The problem with Brisbane rooftops is you don’t feel as though many of them were built with astronomy in mind. Walking from Newstead to the Grange under a snakes and ladders game of strange stars, once in a while I would notice that people weren’t perched on their rooves drinking stout or cider, reading hotrod magazines, or even painting portraits of the Prime Minister while taking the time to have a look at the Pleiades, which are certainly having a good look back down on them, or big bearded Orion and his problem with scorpions back in the thirties or thereabouts.
Walking along Breakfast creek the occasional late night fisherman on concrete banks under car yards fish away their evenings with their eskies full of melted ice and enough bait to last them til five in the morning, when the race horses are led from Hendra round the Ascot hill and into the early morning water. Industrial outlets hem the creek line and must think about the day they’ll go under again. The next flood somewhere up ahead in the mountains. Nobody on any of those small business rooftops. Nobody looking out for the comets.
The TAB at Albion on the hill across from the train station and between the Breakfast Creek at the bottom of the hill and Sandgate Road’s avenue of restaurants and bottle shops craning up into the wealthy green hills is the last and best lighthouses Albion has ever had. No ships are going to run aground anywhere near Albion train station with the TAB building beaming green and yellow by night. The windows of that building are not lit by faces monitorng the night for killer astroids. They have all gone home. The horses and the dogs are sleeping all over Australia as I walk past. There are no telescopes watching the stars.
Albion road falls down a grim grey bridge off of Albion into a brief flood plain of seventy year old houses, one takeaway shop, and a corner near a co op where once a man and a woman I passed by were waiting for the Police to come after a stabbing in the next street. You walk quickly along Albion Road as it climbs up to Lutwyche Road. There are no telescopes, no stars. There are only cloud sopped carbon skies of car headlights. From house to house you can smell the different dinners. The different dinners fight it out from door to door. Mint sauce and gravy battle pasta and salad. You walk on and hope Lutwyche Road will make things better…
But you don’t use it. You follow it uphill and left onto Maygar Street, and immediately you realise all the houses are old nineteen thirties houseboats, riverboats, ferries and liners, all of them marooned on the hills of Windsor post the 1974 floods. Grand white wooden louvre windowed yachts run aground and waiting for the rains to come and flood them back down the Brisbane River and out to sea where they belong. The Windsor yacht club is exclusive. There are probably telescopes around but all the blinds are drawn, the curtains are shut, even though you can’t look into those houses. They look down into you. And most of them don’t like what they see.
And instantly you know as you walk along Maygar Road that you are wandering through tram territory. the lines are gone, the stops are lost, but the trams pull you along the widest road in Brisbane as it moves up and down and sways from side to side. The possums have forgotten the squeeking grinding tram sounds in their trees. But the trees and the churches and the pensioners and old reformed hippies know, and you know, even if you were born long after the trams had been shut out and sent back to Bavaria or wherever. The trams haunt their old streets.
There are probably only seven telescopes in Brisbane now. Three of them are watching the skies. Three of them scanning the late night suburbs for trams. There is always one watching the girl undress a suburb away. It is just the way it goes here at one in the morning this time of year. But those telescopes are going to have to start paying more attention to the constellations of Brisbane. They are fading very fast, and the rooftops are ot getting any younger either.
