Bye bye Brisbane

Just back from a ventiquattrore to Brisbane, for no other reason than we'll probably never go to Brisbane again. We'll be back here of course, to see to things about the house, but will probably be in and out of the Gold Coast for that. Which is a shame, because I fucking hate the Gold Coast, and I'm quite fond of Brisbane. I wondered during our little shindig what would be happening right now if we had moved there instead of L____. Probably pretty much the same thing as is happening now, but with more second thoughts.

The weather is just so constantly perfect in Brisbane whenever there aren't catastrophic and lethal floods, and it's big enough and has enough immigrants to be worth the time of day. And then there's the GOMA. I've enthused about it before on here. I love it, and every time we go - I reckon we've been five or six times over the last three years - I find something that touches me deeply, which is remarkable for a modern art gallery combined with a philistine grump like me, who reckons pretty much everything is crap.

This time it was the video installation Angelica Mesiti put together, Citizens Band.  Beautiful. I mean it won by having throat singing, first of all. Throat singing is one of those things for me . . . if I had massive, stupid money - I mean, more interest on my capital than an average yearly salary - I'd take a few years of my life and go off to northeast Asia and learn how to throat sing. So right away, it won. But then the way it was put together spoke to me so much as an immigrant. Especially with the bits from Paris. And then there was this sort of thing, which I had no idea was even a thing. Of course it was the four musicians involved who made it great but it worked very well as a video installation according to the artist's intentions as far as I could understand them.

This way out

We're leaving for Victoria on Thursday. Possibly we're jumping the gun, but possibly we've dallied too long . . . one of those frustratingly unresolved things. There's a verbal agreement for a tenant for the house to take possession ASAP, and the F-word is 90% sure he's getting a job offer that starts in Melbourne in a week. Nothing set in stone yet. But we've got to go - he has to prepare his exhibition, that starts in a month, and I, personally, am simply ready to stop sitting here twiddling my thumbs. The sooner we get to Victoria the sooner we can find a place to rent in Melbourne and the sooner I won't be living with the F-word's father in the sticks (and the sticks of Victoria is the sort of stick that makes you want to poke your own brain out). And I'm really excited at the prospect of Melbourne. I like it quite a bit from what I know of it.

Reckoning on what I'll miss here. I suppose the colours would top the list. The colours and the birds, which overlap quite a lot, what with all the lovely rosellas and lorrikeets. Such a range of vivid greens, even now, while we're semi-officially droughting. Such a pleasure to see the sun rising over a low blue mist and multi-hued hills here of a morning, if you sort of tune out the disgustingly ugly houses. And there are so many flowers. The jacarandas are flowering again at the moment and I'm pleasantly surprised we get a last few days of enjoyment of that, though I think they have jacarandas down south too. Last year they didn't flower until December and January. The introduced tree species get so confused here - in Northern Rivers at least and much of the rest of the country as well, I believe, you don't have a predictable season cycle at all. Out of the three years or so we've been here there hasn't been the same year twice, if you know what I mean. And everybody talks about it like that's really weird. I suppose they've inherited that ability to be consistently shocked by weather unpredictability from the British, along with their fixation on home ownership and violent drunkenness.

For all that snarking I'm going to miss some people too. My neighbours, a few good friends. Well, only two in my case, but the F-word's a lot more tolerant of other people. And yesterday we went to Byron Bay after passing a gallery where the F-word had sold a painting (for lots of money! Yay!) and called up a couple who we'd met a few months back, before Canada, to buy some baby stuff from. We'd hit it off a lot at the time, Italian paterfamilias and highly-paid-work-from-home-mum like me - lots in common (though I'm guessing from the size of their house and the fact it's in Byron Bay, the main thing we'd have in common income wise would be the same figure but with an extra zero). But life intervened; we haven't got to Byron much, we'd been busy, and their paterfamilias's car was stolen with his cellphone and F-word's number in it, so we never met up again, until yesterday. We had a great time. It makes sense. They're among the first people we've met here who are in a situation, professionally, financially, and educationally, that's anything like ours. And the only other two we've met are the two good friends I'm going to miss.

I understand that makes me sound like a snob but I can live with that. When we first headed here the F-word warned me I was going to find that people weren't going to be that interested in books and the world and whatnot. I thought that'd be fine, I'd just get interested in the crap they were interested in, like gardening or rugby or whatever. That was flat out dumb of me.

Anyways, I think my Northern Rivers experience would have been a lot better if we'd been living in a different town. But then we would be cash-strapped and worrying about money now, instead of having lots of padding to let this move to Victoria go pretty smoothly even if the F-word doesn't get this job that starts Monday, or if the tenant changes his mind at the last second.