Just keep swimming

My icon on DW (a street sign reading FLOODWAY almost completely immersed in floodwater) comes from the last big Queensland floods.

Right now, a vast proportion of Queensland, approximately equivalent to Texas, is underwater. This, unfortunately, includes my home town. Family and friends are okay so far, although my mother's town is completely cut off from the rest of the world (so nothing new there. *RIMSHOT*) but today they're predicting more rain, plus controlled release of water from the overflowing damns, plus a king tide.

Aaaaaaaaaaaand, because this is all about me, I'm torn between staying home to keep refreshing the news, or going to work and refreshing the news there. Some joker in IT decided that all the Brisbane news sites should be blocked for obscene content (insert joke about the Murdoch press here), but my supervisor said I could use her computer to check stuff when I needed.

I'm reminded of the Black Saturday bushfires a couple of years ago, where my line manager at Borders spent most of the afternoon listening to fire updates on the radio and trying to call her parents. Speaking of which, I've lost the link (since I was reading the news on my phone before I got up), but a town that was all but wiped out by said fires is now raising money for flood relief. Incidentally, donation options.

So, um, yeah! If anyone needs me, I'll be reloading this and being otherwise quite useless!

Not drowning

My family, that is. My brother rang to say that everyone is safe, but he's thinking of going out later to loot season 3 of Avatar.

Mawkish sentimentality about a big country town

It's a funny old city, Brisbane.

A few years ago, there was an indie film doing the rounds, called All My Friends Are Leaving Brisbane. That sort of sums it up. Brisbane, BrisVegas, Brisneyland, BrisVenice, it's a place you come from or move to. To the rest of Australia, it's a big country town, an awkward city sort of sandwiched between two glamorous holiday destinations, a cultural wasteland suspiciously close to redneck country.

Of course, I moved to Melbourne, and I don't regret for a moment living in a city with a successful vegan fast food chain, 24 hour ice creameries and more than one newspaper. I lived in Brisbane independently as an adult for eight years, and I grew up in the satellite towns of Ipswich and Caboolture. There came a point where I had seen all the sights, eaten at every place I could afford, and even the mating dance of the emo kids outside the 24-hour Hungry Jacks no longer had any anthropological allure.

But I miss that stupid city, and I'm becoming dangerously sentimental about the bits of it currently being washed away in the flood. The Moggill Ferry and the floating riverwalk have to be destroyed. The Island party boat may follow. Oxleys on the River has not only changed its name, but sunk, and I never even got to try their oysters. I can't even begin to tell you how glad I am that the City library moved from a basement to a multi-storey building.

Brisbane has a funny culture. It's a small city. People ask what school you went to, and give you a funny look if you name an unremarkable state school from another town all together. People gather into subcultures simply for lack of anything better to do. Goths, emos, rockabillies, cosplayers. They're everywhere, but a city like Melbourne doesn't encourage that sort of single-minded obsessiveness.

And, too, there's something a bit dark and strange about Brisbane. Maybe it's the lingering taint of the corruption and right wing politics of the 1980s. The underlying racism that spawned Pauline Hanson and One Nation. The humidity, the mangroves and the scent of rotting mangos in a backyard. Melbourne thinks it's so cool with its rainy alleys, but Brisbane has the lesbian vampire killer, the ghosts in the town hall, the sharks in the river.

A feeling like that shouldn't survive bright sunlight, football crowds, the outer suburbs. But Brisbane is strange that way. It's flexible. Like water.