PHIL BROWN

It’s funny where you end up. I live in Brisbane, a city we once despised. When I say we, I’m referring to the surf community around Broadbeach on the Gold Coast. To us, Brisbane was a hole but how would we have known? We rarely went there.

My only memory of Brisbane from those days is undergoing a humiliating exam. Coming from Hong Kong they needed to see what I knew and they found out that when it came to mathematics I was a dummy. I had told them I wanted to be a civil engineer like my dad and they basically laughed in my face. They didn’t exactly say I was an idiot but it was implied.

I remember afterwards we went for a walk in the City Botanic Gardens and I was desolate. But frankly it didn’t matter at Miami High School. And that was my only experience of Brisbane except for very occasional visits to my mum’s aunty who lived in an old house on Gregory Tce. Lokarlton it is called. It’s still there.

The rest of the time we eschewed Brisbane and the interlopers who sometimes invaded our surf break when they came down from the big smoke. We generally hounded them out of the water. Brissos they were to us, the lowest form of kook.

But in 1986 I had been back on the Gold Coast for a few years after starting my career in Central Queensland and I suddenly realised that I had to get off the glitter strip.

So I moved to a house in Plunkett St, Paddington … my bachelor pad I called it. There was never any food in the fridge and furnishings were sparse. I got a job at The Daily Sun in Fortitude Valley and so began the long process of Brisification. I have lived in Sydney briefly and Melbourne for three years since then but mostly we have made our home in Brisbane’s inner north … my wife, my son and me. And the dog.

I love this subtropical city and I’m enjoying the jacarandas blooming and, believe it or not I’m looking forward to summer in the city that has become my home. If you had told me at 15 that I would one day be a dedicated Brisso I would have laughed out loud. But here I am.