Queensland - See ya later, mate!

The time has come to say goodbye to Queensland and Australia (for now).  I must admit I've been (mostly) envious of the weather Brisbane has been having since I started this blog.  There's certainly logic behind Queensland's popularity as a holiday destination and as a place to retire.  We always think of things being 'upside down' in Australia and in that respect, the Gold Coast and beaches of Queensland are the equivalent to Spain for British holidaymakers and retirees. 

I've blogged about aspects of Queensland's culture that have appealed to me.  I read no less than three novels by Queensland's writers (I didn't blog about the last novel, The House at Riverton by Kate Morton which, although it was really interesting, was set in England and didn't have anything to say about Australia.)  I also watched movies such as Swimming Upstream and Praise.  I cooked kangaroo meat and went on a nostalgia trip with Savage Garden. 

As usual though, there was so much more that I didn't have time to blog about.  As is becoming a traditional in my final blogpost, I'm going to summarise some of the other things I learned about Queensland.

I learned that Queensland is three times the size of France, but has a similar population to Ireland.  I learned that the state was almost called Cooksland, as some people felt one Australian state named after the British queen (Victoria) might be enough.  Queensland's flag used to contain a portrait of Queen Victoria, but this was changed when Queenslanders complained that it was too difficult to reproduce.  I learned that the crown on Queensland's flag is changed with every new monarch. 

I learned that Brisbane was originally called Edinglassie, a combination of Edinburgh and Glasgow.  I learned that approximately 95,000 Brits live in Brisbane and that a million US soldiers were stationed there during the Second World War, this precarious 'colonisation' being described in the famous phrase 'they're over-paid, over-sexed and over here'.

I learned that thousands of Kanakas, workers from the Pacific Islands were deported from Queensland in the early 20th century, as part of the new nation's White Australia policy.  I learned that the name Moreton Bay was the result of a spelling mistake and should have been called 'Morton Bay'. 

I learned that Australian swans are black and that the term semelparous refers to any creature that only lives long enough to reproduce once.  I learned about Queensland's state bird, the Brolga, which is known for its elaborate mating dances, aspects of which have been reproduced in the dance and culture of the native Australian tribes.  I learned that just 1.5% of Australia's land surface produces 95% of its agricultural yield and that most of this is located in the Darling/Murray basin. 

I learned about Macademia nuts, eskies, XXXX beer and Tim tams.  I learned that you can go helmet diving in Cairns and that it takes 28 and a half hours to travel from Brisbane to Cairns by bus.  I learned about the wizard of Kuranda and the Min Min lights of Boulia.  I learned that the small outback town Quilpie has named most of its streets after birds. 

I learned that Cape York peninsula is about the same size as Belarus, but has a population of 16,000 people. 

I'm sure there's even more to learn about Queensland and I look forward to visiting for real one day :-)

Image credits:

The photo of the Brolga is by flickr user anthonycramp who is from Dulwich, which is a suburb of Adelaide (not just London!).  Thanks Anthony for sharing this with us using the Creative Commons License. 

Queensland - Leichhardt and 45 million years of separation

Apologies to my regular readers, as I've had a flu these past two weeks and not had a chance to update this blog, or move on to a new country this month yet.  I still have a couple of posts to do before I can justify moving on from Queensland, so bear with me for another few days :-)

In my learning about Queensland, I've come across the 19th century explorer Ludwig Leichhardt.  Born in Prussia, a country that no longer exists, he made his way via Britain to Sydney of the 1840's and Australia, a country that barely existed in most people's minds at that time, large parts of the outback being un-charted and blanks on the map.  I've always been curious as to the motivation of the 19th century's great explorers.  I can understand the need to go where no man has ever gone before, but I still find it hard to imagine, in our globalised world of package holidays and itineraries, what it was like to head off into the unknown and beat your way across a hostile landscape, with an uncertain destination. 

