MATTHEW MURPHY

Story

Nothing happens in Brisbane,does it?

‘With its jackboot police, crooked pollies, no-talent league players, weak union officials and stinking, humid weather,bloody Brisbane mate, it\’s a hellhole. No one goes to Brisbane. Anyone with half a brain gets out, Melbourne, Sydney, overseas. Anywhere looks good from Brissy mate. It\’s a downer for workers, their Premier Joh is a ratbag and a dead-set bosses man. Nothing happens in Brisbane, she\’s knackered mate!’ It was 1979 in Sydney, we were a new migrant family staying at Coogee migrant hostel and I was looking information about the other Australian cities. This emphatic opinion on Brisbane, by Bruce a cook at the hostel found general approval around our communal dinner table. His slow Aussie strine suggested that he had authentic local knowledge.

Tony, a recent migrant from Liverpool continued in the same vein. ‘I\’ve only been in Australia three months. I\’m a bricklayer and Queenslanders live in wooden huts on poles, there\’s nothing there for me Paddy. Some of the blokes at work are Queenslanders. They told me there\’s no activity in construction since the Brisbane floods and that the building industry is kaput. Bruce is right, nothing happens in Brisbane’. Neville, a bus driver from Cork, interjected ‘From what you read in the papers Brisbane is only for rich old people who go there to save paying death duties. How bloody stupid is that? Money in the bank won\’t impress St. Peter or Old Nick and you can\’t negatively gear a grave. It\’s obvious pal it\’s a dead end, nothing happens in Brisbane. The majority of the people I talked to in Sydney agreed these derogatory comments on Brisbane. Whenever I asked anyone, ‘what\’s it like in Brisbane?\’ the response would be a similar tirade.

The Brisbane being portrayed by my mates in the hostel and Sydneysiders in general might have turned some people off going north. It conveyed the impression that Brisbane was the centre of a steamy decaying despotism. To me these comments only made Brisbane more attractive. I had heard the same sort of invective about Australia in Ireland, while I was trying to gather the courage to emigrate. The image I had of Brisbane was of a subtropical, laid-back city. The opposite of the claustrophobic, rain sodden city of Dublin, my hometown. The books in Dublin\’s Australian embassy had showed Brisbane to be close to one of the best coastlines in the world including the world famous Gold Coast, Fraser Island and the Barrier Reef, while inland was the unique, brown Australian outback. Brisbane was the capital city of Queensland, a state rich in agriculture, mineral wealth and some of the most diverse fauna and flora in the world. Our vague emigration plan to was to check out all the states of Australia and finally settle in Brisbane.

On The 14th of April 1979, I left Ireland for good. I was thirty-two years of age, a tailor by trade, married with four children and frustrated with my attempts to advance generally amounting to nothing. My father a man proud of his working class heritage, would implore me to stay put: Shouting with frustration ‘who the hell do you think you are? You have a good job, you\’re doing well, why can\’t you accept things as they are? You won\’t get a job so handy over there’ Underneath his ranting, he was deeply anxious for my families\’ happiness, he would often walk away from our conversations tapping his head saying, ‘Nothing happens up here, he thinks he can change the world’. This feeling of dejection was part of the Dublin\’s northeast ethos, then one of the poorest areas in Europe.

I decided to try Australia where my abilities might not be measured by my accent or postcode. We landed in Sydney and I started work two hours after arriving! Our three oldest children started school the next week and the baby attended the hostel playgroup. Phil, my wife, bought a second-hand fold up table and chairs and put some posters on the besser-block walls of our two-room hostel unit. We had a rented television showing some of the same American sitcoms and children\’s programmes that we watched in Dublin. This had a reassuring effect on the children. The haste to turn this small unit into a home and normalise our life was paramount, jetlagged and dog-tired the tension and stress allows no rest. To create our own personal space amongst the sea of ethnic migrants and refugees that made up the population of that hostel was critical for all of us. A base to identify with, a centre of gravity is the first pursuit of the lost soul that is the dispossessed migrant.

A sense of routine can be found in the most unstable and alien situations, so our new life evolved. We settled into the hostel and found it easy to make friends.

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