The State That Forgets

Ask a Brisbane resident over fifty what became of this city's heritage and you will, more often than not, be told about two nights.

The first is 21 April 1979, when a crew working for the Deen Brothers began pulling down the Belle Vue Hotel on George Street, a few hundred metres from the Queensland Parliament, starting just after midnight on the order of what a Works Department spokesman would afterwards call only "a higher authority", at an hour chosen so that the work would be finished before any objection could be organised.¹The second is 7 November 1982, when the same firm took Cloudland off the ridge at Bowen Hills at four in the morning, and a ballroom that three generations had danced in was a slope of broken masonry before the first bus ran.²

Those two nights do a great deal of work. They are the story Queensland tells about what it lost and who took it: a government that knocked things down in the dark, a contractor who did not ask, and a city that woke up angry and too late. It is a good story. It has the advantage of being substantially true.

This collection is about what that story conceals.

I. The last state to legislate

For most of the period in which Queensland's nineteenth-century building stock was being cleared, there was no law against clearing it.

The other mainland states had legislated well before. Victoria passed the Historic Buildings Act in 1974. New South Wales passed its Heritage Act in 1977. South Australia followed in 1978, and Western Australia in 1990.³Queensland's Heritage Act was not passed until 1992 — after the Belle Vue, after Cloudland, after the demolitions this book spends its first part describing, and after the government that had presided over them had left office.⁴

What existed in the meantime was the National Trust of Queensland, which had been classifying buildings since the 1960s and whose classification carried no statutory weight whatever.⁵It was an opinion, expertly held and carefully argued, and an owner was free to ignore it. The Belle Vue carried the Trust's classification on the night it came down. That is not an irony. It is the system working exactly as it was built to work.

So for four decades — the decades of the postwar boom, of the mining money, of the Brisbane the 1982 Commonwealth Games and Expo 88 were meant to display — the question of whether a Queensland building stood or fell was a question of who held the title and what that person wanted to do. Heritage was a matter of private preference, occasionally softened by public embarrassment. There was nothing else in the field.

It is worth being precise about what was in the field to lose, because the character of Brisbane's building stock has a great deal to do with how little of its loss was registered. This was not a city of monuments. Its characteristic architecture was timber and corrugated iron, raised on stumps, wrapped in verandahs and lattice — houses, corner hotels, shops with awnings over the footpath, halls, churches, the whole low-rise texture of a subtropical town built cheaply and quickly by people who did not expect it to last. Very little of it was individually remarkable. Almost all of it was collectively irreplaceable.

That distinction matters, because a monument attracts a campaign and a streetscape does not. When a hotel opposite Parliament is threatened, a committee forms. When timber cottages come down one and two at a time, across a decade, in Spring Hill and Petrie Terrace and the inner north, to make room for brick walk-up flats, nothing forms at all, because there is no single moment at which anybody can be asked to object.¹²The character of a place can be removed entirely without any identifiable event having occurred. That kind of loss was running continuously through the very years we do remember, and it is largely absent from the story even so. We remember the biggest objects in a period we remember for other reasons.

This is the first thing to hold on to, because it is the fact from which the familiar story grows. A government that wanted a site cleared did not need to break a law to clear it. The midnight start on George Street was not an attempt to evade the Heritage Act; there was no Heritage Act. It was an attempt to evade the unions' green bans, the crowd that would have gathered at eight in the morning, and whatever else a day's notice might have allowed anybody to try. The lawlessness people remember was never legal lawlessness. It was contempt for process, which is a different and more durable thing.

II. What the Act was for

The Queensland Heritage Act 1992 arrived under the Goss Government, and it owes its existence to the plainest of political facts: in December 1989, for the first time in thirty-two years, the government changed.⁶It is tempting to fold the Act into the post-Fitzgerald settlement, alongside the electoral redistribution and the Criminal Justice Commission, and the temptation should be resisted: the Fitzgerald Report, for all it remade in this state, had nothing to say about heritage buildings.

Nor did the Inquiry supply the election. An election was due in 1989 whether or not Tony Fitzgerald had ever been appointed. What the Inquiry supplied was the result: it shocked enough Queenslanders out of a thirty-two-year habit of voting National and Liberal to overcome whatever remained of the malapportionment that had kept that habit profitable. And what the result supplied was a government prepared, at last, to legislate.

