The Night Cloudland Fell

Three years and six months after the Belle Vue, the same firm did it again.

In the early hours of 7 November 1982, machines belonging to the Deen Brothers went up the ridge at Bowen Hills and began pulling down Cloudland. The work started before dawn, without public notice, and by the time Brisbane was awake the building that had stood on that hill for forty years was substantially gone.¹

The method needs no explanation, because we have already seen it. Begin in the dark. Finish before an objection can be organised or a judge found. Present the city in the morning with a fact rather than a proposal. It had worked on George Street in 1979 and it worked at Bowen Hills in 1982, and the second time was easier than the first, because by then everybody involved had watched it work.

What was different was the building, and the difference matters more than the similarity. The Belle Vue was mourned by architects, by the National Trust, by the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, by the press gallery and by the parliamentarians who had drunk in it — a hotel that had in any case been closed to the public since the Government bought it, its rooms given over to lodging country members, a decent walk from either railway station and further from most people's lives. Cloudland was mourned by Brisbane.

I. Luna Park

The building went up in 1939 and 1940 on the ridge above Breakfast Creek Road, and Cloudland was not yet its whole name. It opened as Luna Park, an amusement venue of the kind the interwar period produced in most Australian capitals, with Cloudland the name of the ballroom at its heart, and its most conspicuous feature was the great parabolic arch that framed the entrance and carried its name in lights.²

The site was awkward and the solution to it became the thing everybody remembers. The ballroom sat on top of a steep hill with no convenient road frontage, so patrons arrived at the bottom and were carried up the slope by a funicular railway.³Brisbane called it the cable car. You did not simply turn up at Cloudland; you were delivered to it, rising up out of the suburb towards a lit arch, which is a piece of theatre no ordinary dance hall could offer and which a great many people remembered for the rest of their lives.

The war interrupted it. Like a good deal of Brisbane's usable floor space between 1942 and 1945, the building was taken over for military purposes by the American forces then quartered in the city.⁴It came back into public use after the war and was renamed. Cloudland is a better name than Luna Park and it is the one that stuck.⁵

II. What it was for

From the late 1940s until the end of the 1970s, Cloudland did the work that a city of Brisbane's size in that period needed one large room to do.

It was where you learned to dance and where you were presented once you had. Debutante balls were held there in numbers, decade after decade, which means a significant proportion of a whole generation of Brisbane women had one of the formal photographs of their lives taken in that building. School formals. Ball after ball for service clubs, church parishes, football clubs, the police, the nurses, the tramways. The University of Queensland is said to have sat examinations on the floor, the ballroom being one of the few spaces in the city large enough to hold a cohort in silence.⁶

Then, from the 1960s and increasingly through the 1970s, it became a room that bands played. The biggest touring names mostly went elsewhere, to Festival Hall or Lang Park — a ballroom whose glory was a sprung floor was not a thing its operators handed lightly to a rock crowd.⁷What Cloudland carried was closer to home: by the end of the 1970s it was one of the rooms of a Brisbane music scene that was, for reasons connected to everything else in this book, unusually angry and unusually good. The floor that had been laid for dancing — and which everybody who ever stood on it mentions, because it moved under a crowd — moved under those crowds too.

That connection is worth drawing out, because it is not incidental. The Queensland of the late 1970s was a state in which the Premier had announced that permits for political street marches, required under the Traffic Act, would simply be refused — "Don't bother applying," he said — in which the appeal against refusal had been taken from the magistrates and given to the Police Commissioner, and in which the discretion was exercised.¹⁰A young person in Brisbane who wanted to gather with several hundred others and make a noise had a narrower range of lawful options than a contemporary in Sydney or Melbourne, and a correspondingly sharper sense of what the available options were worth. The rooms that could hold a crowd mattered more in that city than they would have mattered in a freer one.

Cloudland was one of very few such rooms. Brisbane in 1980 had no purpose-built mid-size venue of the kind that a modern city takes for granted; it had a handful of halls, most of them owned by somebody with other plans for them. So a building erected in 1939 as a novelty attached to a funicular railway ended up, four decades later, carrying a substantial part of the civic and cultural life of a capital city — not by design, and not with any protection whatsoever.

I want to put a number on this and cannot, but the shape of it is clear enough without one. Over roughly forty years, in a city that was for most of that period well under a million people, a very large fraction of the adult population had personally been inside that building, on an occasion they remembered. That is a category of civic asset the Belle Vue was not. The Belle Vue mattered because of what it was: the architecture, the verandahs, the lacework, the relationship to the parliamentary precinct. Cloudland mattered because of what had happened in it, to people who were still alive.

And this is the point at which the arrangement described in the introduction becomes concrete. All of that civic function — the debutante balls, the examinations, the formals, the concerts, four decades of a city's shared occasions — was housed in a privately held building on privately held land, in a state with no heritage legislation. Its continued existence rested on nothing more than the current owner's continuing preference for operating a ballroom. The moment that preference changed, for whatever ordinary commercial reason, there was no step of consequence between the decision and the machines. No register to consult, no consent that could not be dispensed with for the price of a trivial fine, no period in which anybody had to be told. A city had quietly agreed to keep one of its central institutions in a building it did not own and could not protect, and had never been asked whether that was wise, because nobody had ever framed it as a question.

III. The ridge

There is one more thing about the site, and it connects this chapter to material later in the collection.

