The City As Archive: Mapping David Malouf's Brisbane

The city as archive: Mapping David Malouf’s Brisbane

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 imagination ‘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.

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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

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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. The building, its occupants and visitors acted as an extension of the ‘topography’ so important to ‘12 Edmondstone Street’, connecting Malouf’s ‘ﬁrst place’ to the network of streets that was the Brisbane of his mind. The story of David Malouf’s grandparents and their corner shop is told several times across various essays and public addresses, and in each telling the building and its occupants are depicted as foreign, with an alternative way of living in contrast to the more familiar, English way of living just two doors away. In ‘12 Edmondstone Street’, the uneasy relationship between the two houses is made clear. Malouf remembers his father as ‘his mother’s boy’,

still referring to my grandmother’s house as ‘down home’, and still in thrall, for all his male assurance, to that small, soft, demanding woman who two or three times a week sends up his favourite dishes, the old-country cabbage-rolls and sweet things my mother does not cook. He lives with us but Grandma’s is his address. She still insists that the postman leave his letters there, and he collects them on his way from work. (1985: 28)

The arrival of the post is retold in Johnno, where Dante’s aunts ritually examine the contents of the postman’s bag to keep up with events in their neighbourhood. It is no accident, then, that the arrival of Malouf’s mother caused tensions in the family. Looking beyond the local families who might have been expected to provide a suitable spouse, Malouf’s father chose a partner from the other side of the river, from another religion, and English. These differences, as well as the young girl’s duty to her ageing father, kept the couple apart for fourteen years. Also shopkeepers, the residence of this English family was in Fortitude Valley, inexorably linked to the Malouf fruit shop by the web of tramlines that crossed the city: New Farm Park to the Maloufs’ West End. From New Farm, this route takes travellers through the bustle of the city’s central business district before crossing the Victoria Bridge into South Brisbane — another world for many Brisbane residents of the early twentieth century. When the young couple married in October 1933, they moved into South Brisbane’s 12 Edmondstone Street, but without a warm welcome from the occupants of the corner shop. Any movement between the two houses is therefore laden with meaning, and so the grandfather’s garden — established in the backyard of the younger Malouf household — also tests the limits of familial connections. The actual property line of 12 Edmondstone Street dog-legs to face Melbourne Street at its bottom extremity, and so borders 190 Melbourne Street, the grandparents’ address. Malouf doesn’t say how the grandfather gained access to the bottom garden, but no matter how he gained entrance, the maternal inﬂuence of the Melbourne Street address remained strong:

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He came each day to the garden at the bottom of our yard and though he never ventured into the house, liked to stop and chat with my mother at the bottom of the steps. He was, in his shy way, fond of her but afraid of showing it in front of my grandmother, who was powerfully jealous. (1994: 111) The bottom step at the back of 12 Edmondstone Street was a signiﬁcant threshold, and featured in three re-tellings of the grandfather’s gardening (also in ‘12 Edmond- stone Street’ (1985: 57); Johnno (2008: 36–37)), each time marking a point where the grandfather would not cross, but also a point where gifts of lettuces, tomatoes, eggplants, radishes and beans would be left with the call, ‘“Something for you, missus!”’ (2008: 37) For Malouf’s mother, this was a rare gift from the occupants of the corner shop where the ‘grandmother and the league of aunts’ (1985: 29) closely monitored the activities of their neighbourhood. The tension between the two Malouf households was not lost on the children, ensuring that any journey to the corner activated the differences between the two houses: ‘We liked going down to Grandma’s, a small but obvious betrayal’ (1994: 111). Two doors down the hill from 12 Edmondstone Street, the children entered the old world of the grandparents. The grandparents ate at a ‘scrubbed wooden table’ in a courtyard at the back of the shop, where a grapevine grew and a shed was ﬁlled with ropes of garlic, sacks of rice and cracked wheat. To the children, this ‘back part of the shop is very odd and foreign’, a place to feel embarrassed when eating outside at the wooden table:

They eat cabbage-rolls and yoghurt with cucumber and mint, and chopped-up salad with oil on it. At home we have proper meals: stew or cutlets with mashed potatoes and peas, all hot, and a nice boiled pudding with custard. (2014b, 21–22) Living between the cultures of the two houses, the Malouf children consumed a form of multiculturalism decades before the term took hold in Australia’s national consciousness. The two houses of their early life exhibited divided loyalties and the emergence of a new Australian culture:

We are very much concerned about the Heart of Empire. My mother calls it ‘Home’. My father, rather confusingly since he was born in Australia, calls it ‘the Old Country’. But when my grandmother refers to the ‘Old Country’ she means Lebanon. (2014b: 25) If the topography of the house in which young David Malouf learned to see the world had an effect on his developing mind, the worlds across the thresholds of the front verandah and the back steps were equally signiﬁcant. Crossing these thresholds activated new ways of seeing and speaking that would not have received the approval of Malouf’s mother. Adding to the mother’s uneasiness, the not-always-dutiful son’s journeys to the corner shop meant that he was exposed to the comings and goings of the wartime city that lay farther down Melbourne Street, and across the river. The mixture of visitors to the shop provided an attractive milieu to an inquisitive child:

Housewives in worn-down slippers who smoked . . . Nuns from St Mary’s who quizzed me on the Catechism and asked what prayers we said . . . After the Japanese war began, Yanks, including a loud-mouthed top-sergeant called Duke . . . And sometimes a lady friend of Uncle Johnny’s called Addie, who would wait,

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attended on by one or other of the aunts, in the half-dark of the kitchen while he was out walking his greyhounds round Musgrave Park. A dumpy person with jet-black ringlets and too much rouge on her cheeks, she worked in a ‘house’ in Margaret Street — did my aunts know this? (1994: 112)

The corner shop was a hub of activity and cultural exchange, welcoming the local community across its threshold for more than fruit and refreshment. More than a shop, it was a meeting place where the future author’s grandfather ‘held court’ over those who came to tell and swap stories from his ‘old country’, or to ask the old man to write letters to family back home. The grandfather exhibited a priestly attitude, especially

when he sat at his corner table drinking tea from a glass and wetting his drooping moustache, or when he leaned on the handle of his stick and considered a move on the cribbage-board. Very mild and familiar, it was hard to believe he had known a place where whole villages could be wiped out in a single afternoon. The shop was such a backwater. Our own afternoons, so warm and still, seemed far from the echo of violence. And the language in which he and his cronies went over it all, the fearful history, the litany of names, the village jests and insults, was so softly guttural and cooing. (1985: 5)

Through the eyes of the grandson, the shop comes alive with the colours, smells and sounds of a small community gathered for a short time at the corner of Melbourne and Edmondstone Streets . . . an inﬂuential stopping-place between home and the world beyond. For the boy, the corner shop provided an alternative perspective from which the world could be encountered and understood. In the 1940s, when his grandfather lay dying in his upstairs bedroom, the grandson kept him company by reading Shakespeare and fetching things when asked, ‘though he speaks no English and I understand no Arabic’ (2014b: 22). An understanding built on gestures, knowing looks and careful observation, communication between the two was effective and meaningful, the old man passing to his grandson the gift of storytelling and alternative ways of looking at the world. The boy’s relationship with his grandfather is one founded in thresholds: the back steps of his home, the garden, the kitchen table and the second-ﬂoor bedroom that looks out over Melbourne Street:

I liked stepping out past the brown muslin curtains of Grandpa’s room to the cast-iron balcony that hung over the street. Leaning far out over the rails you could see all the way down the tramlines, past Kyogle Station and the Trocadero, to the Blue Moon Skating Rink and the Bridge. (1994: 113)

The tramlines come into view, leading the boy farther away from his home around the corner, past landmarks that hold meanings for him that are personal, visceral, guttural. These are the landmarks that were important and meaningful to the author’s imagination and point of view. As Malouf tells us in ‘12 Edmondstone Street’, it is ‘the body — that small hot engine at the centre of all these records and recollections’ that carries with it all that it remembers of past experience. It is that ‘small hot body’ that we imagine moving through the streets of Brisbane, pointing to places of importance with the words we ﬁnd in his books — places that ultimately position the pointer (whether we think of the pointer as David Malouf

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Figure 2 Victoria Bridge in 1930 Source: Queensland State Archives.

or the constructed self of the narratives) in a declaration of existence and meaning, an event and a place that we can use to fuel our own revisions of personal space. David Malouf writes into being a personal version of Brisbane in Johnno,draw- ing on the rituals and habits of his parents and grandparents to cast a unique light that readers can consider in relation to their own memories and experiences. But the way we move through Brisbane today is not the same as it was yesterday, last week, last year, ﬁfty years ago. David Malouf reminds us that, as individuals, we have to do a lot of ‘unremembering’ to see things as they were in the past — something that is perhaps, in the end, unachievable. Nevertheless, we must to try to strip away the patina of the present in order to better understand the past. Malouf is particularly sensitive to the contingencies of living under such conditions. In Johnno, when Dante returns to Brisbane after his time away in Europe, he remarks: It is a sobering thing, at just thirty, to have out-lived the landmarks of your youth. And to have them go, not in some violent cataclysm, an act of God, or under the fury of bombardment, but in the quiet way of our generation: by council ordinance and by-law; through shady land deals; in the name of order, and progress, and in contempt (or is it small-town embarrassment?) of all that is untidy and shabbily individual. (2008: 48) Some of the landmarks of Dante’s youth — of David Malouf’s — can be retrieved, if only for a moment of quiet contemplation on the function of these places in works of art. Pointing and associating, we bring some aspect of this past into our present.