There is an unflattering way to put this, and I think it is the accurate one. The Act was passed once the demolitions it would have prevented had already happened. It commemorated a problem more than it solved one. By 1992 the office block for which the Belle Vue had been cleared had never been built, and its corner stood empty behind a small commemorative plaque; Cloudland had been a vacant lot for nine years and would within a few years be flats.⁷The legislation gave Queensland a register, a set of criteria, an approvals process, and a mechanism for enforcement, and it gave those things to a state whose most conspicuous losses were already historical.

None of which is an argument against the Act. A state with heritage legislation is in a better position than a state without it, and Queensland's built inheritance is measurably safer for its existence. It is an argument about timing, and about what a law can be expected to do once it exists.

Because here is the difficulty that this collection is organised around: the losses did not stop in 1992.

III. The Regent

In 1978 and 1979 — the seasons of the Belle Vue's final fight and fall — a scheme to replace the Regent Theatre in Queen Street with a cinema complex produced a sustained public campaign: a Save the Regent committee, a National Trust classification, a place on the Register of the National Estate, and a builders' green ban that held the site from September to December 1978 while a commercially viable way of keeping the theatre was searched for. None was found. The auditorium was stripped to its brick shell the following year. What survived — the entrance and the Spanish Gothic foyer, the part everybody meant when they said "the Regent" — survived because the scheme the Council had approved in June 1978 had always provided for its retention, and it is heritage listed now.⁸

Three decades later, what remained behind that foyer — the theatre shell and the cinemas that had been built inside it — was demolished for an office tower. It went lawfully, in daylight, with a development approval from the Brisbane City Council and the paperwork in order. The Heritage Act was not defied; it was not even engaged. In 1994 the register boundary had been redrawn, on an independent assessor's advice, to exclude everything behind the foyer as being of no significance, and what the register excludes needs no heritage consent to remove.⁹

I want to be careful here, because this example carries a great deal of the weight in what follows and it would be easy to make it carry more than it should. The 1978-79 campaign and the later demolition were not the same fight under different management. The ownership had changed, the building had been substantially altered in between, and what was lost in the second instance was not what had been fought over in the first. The foyer is still there. Somebody could reasonably say the essential thing was kept and the system held.

I should declare that until recently I was one of the people who believed it. Between 1997 and 2009 I watched films in those four cinemas. They were ornate to the point of extravagance, gold everywhere, and I took them for the original interior, as I suspect did nearly everyone who sat in them. They were not. They were what was built inside the shell after the auditorium was stripped out in 1979, and they were convincing enough that I spent three decades assuming the 1978 campaign had worked.

That is the smallest available version of this book's argument, and I am the evidence for it. A Queenslander with a history degree, who was in the building repeatedly, who had followed the story at the time, walked out of it believing a thing that the record does not support. The state does not only lose buildings. It loses the memory of having lost them, and the replacement is frequently good enough to close the gap.

But set the two events beside each other and something uncomfortable emerges. In 1978, with no heritage law at all, a public campaign and a union ban could at least hold the machines off the site while the alternatives were argued; the argument was lost, but it was had, in public, before the event. In 2011, with a heritage law, a register, criteria and an approvals process, a campaign formed again — a revived Save the Regent group, petitions to the Parliament, a march — and it changed nothing at all, because the paperwork was in order and there was no longer anything for an objection to attach to. Whatever the Act did, it did not enlarge the space in which several thousand people paying attention could matter. On this site it closed that space, politely, with a boundary amendment.

IV. Two kinds of forgetting

This brings me to the argument of the book, which I should state plainly because everything after this is in service of it.

Queensland's memory of its own heritage destruction is not a memory of destruction. It is a memory of resistance. We remember the Belle Vue and Cloudland with such clarity because they were fought over — and it was the fight, not the loss, that generated the newspaper coverage, the parliamentary questions, the photographs, the pub arguments and eventually the folklore. The record exists because somebody contested the thing.

Where nobody contested, no record was made. A building that came down with a permit, on a Tuesday, on a site nobody had organised around, generates a line in a council minute and nothing else. It does not become a story. It does not become a grievance. Fifteen years later there is no one to say what stood there, because the absence of a fight has been preserved rather than the building.

The effect on the archive is severe, and anyone who has tried to research a demolished Queensland building will have run into it. The best-documented lost buildings of the twentieth century are, disproportionately, the ones that were destroyed after a public fight. The Belle Vue has a bibliography: photographs from several angles, measured drawings, a restoration scheme costed by a practising architect, a decade of submissions, questions on notice, and press coverage running to hundreds of items. Every one of those documents exists because the building was contested. Had the Government simply cleared the site in 1967 when it acquired it, the record would consist of the acquisition notice and very little else.

