The entire history of Queensland is reduced to a collection of historical odds and sods - a blacksmith’s hut, a wrecked plane here and there…while Brisbane itself gets a guernsey solely in the form of an old fire engine.
Look under “Demolition” in the Yellow Pages and you will find an advertisement depicting an historic building on the verge of crumbling beneath the repeated blows of a sining iron pendulum. Underneath the building, the contracts declare their motto: “All we leave behind are memories”.
Most readers, no doubt, will recall those not-so-distant times when things would go bump in the night and Brisbaners would wake to find that one more part of the city’s historic environment, ploughed beneath the bulldozers of development, had become no more than a memory.
Nor has this developmental destruction of the past been true only of Brisbane. The Queensland government, where it has not been outrightly hostile to heritage listings, has been notably lethargic in its contributions to the cause of preservation. This is especially true of its attitude toward the built environment where it has been markedly out of step with other States in its “go slow” approach to the development of the historic components of the National Estate. By 1981, Queensland accounted for a miserly 5.4% of the historic places listed in the Register of the National Estate.
Not only is the past thus thinner on the ground in Queensland than elsewhere in Australia; it also exhibits a distinctive selective pattern. A decade or so ago, Ray Whitmore made the following observation:
An interplanetary traveller landing in Queensland today and turning to the listings of the National Trust of Queensland or the Register... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Deen Bros Demolition Yellow Pages Ad 1988
