Maiwar is the heart of Meanjin in summer. It’s running or walking along its banks under the shady canopy of the jacaranda and poinciana trees of the West End, past the vibrant, human-made beach at South Bank, and around the winding, bustling paths at the base of the Kangaroo Point cliffs, where the whiff of mangroves reminds me of their place in the ecosystem, holding the banks in place.
I run at daybreak in summer to beat the humidity, yet beads of sweat still form before I hit my first kilometre. And while anxiety often plagues me, the sky’s reflection in the glassy river offers tranquillity and calm in an otherwise turbulent world.
The low hum of the CityCat cruising downriver towards the Go Between Bridge, trailing a frothy wake, competes with the morning calls of the birdlife along Maiwar. At least by January the swooping magpies are gone. There’s often a white ibis (AKA bin chicken) strutting about, and occasionally I’ll hear the high-pitched squawk of a rainbow lorikeet, a bird that carries me back to my family home in Sydney, and a photo of my late father smiling, feeding the lorikeets that drove the rest of us mad with their “talking”.
I have discovered Roma Street parkland as a place to run. It’s a wondrous 11-hectare oasis in the heart of the city, described as a “horticultural masterpiece” and known as the world’s largest tropical garden in a city. It’s no wonder Darryl Jones, urban ecologist and author of Getting to Know the Birds in your Neighbourhood, says Brisbane is the most biodiverse city in Australia.
At Christmas, the parkland celebrated with an “Enchanted Garden” light show, and a moonlight cinema runs till early February (who doesn’t love a movie picnic?). But every day of the year the parkland is home to spiny water dragons that test your footwork while you run. Some scatter on approach, while others bravely own the footpath, forcing you to detour around them. The spectacle garden is an ever-changing cascade of colour and the rainforest walk fools you with its temperature and humidity.
I fulfil Wiradyuri tradition when I walk through the parkland by tree-hugging with purpose. Each hug aims to leave some love behind, so passersby can hug the trunk back and absorb the love left there. Tip: there’s quite a bit of my love left along Banyan Lawn.
When I moved to Brisbane at the end of 2015, it was many months before my friends stopped asking when I would return “home”. Without saying I didn’t miss Sydney, which was true, I kept my response simple: “Brisbane is my home now.”
When I read Sally Piper’s novel Bone Memories, I saw some of my reasonings in the line: “This place had all the goings-on of another kind of city, pulsing with as much activity as the one she’d left behind.”
That activity was certainly in the arts but also in the weather patterns that were so new and extreme to me. I remember the fierceness of the first electrical storm the summer I arrived; was amused by colleagues analysing the BoM site on their work computers, calculating how much time they had to get safely home. The devastating effects of floods aside, I am still mesmerised by lightning flashing across a green-grey sky, and the often sideways rain during Brisbane’s tropical summer storms. As I write, the rain has been falling gently for almost 24 hours. On New Year’s Day I strolled around my new ’hood soaking up the rain and the scent of freshly cleansed streets. Brisbane in summer is also renewal and growth.
The colours of Brisbane’s sky are as changeable as the flowers in the spectacle garden. At full sun I feel my own light shine from within; positivity that does not always appear on cloudy days. At dusk, riding the CityCat from work at St Lucia is truly magical; it reflects Maiwar and this city at its best.
The landscape, the ecosystem, the light all capture the senses of many Brisbane writers. The Australian writer and journalist Matthew Condon writes about light in his nonfiction work Brisbane:
I keep coming back to the light of Brisbane. If you are born into it, this palette of gentle pinks and oranges at dawn and dusk, the blast white of midday in summer, the lemon luminescence of mid-morning and mid-afternoon, you keep it with you, and measure all other light by it.
I wasn’t born into the light that Matt writes about but that light stays with me when I am not here. It is difficult not to compare all other places with this jewel of a city and the way it makes me feel when Maiwar is at my side and its paths are beneath my feet.
Dr Anita Heiss is an avid runner and author of Tiddas, a love letter to Brisbane