So the archive is not a record of what Queensland had. It is a record of what Queensland argued about. Where there was no argument there is frequently no photograph, no drawing, no description, and no way now to establish what was there — which means the losses this book is most concerned with are precisely the ones hardest to demonstrate. That is an uncomfortable position for a historian and I do not have a way around it. I can only say that the difficulty is a feature of the thing being described rather than an accident of the research, and that a category of loss which by its nature leaves no trace is not thereby made small.

The consequence is a systematic bias in what the state remembers, and the bias runs in a specific direction: we over-remember the Bjelke-Petersen years and under-remember everything since. Not because more was lost then — and I will argue in Part IV that on any honest count more has been lost since — but because that period produced a government theatrical enough to demolish things at midnight, and theatre is what survives.

A midnight demolition is, considered coldly, an inefficient way to destroy a building. It costs more. It guarantees hostile coverage. It creates a permanent political liability of exactly the kind that was still being levied against that government a decade after it fell. The daylight demolition with a valid permit achieves the same physical outcome at lower cost and leaves no residue at all. If the object is to clear a site, the second method is plainly superior. It has been the dominant method for thirty years, and it is almost entirely undocumented.

So the state that forgets is not forgetting the Belle Vue. It is forgetting everything that has happened since it stopped being angry.

V. The ledger

The natural response to an argument of this kind is to ask for the numbers, and I should be honest at the outset that a complete ledger for Queensland does not exist and I have not been able to construct one. Demolition approvals are held by individual local governments, in formats that changed repeatedly across the period, and there has never been a central register of what was taken down and when. The absence is itself part of the argument: a state that wanted to know what it had lost would have kept a record of losing it.

What can be done, and what Part IV attempts, is a partial ledger — assembled building by building from council records, heritage register decisions, the contemporary press and the files of the National Trust — set against the Joh-era losses that everybody already knows. It is incomplete and it will stay incomplete. It is still the case that the two columns do not say what Queensland thinks they say.

VI. What this collection is

Eleven essays and a coda, in four parts.

Part I, Midnight in Brisbane, deals with the demolitions everybody remembers: the Belle Vue, Cloudland, and the Deen Brothers era considered as a system rather than as a run of outrages — who ordered the work, who profited by it, and who was in a position to stop it and did not.

Part II, The Valley, leaves Brisbane for the Mary Valley and the destruction that did not happen. The Traveston Crossing Dam was refused in 2009 on federal environmental grounds, which is to say that a Queensland valley was saved by a Commonwealth minister and a lungfish rather than by anything the state was prepared to do.¹⁰Pumped hydro has since brought the same financial logic back to the same country under a cleaner name. The two essays are about what it is like to live in a place that is periodically scheduled for removal.

Part III, What the Record Keeps, is about the mechanics of forgetting in smaller compass: a family record across a hundred and seventy years, a premier who governed for eleven years and left almost no trace in the state's memory of itself, and an unwritten agreement over secondary education that shaped Queensland for decades without ever being committed to paper.

Part IV, The Ledger, makes the argument: the heritage laws that arrived four decades late, the quiet demolitions that followed them, and the buildings that survived — Customs House, the Treasury, the Commissariat Store, the Old Windmill — none of which survived by luck. Each is the residue of a decision somebody made, and the decisions are more instructive than the buildings.

VII. All we leave behind

The wrecking firm that took the Belle Vue and Cloudland is supposed to have advertised itself with the line that all it left behind were the memories.¹¹Contractors' slogans are not usually worth taking seriously, but that one has outlived the firm, and it turns out to be a more exact description of the Queensland arrangement than its author can have intended.

The memories are what we left ourselves. They are vivid, they are widely held, and they are concentrated almost entirely in a single decade, for reasons that have more to do with how that decade's government conducted itself than with what was actually lost. Everything since has gone quietly, with consent, and been forgotten immediately.

The question this collection puts is not whether Queensland once had a government that knocked things down in the dark. Everyone agrees that it did, and it is nearly fifty years since the crew pulled up on George Street. The question is whether a state that only notices a demolition when it happens at midnight can be said to be paying attention at all — and what has been carried away, in daylight, while we were busy remembering.