The City As Archive: Mapping David Malouf's Brisbane

The city as archive: Mapping David Malouf’s Brisbane Roger Osborne [email protected] Abstract In this article, I reflect on my creation of a digital map that plots locations from David Malouf’s fiction and non-fiction. I consider the vestiges of David Malouf’s past — particularly his grandparents’ fruit shop and its relationship to his spiritual home at 12 Edmondstone Street — and I demonstrate how Malouf’s words leave traces of his experience at these locations. Recognition of these traces requires alertness to the ways in which the past is communicated through historical registers, maps and literature. Our recognition is enhanced through a deliberate evocation of the past in our own experience of the city. My map, ‘David Malouf’s Brisbane’, helps this to occur. I started plotting locations from David Malouf’s fiction and non-fiction in 2010 (see Osborne 2015). The digital map that grew from this solitary activity subsequently attracted broader attention in 2014 when it was included in the David Malouf and Friends exhibition at the Museum of Brisbane. Like many Queenslanders who had read Malouf, his evocation of the 1940s cast for me a new light on the streets, homes and businesses located along the slow curl of the Brisbane River. I started walking the streets named in Johnno, Harland’s Half Acre and ‘12 Edmondstone Street’ to see how this light fell on the routes taken by the characters and the buildings they visited. I soon found that these routes can still be followed, but the buildings that line them are forever altered by renovation, demolition and rebuilding. Yet some remain, spared by the wrecking ball to stand as they did for the author, or to exist in public memory as photographs held by various archives. My experiment in literary cartography led me through the streets of Brisbane and through the online image collections of the National Library, the State Library of Queensland, Brisbane City Council and the Queensland State Archives. Plotting the locations and adding archival images to a Google Maps project was easy, but doing so inevitably raised questions about what I was doing, whether I should be doing it and what any of it had to do with David Malouf’s fiction, non-fiction and poetry. It was then that I started to think of the city as an archive. In thinking this through, I was helped by others (Leer 1985) who had already attempted to come to terms with the way Malouf deals with ideas of space and time, particularly Emily Bitto’s (2008) essay on Malouf’s Brisbane poetry. Bitto asserts that ‘literature works to produce space, and the perceptions of that space 118 Queensland Review Volume 22 | Issue 2 | 2015 | pp. 118–130 | c The Author(s) 2015 | Downloaded fromdoi http:/www.cambridge.org/core10.1017/qre.2015.34 . UQ Library, on 22 Sep 2016 at 23:45:28, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at http:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/qre.2015.34 The city as archive in the minds of its inhabitants, visitors, and those who visit it only through the pages of a book’ (2008: 92). She adopts the term ‘spatial memory’ from the work of Paul Carter to argue that the act of writing is ‘a process by which . spaces come to be “revisioned”, repeatedly re-inscribed with new meaning and value until they become mythologized spaces’ (2008: 92). Michel de Certeau (1984: 93) saw such inscription in the daily living of his ‘practitioners of the city’, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without being able to read it . The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other. This fleeting otherness is lost to the static grids of maps and aerial photographs. Writing also can only go so far in communicating the dynamics of a cityscape, changing as it does, moment by moment. But writing arrests the dynamics of a cityscape for moments of solitary contemplation — moments where the imagi- nation ‘revisions’ space under the sway of experience and memory. This is the historical record of phenomena like ‘that small hot engine at the centre’ of Mal- ouf’s recollections. Walking the streets of Brisbane with Malouf’s works in hand (and in mind), the city takes on the aspect of a museum, an open-air exhibition described and organised by a citizen curator. I encountered this aspect most clearly after stumbling on the entry for ‘Malouf’s Fruit Shop & Residence (former)’ in the Brisbane City Council Heritage Register (see Figure 1). Situated on the corner of Edmondstone and Melbourne Streets in South Brisbane, the two-storey weatherboard building was constructed in 1913 for David Malouf’s grandfather, Salem Malouf. For more than fifty years, the Malouf family lived upstairs; downstairs, they ran a fruit shop and milk bar until 1969. Occupancy in the 1970s is unclear, but during the 1980s the building was occupied by Squirrel’s Vegetarian Restaurant, and more recently it has been the home of West End Gardens Vietnamese Restaurant. The visible cultural and historical value of the building is acknowledged in the heritage listing, but it is also an important part of Brisbane’s literary heritage because of its depiction in David Malouf’s fiction and non-fiction. With twenty-first-century multi-storey buildings beginning to shadow this remnant of the early twentieth century, it remains one of the few vestiges of Malouf’s childhood left in the area. Most visitors to West End Gardens will be oblivious to the history of the place they occupy during their evening meal. Like Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Malouf’s fiction and non-fiction provide alternatives to the apparent streets and architecture of Brisbane. As Sarah Barns (2011: 203) puts it, ‘from the singularity of this one city are teased provisional cities that capture a mood, a memory, a fleeting gesture, or the tracery of a half-glimpsed pattern’. As David Malouf’s fiction and non-fiction show, the author’s South Brisbane home at 12 Edmondstone Street played a prominent role in the formation of his identity — or the identity of the characters who were inspired by the author’s experience. Just as important was his grandparents’ home just two doors away. The corner shop is well known to readers of ‘12 Edmondstone Street’ and Johnno, but these more familiar accounts are extended in lectures and commissioned essays such as ‘A First Place’, ‘My Multicultural Life’ and ‘As Happy as This’ — most of which have since been gathered together in the 2014 essay collection, A First Place. Queensland Review 119 Downloaded from http:/www.cambridge.org/core. UQ Library, on 22 Sep 2016 at 23:45:28, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at http:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/qre.2015.34 Roger Osborne Figure 1 The house at 190 Melbourne Street in 2010 Photo by Roger Osborne Where ‘12 Edmondstone Street’ focused on the topography of Brisbane houses, the other essays extend the reach of the childhood home further into the streets of Brisbane, as the city existed for a younger David Malouf. The corner shop at 190 Melbourne Street played an important role in this extension by acting as a threshold between home and the world, an existential marker of a young man’s growth. The corner shop is just two doors down from 12 Edmondstone Street — a short walk, but one filled with the possibilities of new worlds yet to be experienced. The city-wide travel routes cast in the minds of Malouf’s characters are reflected most strongly in the image of tram-lines, offering departure-points, destinations and travel routes that help to make sense of a tropical city built on ridges that rise sharply above a meandering river. Malouf makes this clear in ‘A First Place’: So the topography of Brisbane, broken up as it is by hills and by the endless switching back and forth upon itself of the river, offers no clear map for the mind to move in, and this really is unusual — I know of no other city like it. Only one thing saves you here from being completely mapless, and that is the net — the purely conceptual net — that was laid down over the city with the tramline system. Ideally it is a great wheel, with the business centre as the hub and a set of radial spokes that push into the suburbs. The city is conceived of in the minds of its citizens in terms of radial opposites that allow them to establish limits, and these 120 Queensland Review Downloaded from http:/www.cambridge.org/core. UQ Library, on 22 Sep 2016 at 23:45:28, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at http:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/qre.2015.34 The city as archive are the old tram termini: Ascot/Balmoral, Clayfield/Salisbury, Toowong/Grange, West End/New Farm Park, to mention only a few. (2014a:5) For the Malouf family, tram stop 4 on Melbourne Street was a departure point to the city and beyond, as well as a point of return from which a short stroll brought them to their homes. For the young David Malouf (and before him, his father George), the family shop on the corner of Melbourne and Edmondstone Streets was a place that could not be avoided as they walked home.

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