Northerners of an antique vintage will recall a time when the fabled city centre of Brisneyland was but a dream, and none but the hardiest of fools ventured far from home and hearth. This was the era of making your own fun because any other kind was prohibited by criminal statute (as was any form of fun, to be honest).
To understand the dearth of diversions at that time, look at the local underground radio station 4ZZZ’s nightly What’s On segment, which mostly featured a couple of morbidly stoned anarchists riffling through the so-called entertainment pages of the Courier Mail with one asking the other: “So, uh, what’s happening?” To which the other would eventually, inevitably reply: “Uh, not much.”
Unto this fallen world a miracle did come: The Myer Centre — which this week changed its name to Uptown after the Myer store closed for good.
While it was a mere mall to the interlopers from south of the Rio Tweed, the Myer Centre was something much more to those of us fated to live here in Brisbane. Opening in time to welcome visitors to World Expo 1988, the centre was a hinge point in the city’s cultural history because, look, when a couple of dope-addled commies sadly scratching through the arse end of a second-rate broadsheet comprises the vanguard of your cultural, er, vanguard, well, you get the picture.
And damn you elitist southern toffs with your spendy breakfast margaritas and fancy store-bought whisker brushes, we needed this.
Brisbane in those days was the sort of bizarro-world colonial backwater where you were required to dress in jodhpurs and a white tux for a sitdown breakfast at even the lower middling sort of gentleman’s club, but the maitre dude would not look twice if you fetched a rustically carved ironbark whisker brush from your saddle bags and commenced vigorously scrubbing your muttonchop dandruff into the fruit salad.
The Myer Centre changed all that. The Fitzgerald inquiry, too, I suppose, with the jailing of half a dozen corrupt cabinet ministers. And the collapse of a 100-year-old political economy that fashioned the state capital as nothing more than a pass-through for beef, coal and pineapples. But none of those things had a really bitching dragon-themed indoor rollercoaster rumbling overhead, whereas the Myer Centre most assuredly did.
And with the great dragon came great change. Quite a bit of motion sickness too, especially after a few cones and a six-pack of XXXX shotgunned with a half chicken and chips from the food court far below. Like, really far below. That dragon was not messing around.
Nor was it the only attraction. The genius of the Myer Centre designers was to recognise the power of comparative advantage. The nightclubs and beer barns that set the centre apart from its suburban mall competitors weren’t great, but they ensured the place kicked on after 5pm. And while a critical mass of really crap bars is still, you know, crap, it is at least a massive improvement on nothing, which was the city’s previous value proposition. I could never get past the doormen for some reason, but my flatmate Sue got lucky with a piano player from the toniest of the grown-up bars and for her that was enough social proof of the early super-mall concept.
Me, I still had the dragon coaster.
Alas, for devotees of ill-advised indoor carnival rides, the hard rain of half-chewed undigested chicken-n-chips into the shopping centre may well have doomed the entire ride from the get-go, and more sedate, less kinetic and vomitory diversions were soon offered.
The Myer Centre remained the centre of the city’s urban life, however, even as the mall extended and dragged the city’s centre of gravity with it. Largely that was a matter of first-mover advantage. The mass flows of refugee southerners into south-east Queensland was still a decade away. It was probably the arrival of hundreds of thousands of exiles from the grim socialist wastelands of the antarctic south that finally broke the old small-town spell. But for the longest time if you were heading out anywhere in Brisbane, you were probably heading to the Myer Centre.
Can it survive without the eponymous department store as an anchor?
Who can say? But it was the second-largest department store in the country.
Plenty of space for a really kickarse dragon rollercoaster, if you ask me.
John Birmingham is a writer who lives in Brisbane. His books include the memoir He Died With a Felafel in his Hand
