I couldn't believe it. With the hundreds of thousands of people crowding the river, I walked into an empty room with floor to ceiling windows and the blinds down. I rolled them up and got this amazing view of the fireworks - right in the thick of it with the glass of the high rise buildings reflecting the explosions going off in every direction. This is looking straight down Charlotte Street with the Treasury Casino silhouetted against the fireworks at South Bank.
To celebrate the opening of the annual Brisbane Festival each September, Brisbane is treated to "Riverfire", a half hour of pyrotechnics stretching for a couple of kilometres along the river from the Story Bridge (above) to Victoria Bridge. According to the paper yesterday, they were expecting 600,000 people to be turning up to see the display which included the F1-11 "dump and burn". Dump and burn, you ask? Lovers of the environment look away now. They do this low flyover with the F1-11 jet and, as the jet reaches the city, the pilot dumps fuel out of the back of the plane so that it catches on fire, giving the overall effect of a rocket blasting across the sky... with bone shaking, face melting sound. It really is spectacular and everyone gets very excited. A local radio station does a live cross into the cockpit of the jet and just before the pilot dumps his fuel he says "BRISBANE LOOK UP". Unfortunately, I missed getting a photo of that. I think I was too busy staring, mouth agape.
This sunrise, a few weeks ago, had so many colours in it that I feel justified in posting a shot from it here for the third time! (others here and here).
The William Jolly Bridge is settling into its funky new look nicely. As part of Queensland's 150th celebrations, Brisbane city council has commissioned this permanent light installation with a variety of patterns by Ian de Gruchy, a projection artist who has projected on other public buildings like these ones.
I haven't quite worked it out but I think it's a very tall dog in boots, shorts and a hoody... with a backpack holding a tree and stood like he is waiting to cross the road. It's a sculpture on the corner of Wharf and Ann Streets. If you have any info on it, I'd love to know!
I've been birdwatching in my friends' house in Mount Nebo, a mountain community just to the north-west of Brisbane.
Later on this year in December, Queensland will have been independent from New South Wales for 150 years so there are lots of celebrations and commemorations already taking place. One of which is an allocation of traffic signal boxes to be painted with a "Q150" theme. This one on the corner of Waterworks Road and Settlement Road in The Gap was being painted yesterday. There's going to be a horse on one side and a cyclist on the other showing how we got around then and now. The colour scheme is the same for all the boxes doing the project - taken from the Q150 logo. Each one is representative of something Queensland-y so green is the tropical rainforest, red and yellow are the sand, blue is the barrier reef and black (along with red and yellow) are from the aboriginal flag. I had a bit of a chat to the artist, Kathy Sullivan, who said that there is a time limit for getting the thing painted and she had to finish it by yesterday - with 2 coats of paint! Hopefully it's all done now and you can go and admire her work next time you're in The Gap.
This place is great. Built in 1886, according to the front of the building, all the little coloured changing rooms are grouped around the pool (gents on one side, ladies on the other). There's a wooden viewing gallery upstairs.
Welcome to Spring Hill Municipal Baths!
This set of stairs, known as Jacob's Ladder, links Wickham Terrace with Edward Street. It's park of King Edward Park which has just had a colourful new facelift. I think it looks great!
There is a phenomenon in Australia whereby a business holder will construct something big associated with that business (usually out of fibre-glass) and it will become something of a tourist attraction. Personally, I have visited the Big Lobster (Kingston, S.A.), the Big Banana (Coff's Harbour, NSW), the Big Cherries (Young, NSW), the Big Merino (Goulburn, NSW) and the Big Prawn (Ballina, NSW). I have also driven past the Big Shell, the Big Pumpkin, the Big Mower and the Big Pineapple all in Queensland but the novelty was wearing a bit thin by then so we kept driving.
This is Paladar, the beautiful Cuban cigar shop and cafe on Merivale Street in South Brisbane. You can hang out on the roof, have a coffee and a chat to the owner, perhaps smoke a Bolivar or Partigas... and listen to some live music.
Some of the sunrises we've been having recently have been gorgeous - like someone has taken a giant blow-torch to clouds and left them smouldering.
Following on from yesterday's post....80 tonnes of timber from a Nepalese Jungle went into making this beautiful building. I recommend a feel.
This is one of the entrances to the Nepalese Peace Pagoda, a hand-carved wooden building in South Bank given by the Nepalese government to Brisbane. Apparently, it took 160 Nepalese families 2 years to craft! They made it in sections and shipped it over from Nepal in 1988 in time for the World Expo which was held here in the same year. The detail is stunning.
I only noticed this flyer on a telegraph pole outside my place on saturday so I was a bit too late for the meeting. And there was free food!
There are some beautiful Art Deco buildings around Brisbane. This one, an apartment block on Vulture Street in South Brisbane, is one of my favourites.
This guy lives on Blunder Road in Durack and brightens up the busy road no end.
You can't really call the weather we are having "winter". Today is going to be 29 degrees and flowers everywhere are starting to perk up.
Here we are at the Queensland Art Gallery on the south bank of the Brisbane River. Not to be mixed up with the Gallery of Modern Art, next door. At the moment they have a huge exhibition of impressionist and realist works from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. I can't imagine the care that must go in to transporting that precious cargo halfway around the world. Grudgingly, I agreed not to take any pictures.
Chinese Chess (also known as Xiangqi) is a board game for 2 players popular in China, Vietnam and Inala Civic Centre on saturday mornings. There were several games going on at once, with groups of spectators that looked like they may have been dishing out some serious advice.
In Australia, regardless of whether you smoke or not, if you work outdoors your tea-break is usually called a "smoko".
Inala is one of those neighbourhoods you get in cities that doesn't have a lot of wealth but has a really diverse population. Notably Aboriginal, Torres Straight Islanders, Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai and Indonesian. I went shopping there yesterday and had a ball. We picked up a barramundi and a snapper for a BBQ. Mmmm!!
I have gone on about these trees before I know... but I just think they're beautiful and deserve going on about. In my local park here, they line the path by the river and are lit beautifully in the evening sun, emphasising their big old knarls and tendons.
This is looking up at the sky from inside the tropical dome at the Botanical Gardens in Mt Coot-tha. You can be on the outside looking in here.
A flower commonly seen in Brisbane all year round is the Strelitzia, more commonly known as the Bird of Paradise flower, so named because it's petals look a bit like a bird of paradise's plumage. They also come in bright orange. In my local area, they have planted a large patch of them on the edge of a footpath on a busy road. It makes the walk past much nicer!
The life and times of Sir Thomas Brisbane in 10 concise and over-simplified bullet points:
This is a statue of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. He's sitting casually out the front of the Planetarium at the bottom of Mt. Coot-tha. He was a Russian rocket scientist who is credited with inspiring those who led Russia into space.
This is the new bridge over the Centenary Highway which links the bikeway with Mount Coot-tha. It cost $10 million to build - much to the outrage of certain corners of the media - but it's a step closer to making this city more workable for pedestrians. I think it was much needed and makes lovely shadows on a sunny day.
Brisbane City Hall is a beautiful old building (1920s) in the centre of Brisbane. It houses the fantastic Museum of Brisbane as well as various concerts throughout the year. Hundreds of people become Australian citizens here every year in a big grand ceremony and you can even go on a tour up the clock tower. At the moment there is a problem with a lot of the concrete walls within the building in that they're falling apart. It's going to cost A$120 million to sort it out. It cost A$480,000 to build... I wonder what that is in today's money?
Brisbane showing its multicoloured neon ripples, soon after a Citycat has glided past.