The name Leichhardt is probably more familiar to Australians today, as the suburbs named after him, in Sydney and Ipswich (Queensland), but there was a time in the mid-19th century when his exploits caught the imagination of an emerging nation barely coming to terms with its physical geography.  For the first Europeans coming to Australia was like stepping into another world.  With mammals laying eggs and trees shedding their bark rather than their leaves, it must have seemed as though their whole world had, literally, been turned upside-down.

Australia has been separated from all other land-masses for no less than 45 million years, allowing its flora and fauna to develop in a completely unique way, unrelated to or influenced by the evolutionary changes that the rest of the world was experiencing.  Australia in the 19th century was quite possibly the closest a European explorer could come to seeing alien life forms!  From a geological point of view, the importance of soil in Australia shouldn't be underestimated.  The land in Australia is very, very old.  Whilst other continents have been undergoing geological processes that have renewed and re-fertilised their soils, Australia has been in, what is the equivalent of, a geological coma.  The earth there is incredibly fragile, leached of all goodness, the soil can literally be blown away in the wind. 

I guess for that reason, more than anywhere else on our planet, native Australians learned to live in a symbiotic relationship with the Earth, nurturing the fragile landscape that they inherited.  Native Australian culture respects the land in a way that the new European arrivals could barely comprehend.  What little I know about aboriginal culture, I'm impressed by this relationship with the Earth - it reminds me somewhat on the deep reverence native American peoples have for Mother Nature.  In stark contrast to other parts of the world, where mankind has tried (not entirely successfully) to master the environment and make it conform to the needs of the human population, I get the impression that human culture in Australia is defined by the landscape, rather than being part of a landscape defined by man. 

You can read all about Leichhardt's first (successful) expedition in his memoir, Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia, from Moreton Bay to Port Essington, a Distance of Upwards of 3000 Miles, During the Years 1844-1845.  Catchy title, eh?  Thanks to the Gutenburg project and an iPhone application called Wattpad, I was able to download Leichhardt's journal and dip into the enthralling world of a 19th-century adventurer! 

It's not the kind of book you would necessarily read from cover to cover (all 659 pages of it), but that's the joy of having so many obscure texts published free online.  I didn't have time to read the whole thing, but at least I could get a sense of what the journey was like, from an original source document.  His first journey wasn't particularly well-funded, although he had no shortage of men volunteering to accompany him on his adventure.  His companions included a man who was released from prison for the journey and an Aborigine called Harry Brown (I can see Michael Caine in the film version!).  Before they even started their journey they travelled from Sydney to Brisbane by boat, a journey that normally took three days but, because of inclement weather, took them almost a week. 

Leichhardt was a natural scientist by profession, with a keen interest in botany and his journal is a world of plants and flowers.  The Brigalow tree features highly in his descriptions of the landscape, as does the Bastard Box and a peculiar animal that he calls the rabbit-rat.  The name rabbit-rat makes me giggle a bit, it's obvious they couldn't make up their minds exactly which animal it was most similar to, so they settled for this double-barrelled moniker! 

The psychological strain of the journey begins to show after the first month or so and one of the expeditioners, Mr Gilbert, has some kind of falling out with the servant boy Charley.  Charley is given the option of leaving the expedition and making his way back to Brisbane, but without any supplies, one month into their journey - understandably he apologises to Mr Gilbert and the voyage continues.

For better or worse, Leichhardt's first voyage across the northern part of Australia, setting out from the Darling Downs in what is now Queensland, was a great success, securing further support for repeat voyages, including his third voyage when he and his entire party mysteriously 'disappeared', melting into the landscape, as though they had never really made an impression on it in the first place.

Image credits:

The image of Ludwig Leichhardt was painted by Friedrich August Schmalfuß and is used as the main image for the Wikipedia article on the great explorer.  The copyright for this image has expired and it is deemed to be 'in the public domain' 

Queensland - Truly Madly Savage

I must admit, I've used the fact that I'm blogging about Queensland to go on a major nostalgia trip courtesy of Aussie band Savage Garden.  Mind you, I didn't know that Darren Hayes and Daniel Jones are from Brisbane when I started researching Queensland, so it came as a pleasant surprise.

