only major conurbation without a beach on its doorstep, the Brisbane authorities have compensated with a purpose built beach in the middle of the busy South Bank district, complete with sand, lagoons and lifeguards, which overlooks the Brisbane River and the cityscape beyond. It’s a remarkable piece of public landscaping which, thanks to my weather-beaten British cynicism, I was amazed hadn’t been vandalised. It wouldn’t take the most determined of British hoodies too long to dismantle those fountain structures and fashion out a missile of some kind, but no, it actually looked like people were enjoying themselves at this place, swimming and smiling and mucking about. The less bodily conscious even stripped to scanty bikinis to take a dip (we’re still technically in winter, by the way), one of which appeared to have been fashioned from the Australian flag with a Union Jack emblazoned on the left cup - not that I was looking, of course. It’s not exactly escapism - swimming in your togs in front of the Commonwealth Bank head office - but it’s enough for the people of Brisbane, and this attitude only adds to the strange gaiety of the place. But mainly, Streets Beach will make you realise that there is still a lot of Queensland left in Brisbane.


AU Tube: Understanding Australian TV
‘World’s Strictest Parents’ (Channel 7)

In the past, this show usually concerns wayward Aussie hoons who get verbally pummelled by psychotic drill sergeant fathers who think that doing push ups will improve school attendance and stop them hiding cigarettes in their room. As a result, everyone involved ends up looking ridiculous: from the extreme foster parents to the unruly children, who return after a weeklong life lesson to their distressed but doting parents only to continue the chaos, which then makes the viewer feel even more ridiculous for completely wasting their time.

But sometimes the show features the more evangelical side of American parenting, which is how we meet Ohio choir leader and pastor’s wife Cassandra. She’s introduced belting out ‘Amazing Grace’ in her living room on a cheap keyboard, savouring every note with her eyes closed, and we can quickly determine that she’s a fan of the motivational one liner, quips like “teamwork makes the dream work” and so on. She’s more matronly than motherly, adhering to basic house rules that wouldn’t look out of place in a convent. Enter Troy, 17, from Brisbane, who struggles to go two days without alcohol, and Sydney’s Aza, also 17, a pill-popping grunge girl with all the charm of a wet flannel. They only need to survive a week under Cassandra’s roof, but with some clear prompting, Troy can only manage one hour’s work in the church-run soup kitchen before escaping to drink whisky from a Pepsi can, while Aza starts fraternising with Cassandra’s foster son, canoodling in her back garden.

“I’m not holding my hopes too high,” says Troy’s mother through fretful tears, “but hopefully he’ll come back and get a full time job and sort his life out.” She might be expecting slightly too much from just one week of bible bashing, considering that the majority of the week was spent in a drunken stupor, while a reality show like this can only ever scratch at the surface. If we were actually in the business of understanding violent teenage rebellion, I’d be tempting to look more into any underlying family concerns. There doesn’t seem to be any attempt at reconciliation - or even affection - between Troy and his father, whereas Aza’s father isn’t in the picture. And are American households really that more secure and superior to Australia’s, when the US suffers from such alarming rates of teenage drug abuse, gun crime and gang culture? A program like this excels at painting the kids out to be the bad guys, but it is much more complicated than that.