Dear Everyone,
Our flight to Brisbane is uneventful. We
are staying at an Airbnb on the South Bank.
This is a big cultural destination because along the south bank of the
Brisbane River is where a lot of big institutions reside: the natural history
museum, the art museum, the state library, and the city theater. We arrive in
the late afternoon, relax on the patio, visit a 7-11 for a few rations, and
then have some ramen for dinner.
The following morning we walk a few blocks to the riverside,
near the library complex, and board a catamaran that takes us up river to the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary. It’s a beautiful day for a river cruise, and
the boat has an exquisitely timed recorded patter (including dad jokes) that
corresponds to the sights along the river.
There are a lot of large mansions riverside. Brisbane is twenty miles up from the ocean,
but is still a tidal estuary for another 30 miles, so you can get an idea of
how flat the river delta is. There have
been several major floods over the years.
The authorities thought they had taken care of this problem when they
built the large Wivenhoe
dam in the 1970s, but two major floods (in 2011 and 2021, up to 16 feet
above the normal water level) that caused multi-billions in damage have proved
this incorrect. Climate change may
exacerbate this problem.
After passing the University
of Queensland (known as ‘UQ’), and passing under a series of bridges, we
arrive at Lone Pine. This was started
almost 100 years ago in 1927. Claude Reid was afraid that koalas were in danger
of extinction, so he bought some land, planted a bunch of eucalyptus, and began
to breed koalas for reintroduction. The
space now houses over 100 breeding koalas, as well as other iconic Australian
animals – Tasmanian devils, four kinds of Kangaroo/wallaby, emus, cassowaries,
platypus, dingos, wombats, etc. It’s
about the size of Lincoln Park Zoo.
Cheryl starts laughing uncontrollably when we come upon the koala area -
-there are so many of them! Some with babies!
She pays an extra fee to get the chance to hold one (later in the
day). We go past bird exhibits, sleeping
devils, and into a large field where there are multiple kangaroos, reminiscent of
a goat or deer park. The ‘roos are happy
to eat from your hand, and submit to tentative petting. We have never seen so
many koalas or 'roos at once! There is another large field where they give
raptor demonstrations (which we miss), although we do see some wild raptors (Black kites and Brahminy kites) flying about. There is also a small farm in the zoo, which we skip.
We have a lunch in the outdoor picnic area, where we are amused by brush
turkeys and eastern water dragons. All
too soon it’s time to leave, and we get back on the boat for a relatively quiet
trip to the city. We play tag with the CityCat
and KittyCat ferry services (some of which are free) ply their way up and
down, and across the river
On arrival we walk through the library, and pay a visit to
the art museum. For dinner that evening
we go to a Turkish restaurant in the trendy South Bank where we have pide (lahmacun),
and later stop at an ice cream store.
Brisbane 2
We don’t really have any plans this day. Cheryl and Cindy
plan for the last loads of laundry (they did some in Cairns) before going to
New Zealand. The rental has a small launderette,
but the washer is super sensitive to unbalancing, and the small dryer is
underpowered. In the end some of the
clothes are hand washed, and clothes are set out to dry on racks after a couple
of cycles of the dryer. Late in the morning we walk across the Victoria Bridge,
which has been rebuilt multiple times. Just before, on the South Bank is a
large aquatic complex where they are reconstructing the beach area. You can see
the Kulripa Bridge
just upriver, built using tensegrity principles. The Victoria Bridge dumps us out on Queen Street,
which is the main shopping drag of the city.
There is an elementary school orchestra and choir competition going on,
and we eat at a Japanese dumpling house.
We walk back to the south bank where we visit the natural
history museum which has both animals and some anthropological exhibits, and then up the street a bit where we go to Eleven Bridges Bar
and Distillery, a bar that specializes in gin.
They have about 200 different brands of gin. We get three paddles with three different
gins each, so nine in all. This includes
two gins flavored with saffron (blech), one aged in a port wine cask (yum),
three house gins, and three others I can’t recall. We walk to a nearby grocery store to get take
out microwave food we eat in our apartment, and then watch the opening games of
the world cup – New Zealand beats Norway (their only goal, and only win in the
group stage) , and Australia beats Ireland (Australia makes it to the knock-out
round).
The next day is our flight to New Zealand. Thoughts on Australia? It’s a foreign country where people speak English. Australians seem interested in developing a
country with shared public goods: there are frequent clean and working public
restrooms, every museum we saw had free entry; plentiful public parks in good
shape, lots of public transportation. We
saw may businesses promoting help for immigration. The cities seemed clean and livable, although
I don’t know if people are paid living wages.
They have a colonial history with a poor accounting of how they treated
the aborigines, but still better than how the US treated Indians, and I think
they are doing more than lip service (although not much more) to make amends –
they established a ~300 million fund in 2021 for reparations for the children
of the stolen generations. It’s a big country, and we only visited three
cities, but we all enjoyed our time there.
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