Savage Garden are a band that has lingered at the edge of my musical taste - what I mean is that I've always been vaguely aware of them, but never been an actual fan.  The fact that I associate Savage Garden with the time I lived in Derry (Northern Ireland), which was 1999, shows how long it took for their music to penetrate my subconscious (they became really big around 1996/97). Also, somehow, when I started listening to their music again this week, I realised that I'd liked individual songs (three in particular) and never really connected them together, as being Savage Garden songs.

Of course their biggest hit will always be Truly Madly Deeply, a (seemingly) classic love song and one that I really associate with one person in particular, who was once very special to me.  Even hearing him play it five times in a row didn't put me off, but only endeared him to me even more, in a way that's only possible when you fancy someone :-)  I made the mistake once of trying to sing this song at a Karaoke (in an attempt to impress this same person) and, what you realise in a moment of sheer horror, in front of a packed pub, is that this seemingly 'slow' song has got an awful lot of words, packed tightly into almost breathless sentences, so you end up rapping, rather unromantically, especially when you don't actually know the words of the song!
This breathless, rapping quality is what makes Savage Garden so good and immediately caught my attention the first time I heard I Want You, their first big hit and the song that made them famous.  Hayes delivers the opening lines at an impressive speed:

Anytime I need to see your face I just close my eyes
And I am taken to a place where your crystal mind and
Magenta feelings take up shelter in the base of my spine
Sweet like a drink of cherry cola

Don't think I'll be trying this one at Karaoke.  Great song though!
Quite predictably, the third Savage Garden song I really like is To the Moon and Back.  I'd never really listened to the words though, not properly anyway, and I've realised that the lyrics are actually quite dark - it's a song about loneliness and feeling that the rest of the world doesn't understand you.  No doubt if I had been a teenager when Savage Garden made it big, I would have clung to the words with a sense of angst that you can only really have in your teenage years.  In that sense, like many bands before them, Savage Garden has no doubt meant so many things to many people around the world and I'm sure their lyrics have helped people get through hard times, provided the soundtrack for love affairs and the opportunity for many disastrous karaoke attempts.
I was a Goth in my teenage years, clinging to the words and music of The Cure and I see elements of this in Savage Garden's music.  Indeed the name, Savage Garden, is taken from Anne Rice's book The Vampire Chronicles and the quotation;

The mind of each man is a savage garden.

It is an incredibly cool  name and, in a world of constant revivals, will no doubt continue to fascinate people, well into the 21st century.  Not to mention the fact that they are probably the biggest-selling band ever to come out of Queensland (and Australia!). 

If I was to take it a step further, I would say that 'the savage garden' is an apt metaphor for the Australian outback - an environment that is unforgiving in the cycles of survival, but one that has, in some ways, been tamed by the European (and other) settlers who came to live there.

One footnote (of minor importance) - I was really surprised to find out that Darren Hayes was straight.  I'd always presumed he was gay.  As soon as I found out he'd been married to a woman, then it turns out that he is gay after all! 

Image credits:

The image of the Queensland flag has been created for Wikimedia Commons by user Denelson83 who is male and comes from Vancouver Island. He has contributed a lot of flag images to Wikimedia Commons, so thanks Denelson83 for sharing these with the world!


It's incredibly difficult to get copyright-free images of celebs on the internet, so I have embedded some YouTube videos instead.  Apologies to those readers who are receiving this by email, as you will only be able to view the videos online.

For lyrics I often use http://www.sing365.com/ - it's a website I've used since my teaching days and has generally been reliable, although I do listen to the songs to check the lyrics as well.

Queensland - G'day mate

Queensland, Australia - what a journey this is going to be!  For those of you who regularly read this blog, I'm just back from two weeks of 'real' travelling around Cuba and it feels like centuries since the last time I blogged.  One of the great things about Cuba was that I got a break from 'being connected' with the rest of the world.  As much as I love Facebook and Twitter and my blog, it does no harm to get some time out every now and then.  On the flight on the way over to Havana, I watched Julie and Julia which was an amazing movie and I can understand now why people draw parallels with what I'm doing, although it's vastly different (apart from the cooking bit).