Because it stood on top of a hill, Cloudland was visible from a long way off, and at night the arch was lit. It functioned as a landmark in the plain sense: a fixed thing on the skyline by which people oriented themselves, and which told them where they were and how far from home. Brisbane has very few of these. It is a city of ridges and river bends without a dominant natural feature, and the objects that stand up on its horizon do a disproportionate amount of the work of making it legible.

When such a thing is removed, what goes is not only a building but a bearing. I have written elsewhere about a monolith on the Mary Valley horizon and what its absence did to the drive home. The mechanism is identical and the scale is merely larger. The loss is not experienced as the loss of a structure. It is experienced as a wrongness in a view that had never previously required any thought at all.

IV. The night

The demolition began in the early hours of 7 November 1982 and there had been no public warning.

Here I must be careful, because this is the point at which the popular account and the documented account diverge, and the popular account is very well established. Brisbane's collective memory holds that Cloudland was destroyed at four in the morning, on the orders of a government that wanted it gone, by a contractor who specialised in the overnight fait accompli. The first and last elements are true. The middle one is not. Cloudland in 1982 belonged not to the Government but to a private owner, the property developer Peter Kurts, who had bought a ballroom, spent years restoring it for a thin return, and wanted the hill for flats; and it was Kurts, not the Cabinet, who engaged the Deen Brothers, whose machines moved in at four o'clock as instructed. No approval had been sought from the Brisbane City Council, whose permission the demolition legally required. The National Trust listing the building carried had no force of law, and the penalty reported for the whole transaction was a fine of $125.⁸

What can be said without qualification is this. The building came down at night. No notice was given that would have permitted anybody to try to restrain the work, and there was almost nothing to try: Queensland had no heritage legislation in 1982, the building carried no statutory protection, and the one consent the law did require could be dispensed with for the price of a parking ticket. The firm on the site was the firm that had taken the Belle Vue. And the Government's part was not to order the machines. It was to preside over the arrangement that made them unanswerable — and, when the city woke, to do nothing about it.

V. A city that found out afterwards

The reaction was immediate, large and useless.

This is the feature of Cloudland that makes it analytically different from the Belle Vue, and it is the reason the chapter sits where it does in this collection. The Belle Vue was fought over for twelve years before it fell. That fight produced inquiries, submissions, costed restoration schemes, questions in the House, and an enormous quantity of newspaper coverage — the entire archive on which the previous chapter rests. When the Belle Vue came down, Brisbane had already been arguing about it for over a decade and lost.

With Cloudland, the sequence ran the other way. There was no twelve-year campaign, no National Trust classification fight conducted in public, no architect's restoration scheme circulating. The grief arrived after the event, in a city that had been given no warning the machines were coming, and it had nowhere to go because the thing it wanted to save no longer existed.

Grief with nothing to save does not become a campaign. It becomes memory. And Brisbane's memory of Cloudland is prodigious — far larger, in the general population, than its memory of the Belle Vue. Ask about heritage in this city and Cloudland will be named by people who could not tell you what stood on George Street.

I want to state the uncomfortable implication plainly, because Part IV depends on it. The intensity with which Cloudland is remembered is not evidence that the system worked. It is evidence of the opposite. It is what public feeling does when it arrives too late to be converted into anything. A campaign leaves a building or a defeat; unfocused grief leaves a story, and a story asks nothing of anybody.

VI. What was learned

The conventional reading of these two nights is that they represent a government at the height of its arrogance, and that the arrogance was eventually punished — Fitzgerald, the 1989 election, the Heritage Act three years later. On that reading, the midnight demolitions are the end of something.

I think they are better understood as the beginning of something, and this is the argument the rest of the collection builds on.

Consider what an observer in November 1982 could reasonably have concluded. Two buildings of the first rank had been removed in three years. In both cases the method was the same: no notice, an overnight start, a contractor untroubled by the work, and a decision taken well before the process that was supposed to inform it. In both cases the method had been completely successful. Nothing had stopped it. Nothing was ever going to stop it, because the thing that would have stopped it — an opportunity to be heard before the machines arrived — was precisely what the method was designed to remove.

The lesson available to anybody who wanted to clear a site in Queensland was not do not do this. It was do this before anybody can object. And the refinement available by 1992, once there was a Heritage Act and an approvals process and a register, was better still: do it with an approval, in daylight, on a Tuesday, and nobody will object at all, because the process will have been followed and there will be nothing to be outraged about.

The midnight demolitions were not the last gasp of a lawless period. They were a proof of concept. What they proved was that the public could not intervene in a decision it did not know was being made, and every quiet demolition since has been an application of that finding under improved conditions.

VII. The name

There is a coda, and it is the sort of thing that would be too neat if it were not true.

The building is gone and the site was redeveloped for housing. The name was not retired. "Cloudland" has been reused in Brisbane, most conspicuously by an upmarket nightclub that has traded in the city since 2009, by people entitled to use a word that belongs to nobody.⁹

That is now the primary reference. Say "Cloudland" to a Brisbane resident under thirty-five and they will picture a venue that has no connection to the ballroom beyond a borrowed name — not the arch on the hill, not the cable car, not the floor. The word survived the building by outliving the people who knew what it meant.

I do not raise this to complain about it. It is not an outrage and nobody has done anything wrong. I raise it because it is a precise illustration of what the Deen Brothers' slogan describes. What was left behind was the memory, and the memory turned out to be the commercially useful part. The arch, the cable car, the sprung floor and the forty years of debutante photographs were demolished in a night. The word survived, was found to have value, and was put back into service.

That is the arrangement this book is about. Queensland is very good at keeping the names of things it has destroyed.