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The Grand Central Hotel might be a good place to start, before following Johnno and Dante throughout the city to some of the destinations that shaped their identi- ties as they wandered through Brisbane as adolescents and young men. The Grand Central was only one of their drinking places (often selected because the establish- ments turned a blind eye to under-age drinkers): the Royal George and the Prince Consort in Fortitude Valley, the Lands Office, Treasury and Criterion on George Street, the British Empire on Queen Street and the Windsor Hotel across from City Hall on Adelaide Street, one last stop before Roma Street Station. Some of these hotels still stand, renovated versions of nineteenth-century public houses, and some are long gone, victims of ‘council ordinance and by-law’ or some ‘shady land deal’. Nevertheless, there are remnants enough to support a Johnno-inspired pub crawl should the urge arise. The Grand Central, however, exists only in memory. Located at 205–207 Queen Street, the Grand Central had a queer bar, a plush and cut-glass ladies lounge on the second floor, and at the very back (with its own entrance in the street behind) an open air beer garden, all green-stained concrete and wrought-iron tables, that was known as the Sex Pit, since it was the special preserve of Brisbane’s most flamboyant tarts. They occupied a table apiece, wore glossy patent-leather shoes, carried glossy patent- leather hand bags, had their hair lacquered and piled up in sculptured, jet-black, peroxide, or chestnut curls, penciled eyebrows, vivid scarlet mouths — they were the real thing. Potted palms gave the Sex Pit an air of the jungle. (2008: 70) The Grand Central was also the site of the Battle of Brisbane, Dante recalls, ‘when Australian and American servicemen had fought the whole of one Saturday night all up and down the inner city. In the morning there were seven dead.’ The casualty count might have been exaggerated, but the ‘battle’ was real enough, exacerbated by the well-known local complaint that American servicemen were ‘overpaid, over- sexed and over here’. Drinking and carousing might not have been Dante’s forte, but he was inevitably drawn by Johnno into a variety of locations, such as the brothels on Edward Street, the Greek Club on Charlotte Street, Littleboys Coffee Lounge on Albert Street and the pontoon of the Commercial Rowing Club underneath the O’Connor Boathouse, from which Johnno plunged into a flooded Brisbane River. Malouf’s Dante describes this as a climax to another drinking adventure led by Johnno: On one such occasion, when the flood was at its peak, we all walked up Queen Street with the crowd and made our way, slipping and sliding on the wet tracks, down the steep embankment north of the bridge. A wooden ramp ran down to the water, one of the Grammar School rowing pontoons, and we sat there for a while and watched the lights of the Blue Moon Skating Rink on the far bank play red and green across the waves. It was just after eight. Behind us was the Verandah of the O’Connor Boathouse where we had sometimes gone to dances. On the foot-walk of the bridge, immediately above, I could see rows of umbrellas gleaming under the lamps. Though it was barely drizzling now; just a fine silver mist that made the neons, TIGER BATTERIES, EAT MORE FISH, swim a little in the air . . . Suddenly, without warning, Johnno had staggered to his feet and was hauling off his shirt. (2008: 101–2) Johnno ‘jack-knifed neatly and was gone’ into the murky waters of the flooded Brisbane River, prefiguring his fatal submersion later in the book.

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Figure 3 O’Connor Boathouse. Source: State Library of Queensland.

Dante encountered a variety of people in all of these places, describing characters like ‘Old Moscow’, who frequented the Public Library, and vagrants coming from ‘the arcades of the old markets in Turbot Street, where they were still to be seen sometimes, in the early morning, wrapped up in newspapers like old parcels, or in dirty vegetable sacks’ (2008: 60–61). Dante also visited the questionable streets towards the Botanic Gardens with his father to watch the fights at the Brisbane Stadium. In Johnno, Dante’s relationship with his father is contentious. The boxing stadium was a venue where they developed a relationship based on sporting prowess and physical fitness. But Dante was destined to be a man of thought, taking lessons from the ritual: The fight itself was a ritual in which the loser fought heroically against his own weakness, against a fate that was already decided, and to the expert, visible from the start: a weak limb, bad training, too much grog, too many women, or the sheer arrogance and folly of not knowing your limits. (2008: 70–71) This ritual over, Dante often met Johnno and disappeared into the night, leaving his father to return home through some of Brisbane’s most disreputable streets. As Dante describes the streets of the 1940s: Hidden away behind a ten-foot corrugated-iron wall, in one-storeyed weather boards that were virtually indistinguishable from the spare parts yards and me- chanic’s shops of the sleazy areas between the Gardens and Elizabeth Street, the

