Brisbane

I keep coming back to the light of Brisbane. If you are born into it, this palette of gentle pinks and oranges at dawn and dusk, the blast white of midday in summer, the lemon luminescence of mid-morning and mid-afternoon, you keep it with you, and measure all other light by it. If you live away from it, then step back into it, it is the first thing that tells you you’re home. Brisbane reveals a city of wooden houses where mango trees abound, where the serpentine river seems to be of the city and yet somehow not, where ghostly memories of demolished landmarks like Cloudland and The Bellevue Hotel hover and where the chime of the City Hall clock echoes through time and place. Taking readers on a unique personal journey, Matthew Condon unearths the city’s history – sometimes literally – and paints a portrait of transformation from a sleepy capital city that’s more like a big country town, to a vibrant, confident place, but one where time can still move slowly. In a new epilogue, Condon returns to the house he grew up in; standing and looking out from the verandah, the past collides with the present, but the view is as he remembers it.