We stayed in Brisbane for a bit over two weeks, mostly visiting with Karen’s Aunt Margaret, her cousin Rob, and Rob’s family. Many of the days were maintenance, down time, work and running (for Greg) and being domestic. We don’t have photos of a lot of those bits – which include two reasonably-successful attempts by Greg to make gluten-free pizza from scratch – but we do have photos of the outings we took.
This is Margaret’s back garden, viewed from her deck. If you’re an avid gardener, there are advantages to living in a sub-tropical climate. We stayed with her most of the time we were in Brisbane, other than two nights at Rob’s.
The day after our arrival, Rob needed to make a run to Bunnings, the Australian equivalent of Home Depot. Apparently this rates as An Important Cultural Experience, so we got dragged (willingly) along.
At Rob’s place we got to meet his youngest, Nicki, who has been doing circus since they were little. Greg and Nic spent some time juggling together, and made a date to pass clubs later in the week.
The 1st of February is the birthday of Rob’s dog Twilight. As a special birthday treat, Twilight (the black one) got to have her favourite food – pizza. Marg’s dog, Maisy, was also offered pizza but had exactly zero interest. Twilight took care of Maisy’s share later.
The next evening we went over to Rob’s to stay for a couple of days. Near sunset we walked to the Enoggera Creek bikeway bridge in Gould Street Park to have a look at the bats.
There are hundreds, possibly thousands of Grey-headed flying foxes living in the trees along that stretch of the creek. Australia’s largest bat, with a wing span up to one metre, they’re quite striking when they all head out in search of food. But don’t worry: the flying fox is a fruit-eating bat, and has no interest in people.
Interestingly, the Australian white ibis, also known as the “bin chicken” for its habit of scavenging in the garbage, is quite happy to share roosting space with the flying fox.
3 February: Farmers market and Roma Street Gardens #
The next morning Rob took us down to the local farmer’s market to get some fruit and vegetables.
Here’s Rob, the happy shopper, in his Hottest 100 t-shirt. He was getting a bunch of things, but his main objective was kangkung or Balinese water spinach. Rob is a geologist for a mining company and splits his time between the mine site on eastern Java (Indonesia) and his home in Brisbane. We’d timed our visit for one of the weeks he was home.
After shopping, Rob dropped us off at the Roma Street Parkland, were we had a bit of a wander. Near the entrance to the garden was another colony of flying foxes, roosting for the day.
The parkland is on the site of a former railway yard, and has been beautifully repurposed as a garden, children’s play area, picnic ground, and event space. Here’s the usual picture of Karen taking a picture of a plant.
And here’s a less usual picture of Greg taking a picture of a plant…
… plus the picture he took.
The park is heavily populated with Australian water dragons, who are quite relaxed around the visitors.
It also has a large population of really big spiders, many of which are quite pretty, assuming you’re not an arachnophobe. This one, a Golden Orb Weaver, was about the size of the palm of your hand, including the legs.
The gardens at Roma Street are some of the most highly designed and well-maintained that we’ve seen on our trip, and if you’ve been following along you’ll know we’ve visited rather a lot of gardens.
The Spectacle Garden is well-named, with a wide variety of brightly-coloured flowers and plants.
The rockery in the the Spectacle Garden is a bit more monochrome, but with lots of interesting shapes and textures.
We walked back from Roma Street to Rob’s place, where he cooked us an excellent Indonesian dinner of mie kangkung, using the vegetables he’d bought that morning at the farmer’s market.
There was a large-item pickup coming up in Rob’s neighbourhood, so we spent a chunk of the next day helping him sort and move things from his garage, with a large pile of junk going out to the kerb. It was a lot of work – especially for Rob, who had the hard role of making decisions, while we mostly hauled stuff around – but the end result was quite satisfying.
In the afternoon we decided to take a road trip with Margaret to the Mount Coot-tha lookout.
Here’s a selfie of the four of us. We took two shots and realized afterwards that Margaret’s eyes were closed in one, and Karen’s in the other. Margaret won the coin toss.
The view of the Brisbane skyline was lovely, despite the clouds.
After visiting the lookout we took a drive through the nearby Toowong Cemetery, where we found a tombstone with Margaret’s maiden name, possibly a distant relative.
Rob’s wife Cheryl, who goes by Chez, had been away helping her mother during the first few days of our visit. She’d returned on the 4th, so we had a dinner out at Pepe’s Mexican Restaurant on the 5th. Going around the table are Greg, Rob, Nicki, Karen, Chez, and Margaret. Rob and Chez’s other daughter, Jasmine, was otherwise occupied, but you’ll meet her later.
