Getting Lost in Logan

KERITH POWER

GETTING LOST IN LOGAN

One Sunday morning, as I went walking, by Brisbane waters I chanced to stray. I heard a convict his fate bewailing, as on the sunny river bank he lay. I am a native of Erin’s island, and banished now from my native shore. They tore me from my aged parents, and from the maiden I do adore. For three long years I was beastly treated, and heavy irons on my legs I wore. My back with flogging is lacerated, and often painted with my crimson gore. And many a man from downright starvation lies mouldering now underneath the clay. And Captain Logan he had us mangled at the triangles of Moreton Bay. (Anon.)

Before I came to Logan the only thing I knew about it was this dark song about its name. The Governor of the former penal colony of Moreton Bay (now Brisbane, the capital city of Queensland on the north-east cost of Australia), Captain Patrick Logan, is immortalised as a brutal tyrant who was eventually killed by the spear of an Indigenous resistance warrior, to the rejoicing of the convicts. To me, on arrival in the place, it seemed no coincidence that the song refers to exile as well as to crime. I came to Logan as a newcomer from a small country town at the beginning of 2005 to work as a teacher educator in an outer suburban campus of Griffith University. For the first two months my most consistent experience of place was getting lost in Logan. I would set out along the freeway (in itself a terrifying experience), drive rapidly for half an hour, turn off at Exit 23 and confidently follow the signs to one of many shopping centres, assuming that I could easily conduct my “settling in” business and then proceed to my new workplace. For the first few weeks I was consistently very late to work. The strip malls stretched out too far apart to walk in the thirty six degree Celsius heat and too close together for the car air conditioning to take effect. In Logan Central, Loganlea, Loganholme and Beenleigh I walked through apparently identical shopping malls, finding many people of different cultural origins, many ATM machines and consumer goods, but no bank branches or other community amenities such as a post office, library, neighbourhood centre, corner store or community information centre where I could ask my way. I could recognise nothing as a centre of Logan.

Logan is a satellite city located midway between Brisbane and the Gold Coast. It is one of the fastest growing suburban fringe cities in Australia, bisected by a major freeway and populated by one hundred and seventy thousand people from an estimated one hundred and sixty different cultural backgrounds. My experience of getting lost in Logan led me to rely more and more on a street directory. In the 2001 Australian census, thirty percent of Logan’s residents reported being overseas born(Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2001). I wondered how the many newcomers from other countries, who often cannot afford cars and do not read or speak English, manage to settle in Logan, to find the services they need and to negotiate their daily lives. During my two years’ stay, I collected stories from “Anglo”, immigrant and Indigenous Logan “locals”, from teachers in schools and colleagues on campus, from parents and children. All but a few records of these conversations were lost in a computer crash and so this account is drawn from the surviving audiotape transcripts of conversations, journal entries and memory. Lather (2007, p. 7) describes ‘(post) critical ethnography’ as ‘what would be made possible if we were to think ethnography otherwise, as a space surprised by difference into the performance of practices of not-knowing’, in which ‘one situates oneself as curious and unknowing…[H]ere is where the journey of thinking differently begins’. The loss of much of my data has enabled me to think differently. My belief that systematically collected “data” will shore up the truth and authority of the storylines I construct about Logan (see Introduction) betrays the ‘positivist tail’ (Davies, 2010) in my poststructuralism, what St Pierre describes as ‘the belief that true knowledge is produced through the rational observation and description of a reality detached from the observer’ (2000, p. 495). Freed from the anchor of data, key memories surfaced and clustered around episodes of being ‘surprised by difference’ (Lather, 2007, p. 7). I read the persistence of these memories of surprise as bodily signals that, at those moments, the possibility of new knowledge was enabled by my entry into a ‘cultural contact zone’ where presuppositions were confounded (Carter, 1992; Pratt, 1992). Logan is portrayed on billboards, on television and on the Logan City Council website as an example of the lifestyle of Queensland’s “Great South East”, the fastest growing area of population in Australia. The billboards proclaim Loving life in Logan and portray young smiling residents doing exciting outdoor activities. The TV advertisements refer to the constant physical and social change as part of the dynamism and excitement of the area. The Council website portrays representatives of different cultures of origin, again all smiling, and has links to community festivals, activities and events. The thrust of these public stories of place is of exciting, dynamic change and an optimistic future based on getting ahead in a new country. Community profiles on the Council website contain statistics pointing to many recent arrivals, a young population and a wide range of economic indicators. Half Logan’s people have been there less than five years. While the top five languages (other than English) spoken at home at the time of my research were Samoan, Chinese, Spanish, Khmer, and Tagalog/Filipino, it was estimated that one hundred