The Deen Brothers were the firm Brisbane called when something had to come down. They took the Belle Vue in April 1979 and Cloudland in November 1982, and in the decades between they took a great deal else that nobody now recalls having stood.
What the city remembers about them is not a building. It is a sentence. The brothers advertised themselves, or were said to have advertised themselves, with the line that all they left behind were the memories.
I have wanted that line for a title since I began writing about this, and I was careful to check it before I took it, because a slogan that everybody in Brisbane can quote is exactly the kind of thing that turns out on inspection to have been invented by somebody's uncle. It has been quoted in the Courier-Mail, in InDaily and in Broadsheet, and the wording holds: all we leave behind are the memories. A variant circulates with "is" for "are". The sources I could check give "are".
It is a good line and it was meant as a boast. A wrecking firm telling a city that the past is safe with them, because they only take the fabric, and memory is not fabric.
This collection is an argument that the boast was wrong, and wrong in a way that matters. Memory is not what survives a demolition. Memory is the first thing to go, and it goes so quietly that we mistake its absence for the absence of a loss. Brisbane remembers the Belle Vue and Cloudland with real feeling, and the feeling is genuine, but it has crowded out the far larger number of buildings that went without a rally, without a headline, and without anybody being able to name them forty years later.
What we leave behind is not the memories. It is a gap where a memory would have been, and the particular talent of this state has been to make those gaps difficult to see.
So the title is theirs, and the argument is against them. That seemed the right way round.