February 6th was our 36th wedding anniversary, and we decided to celebrate with brunch out and a visit to the Brisbane city centre. To the best of our recollection, this is our first outdoor anniversary brunch ever, the weather being slightly less cooperative in February in Canada.
After brunch we walked along the riverside on the eastern edge of Brisbane’s city centre. This is the Customs House, where duty on goods coming up river was once assessed and collected. These days it’s a restaurant and event space.
This large banyan tree caught Karen’s eye. Greg for scale, with the sweat on his shirt to prove it was a rather warm day.
The City Botanic Gardens are much more open than Roma Street, and much older. This is a kigelia or sausage tree, last seen on our visit to Singapore.
Like Roma Street, City Botanic Gardens is home to quite a few large spiders. Yes, the spider is closer to the camera than Karen is, but not that much closer.
The Gardens included some other impressive banyan trees; Karen for scale this time.
From the Gardens we headed into the city centre itself. The core is a mix of older colonial construction and large, modern buildings.
The sculpture above the door to the former Brisbane printing office plays homage to the “printer’s devil”, a term used to describe apprentices in printing shops. The actual origin of the term is unknown, and there are a variety of competing theories on the printer’s devil Wikipedia page.
Quite a few of the older buildings in Brisbane have ironwork railings and decorations that reminded us strongly of New Orleans. We haven’t yet been able to find a good explanation for the similarity in style.
Our final destination for the day was King George Square and the Brisbane City Hall. In addition to its role as the seat of Brisbane government, it also houses a concert hall and a museum, with tours of the clock tower also offered.
On the square is the Petrie Tableau, commemorating Brisbane’s pioneering spirit and early European settlers. There’s also a statue of King George V, of course.
We had lunch in the Shingle Inn, a restaurant once located elsewhere but whose interior furnishings were relocated to City Hall.
Then we went up for our the visit we’d booked to the clock tower. This was once the highest point in Brisbane, but as you can see, recent construction has significantly eclipsed it.
The Albert Street Uniting Church looks quite striking from the tower, surrounded as it is by modern construction.
After our visit to the tower we spent some time in the museum, which had a number of interesting exhibits of Brisbane history and art. This is Look down at the ground, by Monica Rohan, which we quite liked.
On the 7th we had a COVID vaccination booster appointment booked at a nearby pharmacy. Australia is quite happy to vaccinate anyone, for free, regardless of citizenship or residency. Unfortunately, the guidance in Queensland calls for one shot in each calendar year, our last shots were in June of 2023, and the 2024 guidance had not yet been released so it was still considered to be 2023. The pharmacist was very pleasant and tried her best to find a loophole in the rules to let us be vaccinated, but was ultimately unsuccessful. Well, at least we tried!
That afternoon we visited Rob’s place so that Greg and Nicki could have their promised club passing session. Nicki’s circus school emphasizes other circus arts over juggling (boo!) and doesn’t have clubs (double boo!), so Nic hasn’t done much passing – but it didn’t take Nic and Greg long to get solid runs of five club one count running. Apologies for the low-quality picture – it’s actually a screen-grab from a video Chez sent on the family WhatsApp group. Photo by (CT).
While Greg and Nic were passing, Karen did some poi swinging and Margaret, Chez and Jasmine watched and chatted. Unfortunately we were chased back to Rob’s by some rain a bit earlier than we’d hoped. And same apologies here as for the previous photo. (CT)
The biggest commercial brewer in Queensland is Castlemaine Perkins, which was founded in 1878 and is home to XXXX beer, among other brands. Greg first encountered XXXX or “the old barbed wire” in 1991 when he served in Cyprus alongside a unit of Australian civilian police. So naturally we had to book a brewery tour.
Our guide, who was a serious character, has been an employee of the brewery in various capacities for almost five decades. Here he is explaining the brewing processes of the various beers brewed by Castlemaine Perkins. Through the window you can see the analysis laboratory where quality control measures of the brews and their ingredients are made.
This is the main brewing room, where the magic happens. We’ve visited a lot of breweries over the years, but never anything on quite this scale.
Our tour also included a museum with some of the early brewing equipment and a wide selection of packaging through the history of the brewery, starting with wax-sealed glass bottles and progressing through the cans you can see here.
And speaking of cans, this is part of the main canning line. Unfortunately the line only runs four days a week, so we didn’t get to see it in operation, but we did see videos during our end-of-tour beer tasting. It was impressive nonetheless.
The next day was Brisbane’s Lunar New Year celebrations. It was raining on and off most of the day, but we decided to head downtown regardless to check it out. We arrived just in time for the opening, and this was our view for much of the ceremony.
