Home Truth by HarperCollins Publishers

Author:HarperCollins Publishers [Publishers, HarperCollins]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780730492443
Publisher: HarperCollins

Inside the commemorative souvenir is a further account of Oxley’s second journey and the discovery of the settlement site. It notes that Oxley visited the future site of Customs House; however, ‘the first centre of activity…was a little further up the river, and it was close to the position of the Victoria Bridge (near North Quay)—there the chief buildings of the settlement soon began to arise’.

It goes on to congratulate Oxley for his site choice. ‘The river has everything to do with the enduring permanence, growth and prosperity of the city, and it would be a bold man who would deny the prescience, or was it fate, which led Oxley, on his second choice, to fix upon the peninsula which is Brisbane.’

And in the 1924 book—perhaps inspired by Ms Bulcock’s effusiveness—there is wild poetic flourish in the prose. ‘The river always was, and is, a thing of beauty and a joy; one could almost wish that we were pagans, so that we might, as the Romans did, erect statues in appreciation of our river God.’

Jerusalem. The Romans. River gods. The great classical allusions hardly match the stolid lump of surviving granite in Oxley’s name. In those Roaring 20s and Depression 30s days of shovel-nosed trams and fewer cars, the obelisk quite possibly attracted the historically curious with its little skirt of low cast-iron fencing. Frank Hurley, the legendary photographer/explorer/mythologiser, seemed to find it worthy of his lens. In his restless meanderings across the country after World War Two, when he produced endless postcards and souvenir booklets for the major capital cities of Australia, he snapped a well-dressed young couple before the obelisk, standing stiffly and reading the plaque in the early afternoon. They look attired for the theatre, he in his baggy suit, and she in long skirt, mohair short-sleeved top and headscarf.

One recent winter day I too decide to stand on the exact location where Oxley scrambled ashore and founded Brisbane. To get to the obelisk, you must head up Makerston Street from Roma Street until you strike the T-junction with one of the city’s busiest peak hour thoroughfares—also called North Quay. Here, several lanes of traffic feed in from Coronation Drive and Hale Street in the west and funnel traffic either into the CBD or onto the Riverside Expressway heading south. For pedestrians, it is a dead zone of sterile apartment buildings and a police credit union. There is little human traffic here, for the stretch of bitumen fronting the obelisk has been left stranded by the expressway. It is one of those eerie corners of a city that feels to have died. The obelisk itself is halfhidden under a stand of pollution-filthy trees and hemmed in by a steel safety barrier.

Here John Oxley Landing to Look for Water Discovered the Site of this City. What are we to make of this simple, unpunctuated sentence? To a schoolboy it would present as straightforward and logical. But today it seems worded to suggest that the discovery was somehow accidental. That young Oxley stumbled upon the settlement site.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.