Brisbane

Photo: John Pryke

The coasts are equated with cultural ugliness; new housing estates, mainstreamers, tradies, boring types who enjoy the beach. To have come from the coast and be accepted in Brisbane means to turn one's back on the coast and join with them in their scoffing. Excersise is scoffed at. Healthy foods are scoffed at. When a limitation in physical fitness is revealed, for example gross inflexibility or excessive puffing after a short amount of cardio, it is joked about with a kind of pride. For they have not wasted a second of their life on the lowly and brainless drudgery of sport, save for when they might have been forced to in early childhood. It is the type of condition, that, if combined with heavy lifting, may cause an injury, or in later life, obesity, but until this happens it is all hunky dory. The flesh is unimportant, simply a vessel to consume intoxicants, a canvas on which to inscribe with ironic tattoos, a housing for the eyes to gaze on with a unique cynical view. This way of viewing is much valued, and when a deadline is due at art college, it is drawn upon to produce a work.

Perhaps it is the landscape of Brisbane itself which informs everything, it's core a mess of concreted surfaces; overpasses, tunnels, entire hills paved over, busways, grimy last-century train-lines carved obtusely through it all; the summer heat radiating back off these hard surfaces, with hardly a grassed area to soak into, being defied by the youth in jeans and docs, a counter-reaction to the shorts and thongs a simple Brisbane worker will don in his leisure time. But you will not see the worker waiting to cross at traffic lights on a summers day as the youth does, uncomfortable and hungover at midday, mid-week; they are in air-conditioned offices and later on in their cars driving home, when the network of asphalt and tollways makes the commute just-bearable. And even if it is not, a change in government at the next election is sure to result in a new tunnel or overpass.

Distant forest-covered hills can be glimpsed through certain angles, beyond the edge of Brisbane, but they are seldom looked upon, and even in the refuge of the shady suburbs, ugliness is worshipped. A dirt-bare floored area under a house is converted into a gallery; the work on show is a fan shuddering around with brown panty-hose replacing the blades. In the next room, a rotten disused 70s-era laundry, the mouth of a vacuum cleaner sucks vainly at a pair of suspended underpants.