We Were From the Mountains

Memoir: We Were From the Mountains In 2009 the Brisbane City Council asked me to contribute to an anthology they were publishing called One Book Many Brisbanes. I grew up on Tamborine Mountain, a rainforest community in the hinterland of the Gold Coast, about an hour’s drive south of Brisbane, but both of my parents had been born and raised in Brisbane and I’d always considered it the big city to my mountain home. I came to know the place better after I moved there to go to university. I met and married my husband in Brisbane, had three sons there, and by and by a not-insignificant portion of life was passed on the slopes of Paddington; and yet, when I sat down to write my essay, it seems that my mind did not fix on those events, that place: it went back further still. For I have known two Brisbanes in my lifetime and they refuse to merge, both held simultaneously and discrete in my memory. There is the Paddington of my adult life, in which I move with comfort and ease; and there is the Brisbane of my childhood, a strange, shimmering place, where exotic things like grandparents and Christmas windows and council buses belong, where it is always hot and I am an outsider, a mountain kid, observing, admiring, and always taking notes.