BrisBAMN!?

Abstract

I had been under the impression that there was only one Brisbane. — Steele Rudd In 1921, Jack Lindsay wrote from Brisbane of Nietzsche's assertion ‘that the academic virtue is sleep, i.e., narcotisation’. A common academic and non-academic indulgence in remembering Brisbane is the narcotic of Queensland's extreme difference: a state of exceptional boredom and brutality. It is widely assumed that, for most of its history, Queensland was a sleepy backwater; its capital the country town described by a late nineteenth century visitor: ‘Brisbane is quite a pretty town, to be sure, but it bores you to death.’ Dismissive characterisations of Queensland coarsened as a result of Bjelke-Petersen's ascendency. If you were not bored to death by its cultural wastelands, you could be beaten close to it in the boorish badlands patrolled by his pigs. The crazed Dane fed the chooks while watching cranes rise over this animal farm, apparently untouchable in his Elsinore: The rest of the country often thought [Queenslanders] a bit peculiar: a maverick state, populated by politically backward ‘banana benders’ who chose a crank … to rule them. These rather offensive stereotypes helped in turn to sustain a political myth that the government was somehow unique in its reactionary politics — even ‘fascist’ — making Petersen impossible to defeat or dislodge.