However, sometimes what was on stage poked up high enough to be seen over the umbrellas. We could curse them, but our umbrellas were up as well!
Occasionally the rain would stop for a bit and the umbrellas would come down.
In addition to the dragon puppet, there as also a two person dancing dragon.
After the opening we wandered the stalls in Brisbane’s very-small Chinatown (one street, one block long, with a few other shops on the side) then caught an early dinner at a nearby restaurant. Along the way we spotted another building very reminiscent of New Orleans.
After dinner we returned to the New Year celebrations, where we caught the tail end of what was advertised as “the Grandma show”. Much to our delight it turned out to be traditional Chinese juggling, performed by someone who (yes) may well have been a Grandma.
Just before we left there was a fun performance of traditional Chinese drums.
For our last big outing before leaving Brisbane, Chez organized a family trip for us on the Brisbane City Cat, which is a commuter ferry that makes for a fun and reasonably cheap way to see the city from the water. Here we are in a big taxi-van on our way to the dock. Left to right: Chez, Greg, Jasmine, Emily (a cousin who was staying at Chez and Rob’s), and Karen. Nicki and Margaret were in the front of the van. (CT)
And here we are on the Cat: Nicki, Karen, Margaret, and Chez.
And another, to prove that Greg was actually there. (CT)
This is the Customs House (see above) viewed from the water. It was nice to see the city from a different angle, and Chez did a great job of providing commentary about the different buildings and areas we were seeing.
There’s lots of new development in the city centre.
After riding the Cat down the river, changing boats, and coming back up, we disembarked on the South Bank Parklands, where a passing couple offered to take a picture of the whole group. We spent some time wandering a craft fair, then had a nice Vietnamese lunch before splitting up to go our separate ways.
The two of us headed north up the bank, towards the Queensland Museum. This is the Nepalese Peace Pagoda, originally constructed for the 1988 World Expo and the only exhibit from the Expo remaining on the site.
Here’s another shot of the construction from a few photos ago, nicely offset by the geometry of the white bridge.
There’s a large exhibit of Lego dinosaurs at the Queensland Museum, constructed by Brickman – the same workshop that did the model of the Australian Parliament we saw during our visit to Canberra. We didn’t actually visit the exhibit, which had a separate admission fee, but we did enjoy this raptor in the entrance.
We also enjoyed this giant squid, not made of lego, in a pressurized tank on the main floor of the Museum.
The entry of the museum features a bunch of suspended models of marine animals, as well as a biplane. Greg tried to capture a shot of the plane being eaten by a shark, but wasn’t particularly successful. We’re sharing it with you anyway.
One of the more interesting parts of the Museum was the Dodd Collection, which shows a rotating selection of the insects captured in Queensland and New Guineau by by F.P. and A.P. Dodd from about 1900 through 1960. This photo shows one of the 27 cases that make up the collection, this one of stick insects, with Karen’s hand for scale.
The lower floor of the Museum is the ANZAC Legacy Gallery, which explores how the First World War affected Queensland and its people. One striking element of the collection is the Mephisto, the last remaining German A7V Sturmpanzerwagen tank in the world. The A7V was Germany’s first tank, and featured in the first tank versus tank battle in history, in April 1918.
Earlier in the day we’d been talking to Jasmine about the dance battle qualifiers she’d been to the night before, which were part of this year’s BrisAsia festival. It turned out the finals were going on that evening at the Queen Street Mall Stage, which was not too far from the Museum, so we decided to head down and catch them. Jasmine was there too, hanging with her friends, but we managed to catch her for a quick goodbye hug at the end.
The battles were in three categories: Hip Hop, Popping, and Open Style. We’re not actually that knowledgeable about these dance forms, but we had a lot of fun watching, regardless. We were already familiar with the dance battle style of competition, as jugglers have co-opted it for club juggling and diabolo competitions. These are two of the competitors in the Open Style final.
During a break in the competition the compere invited any “next gen” dancers to come up and show their stuff. Both of these kids have been dancing for more than half their lives and were seriously good.
Our last couple of days in Brisbane were pretty domestic. We did have one last coffee with Chez and Margaret at a delightful Italian pastry shop near Margaret’s house, but other than that it was mostly taking care of miscellaneous chores and packing up for the next leg of our trip: onwards to New Zealand.
A huge thanks to Margaret, Rob, Chez, Nicki and Jasmine for making us really part of the family during our time in Brisbane and for taking care of us so well! We’re looking forward to seeing at least some of you again, briefly, when we’re back in Brisbane for two nights at the beginning of April.
