Sunday

Southbank rainforest walk. Palms and weeping figs.


Tipuana tipu. UQ Lakes.

I've been reading Manzoni's 'The Betrothed' (I promessi sposi). Now in retrospect, it feels like the lives of the saints. But it is a delight to read. From the very first event, where the priest Don Abbondio is accosted by two bravoes and we have three pages quoting the various edicts by which these bravoes are to be discouraged.

"Hearing such bold and confident words from so great a noble, and such orders going with them, one would be very much inclined to think that all the bravoies disappeared for ever at their very sound. But the evidence of a nobleman no less authoritatative and no less endowed with titles obliges us to believe quite the contrary. ...

And wherever he touches on history there is always this delicate irony. Fantastic stuff. A most extraordinary book: we go from character to character with interludes of beautifully ironic history - history, which has been deeply internalised and now comes out as natural conversation. And it's always a conversation with you, the reader. And it's a tale of terrible times: immense lawlessness, war, famine and pestilence, encompassed in a tale of Milan and its environs from 1628 to 1630.

"The people had tried to create abundance by sacking and burning, the government was trying to maintain it be the gallows and the rope. Such means were linked to each other, but the reader can see how little they had to do with the ends; and in a moment he will see just what avail they wre to attain them. It is easy to see, and not uninteresting to observe, how there was a necessary connexion between these measures; each was an inevitable consequence of its predecessor, and all a result of the first decree which fixed the price of bread so far from its real price - from the price, that is, that would have resulted naturally from the relation between supply and demand. .... But then, as the consequences gradually began to be felt, it became the duty of those responsible to come to the relief of each edict with a law forbidding people to do what they had been encouraged to do by the preceding law."

"Man's activity is limited; and the more of it is put into giving orders, the less goes into carrying them out. What goes into the sleeves cannot go into the gussets."

Floating vegetation

Flood debris in the mangroves at QUT


UQ Boat House and pontoon and rowers getting off the river


Flowering foxtail palm, SouthBank

The ferries started again on Tuesday. It was the first day I had looked at the river since they had been cancelled (on the previous Thursday). There were huge logs everywhere as well as the mats of vegetation I had seen on the first afternoon after the storms. What is curious and disconcerting is that the floating vegetation continues to float, moving upstream and downstream with the tide.

We've had more rain in the last two days, too. But one wonders when the floating vegetation will cease to mar the surface of the river. It seems as if it could go on for ever, floating to and fro. (I said this to a woman while waiting for the cat. She assured me that the water hyacinths would eventually die because of brackish water... and presumably then they will lose some flotation. I hope so.)

On Tuesday, it made for interesting rowing, since the last thing we wanted to do was punch a hole in the boat by cannoning into a log.

Various palms are flowering at the moment. And on Sunday, I finally found the powerhouse at New Farm. My father would have loved the restaurant there.



Watt (at the Powerhouse on the river)

Along the river

Mangroves at the QUT ferry pontoon


Southbank. Bougainvillea, weeping figs & palm trees


State Library from the river


Gallery of Modern Art from the river


Poincianas on the building site. (Gallery of Modern Art behind.)


Cranes



Two days earlier. Same site. Pile-driver (yellow) and two cranes.

They tell me Joh was responsible for the Cultural Centre and Southbank. I must think more kindly of him. It is a beautiful place and all Brisbane seems to flock there to barbecue, to picnic, to eat, to swim, to do cultural things and to just enjoy themselves. The people pour off the ferry at the Southbank stop and on again and it doesn't matter what hour of the day or night it is.

The ferry has to slow to a crawl between Regatta and North Quay so as not to disturb the building works on the river. I heard the yellow pile-driver first and then saw it. Amazing that they have built this way since at least the Bronze Age.
See
www.tv.com/time-team/vauxhall-london/episode/450351/summa...

The bridge being built is the Tank Street Bridge
Wikipedia
For the design see
Department of Public Works
I hope it doesn't clutter up the river..