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Figure 4 Brisbane Stadium in the 1920s. Source: State Library of Queensland.

brothels were known, by reputation at least, to every Brisbane schoolboy. (2008: 78) The Brisbane Stadium eventually transformed into Festival Hall, a notable music venue, before this made way for the construction of the multi-storey residential complex, Festival Towers. The character of the surrounding district has been erased, with only remnants of the buildings occupied by mechanics and madams remaining to remind visitors of a shady past. By the late 1940s, home for Dante and the Maloufs was the more respectable Hamilton, from where Dante reﬂected on his position in the world, ‘Arran Avenue, Hamilton, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, the World. That is the address that appears on my schoolbooks. But what does it mean? Where do I really stand?’ (2008: 52). Dante preferred the streets of South Brisbane, where a return home would take him from Hamilton through the city, across the Victoria Bridge, past the Cremorne Theatre, the Blue Moon Skating Rink, South Brisbane Station, The Trocadero, the Melbourne Street brothels and his grandparents’ corner shop, ending his journey at his spiritual home, 12 Edmondstone Street. Along the way, venues like the Trocadero Dansant feature prominently as landmarks in Dante’s vision of Brisbane, just as they did for the young David Malouf, leaning out across the balcony of his grandfather’s bedroom. Close to South Brisbane Station where young soldiers stopped on their journey to the battlegrounds of the Paciﬁc, the Trocadero offered a foreboding threshold for young men in a time of war, a place

where girls who might otherwise have been teaching Sunday school were en- couraged by the movies they had seen, the hysteria of the times, the words of

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Figure 5 Trocadero Dansant in the 1920s. Source: State Library of Queensland.

sentimental Tin Pan Alley tunes, and the mock moonbeams of a many-faceted glass ball that revolved slowly in the ceilings of darkened ballrooms, to give the boys ‘something to remember’ before they were mustered (forever perhaps) into the dawn. (2008: 29)

Malouf accentuates the humanity associated with this building, but it no longer stands to exhibit the same attributes. It was demolished in the 1950s to make way for the train line that connected South Brisbane to Roma Street Station. Today, we can only point to where it was, and to imagine the humanity that it served. Nevertheless, such places endure as vivid reminders in the public memory of mu- nicipal archives, and the written word of authors such as David Malouf, whose work curates an idea of Brisbane that is at once personal and a part of our shared cultural heritage. This brings me back to the map that inspired my exploration. What does a map of David Malouf’s Brisbane really look like? What work do the markers on this map do? What does it tell us about Brisbane? What does it tell us about Malouf’s art? The markers I put down on the map I called ‘David Malouf’s Brisbane’ record moments in time: moments in the time of the narrative; and moments in the time of reception when I created an association between a real place, the words that point to it from the pages of Malouf’s books, and one or two archival images that serve as reminders of the past. In more recent times, the Malouf corner shop has been tagged by passers-by (see Figure 6). Plotting David Malouf’s Brisbane serves as a reminder of moments in time — virtual tagging, if you like — inscribed words in space that suggest meanings not apparent until we look for them.

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Figure 6 (Colour online) The house at 6 Edmondstone Street, 2010 PhotobyRogerOsborne

David Malouf’s Brisbane reminds us of moments in time that can have a sig- niﬁcant impact on the formation of character: the rituals of masculinity at the Brisbane Stadium; the growing awareness of activities in the red-light district; the consolidation of this awareness in more public spaces; the meeting places where friendships are forged and broken; places of innocence and lost innocence; places at the end of the line where more perilous journeys begin; places of the mind and body where understanding begins to guide us through the rest of our lives. It is worth stopping at these places to listen, to think and to imagine what other minds have created under similar circumstances. Through our shared experience of place and circumstance, a fertile imagination can turn even the most mundane spaces into poetry. As Dante explains in the closing chapters of Johnno:

The Brisbane I knew had its existence only in my memory, in the ﬁne roots it had put down in my emotions . . . I could have made my way through it blindfold, as I often did in my sleep, amazed to discover that in my Brisbane the old markets hadn’t been removed at all, and the Grand Central, that extraordinary three-ring circus of my youth, was still in full swing. I could see my own reﬂections in its mirrors. And Johnno’s as well. It would always be there. (2008: 127–28)

With this in mind, the heritage-listed building at the corner of Melbourne and Edmondstone Streets offers an exceedingly rare place to reflect on the spaces that come alive in Malouf’s fiction and non-fiction. Outside, busy Melbourne Street falls away towards the city, offering a route along which David Malouf’s Brisbane can be glimpsed, if only for a moment in which a ‘small hot engine’ beckons from a past that refuses to disappear.

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