I've been writing this blog for seven months now and I've really enjoyed it.  I've had over 1,000 hits, from all over the world and, most excitingly, from places like Lesotho, Oklahoma and Paraguay, ie. the places I've been blogging about.  For those of you who are visiting for the first time, in the next month or so, I will try to immerse myself in the history, culture, music and cooking of Queensland.  As much as possible, I will try to see the world from the point of view of a Queenslander and I will try to understand what it is that makes Queensland tick.

One of my closest friends in the world (and a regular reader of this blog) is from Melbourne so, thanks to her, I have learned an awful lot about Australian culture already.  I've also read The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin, which is a truly inspirational book and really helped me understand Aboriginal culture a little bit and the idea of the first people being 'caretakers of the land'.  I've listened to a lot of Australian music, watched Muriel's Wedding, got addicted to Kath and Kim and Summer Heights High (also the Einstein Factor when I was living in Thailand and had ABC - I wish they would make a British version of this quiz show).  My point is that, with a country like Australia, I will have to dig even deeper to learn new things.

I thought Queensland would be an apt starting point as, compared to Victoria or New South Wales, it's a part of Australia I know very little about.  Of course, we've all heard of the Gold Coast, Brisbane and the Great Barrier Reef.  I know about Queensland's amazing climate, how important tourism is to the state and I've also vaguely heard about the Torres Strait Islanders, although I don't know why.  I guess Queenslanders have had a lifetime of being compared to Victoria and New South Wales - even the name suggests that Victoria got there first.  I get a sense that Queensland's history has been one of playing 'catch-up' with these two bigger states.  One of the first things that has become really apparant to me, in my prelimary reading, is that Queensland today is an incredibly dynamic place.  It seems to hold all the aspirations and drive of modern Australia.  Australians from other parts of the country are moving there in their thousands.  So much so, that Queensland is poised to take second place in the population stakes by the late 2020's, overtaking the older and more established communities of Victoria. 

A brief glance at today's edition of The Courier-Mail, Brisbane's main newspaper, shows me that immigration is somewhat of an issue for Queenslanders (and all Australians?).  The main newspaper article is about a group of 'boat people' from Afghanistan and Kurdistan, who've been taken on a shopping trip to the Centro Toombul shopping mall in Brisbane.  I must admit, I really hate the term 'boat people' - something about the fact that the word 'boat' is put before the fact that they are people.  The image of people floating around in a boat, not identifying with their origins, somehow negates their home culture.  They're not Afghans or Kurds, but generic people who came to Australia on a boat - as if their culture or political repression is somehow not interesting enough to be defined. 

I think it's going to be an interesting and challenging experience learning about Queensland.  I have books, movies, music lined up.  Still need to look at things like traditional recipes (I wonder if you can buy crocodile meat in London?) and I also want to listen to local radio from Brisbane, keep an eye on the newspapers and perhaps find an interesting blog.  I'll also try to follow some Queenslanders on Twitter, as I've found this a really useful way of getting an insight into the daily lives of people in the countries I'm learning about.  If you're from Queensland, please leave a comment and tell us something about what's great about your state!

I'm leaving you with a video from YouTube which shows images of Brisbane - it's (quite strangely) silent and seems to be part of a series by YouTube user pleasetakemeto



Image credits:

The image of the Queensland flag has been created for Wikimedia Commons by user Denelson83 who is male and comes from Vancouver Island.  He has contributed a lot of flag images to Wikimedia Commons, so thanks Denelson83 for sharing these with the world!

The wonderful image of Noosa River in Queensland is by a very enthusiastic flick photographer whose username is neilalderney123 - his real name is Neil Howard, he's orginally from Brisbane, but now lives in the Channel Islands.  Thanks for sharing this with us, Neil.