Mister Brisbane: City v Country
My drive to a bakery in Boonah, not Buna. And: have you named your house?
Two weeks ago, I went on a country drive and bought a pie. Last week, I went on a city drive and bought a pie. The home-made country pie — from the Sugar Loaf Bakery in Boonah — was the winner. The city pie, from a shop at Coorparoo Square — fashioned from the remains of the old Myer store, and also featuring a huge apartment block — came in second. As far as the drives themselves went, the rural ride was far superior. Winter really is a great time to drive through the Scenic Rim and Lockyer Valley and, I suspect, the Darling Downs.
I headed out from Cannon Hill along the Gateway Motorway and on the Mt Lindesay Highway, stopping very briefly in Beaudesert, before going west on State Route 90 and taking a longer break in Boonah, where I ate my pie in a park next to a small, but deep (see the sign), body of water, and then continued to Frazer View — resisting the temptation to turn towards Aratula and Warwick — and back home along the Cunningham Highway, Ipswich Road, the Centenary Highway and Legacy Way. The only hitch was when Siri wanted to take me to Buna, Texas rather than Boonah, Queensland — although even Apple Maps couldn’t find a way for me to drive to America.
Tune in to the Mister Brisbane radio show on Reading Radio at 1296AM and on DAB+ in Brisbane at 6.30pm on Tuesday nights. It’s also available as a podcast. Just search for “Mister Brisbane” on your favourite player or follow this link.
BAKED BLISS
Apart from its meat pies, the aforementioned Sugar Loaf Bakery, also had a great range of pasties, tarts, cakes and buns — many of them seemingly transported from my childhood. Cream buns with a dollop of jam, long doughnuts (as opposed to the ones with a hole), Boston buns, Neenish tarts, carrot cake, meringues, vanilla slices, lemon tarts, apple slices and biscuits sprinkled with hundreds and thousands were all on display. If not for the perpetual diet in which I find myself, I’d have bought and scoffed the lot.
Do you have a favourite bakery treat that you can’t find any more? Or perhaps you can tell me where in or around Brisbane to go to find the best of the best.
NAME GAME
Does your house have a name? There was a time when people like you and me named their homes and it was regarded as a perfectly normal thing to do. You may remember that the house in Gone With the Wind (above) was called Tara, and think that only grand old piles deserve their own moniker. But when I was growing up, it was normal, if not common, for three-bedroom, one bathroom suburban abodes to carry names as well as numbers. Ours was “Brentwood”. We never used the name in conversation, but occasionally a letter would arrive with that as part of the address.
The full story is lost, but it had something to do with my father’s Army buddy, an American GI he met in Papua New Guinea and whose son was named Brent. It might also help explain why I was named Brett (although I believe — and hope — that the suave, handsome and mischievous James Garner character, Bret Maverick, in the TV series Maverick had something to do with it, too.)
Our neighbours up the road lived in “Evron” — a combination of the couple’s names, Evelyn (I think) and Ronald. I believe other houses in the suburb also had names, but I can’t recall them. To this day, there are a few famous, historic Brisbane houses — Ormiston House, Newstead House, Wolston House — but it took a long time before I encountered the phenomenon again in reference to more modest abodes. That was in Doo Town, Tasmania, where, as part of a community in-joke, all the beach shacks have names that include the word “Doo”.
Can anyone tell me whether naming homes is still a thing? And, while we’re at it, do you also have a name for your car?
FAKE DATE
The online dating saga continues. I received an unsolicited approach from a very stylish woman whose pictures seemed to be taken by a professional photographer. As I discovered, they were — and not for a dating site, but for a fashion feature in Harper’s Bazaar magazine. Unsurprisingly, the model credited on their pages had an entirely different name to the woman who was wooing me. I’ve no doubt that she is blissfully ignorant of the fact that her pictures are being used in this way.
A simple Google image search was all I needed to uncover the ruse — yet that was, apparently, too hard or inconvenient for the company that charges suckers by the minute to chat to these frauds. (And, no, I was not one of those suckers — I checked her bona-fides first.) Any lawyer who represents models, photographers and/or glossy mags would do well to have a look at these dating sites with the view to suing for breach of copyright and other offences. The one in question is based in Bulgaria, which is a member of the European Union which ought to be enforcing the relevant laws.
By the way, if you haven’t checked out the Ghosts of Boyfriends Past podcast yet, I suggest you do. My ep, Brett and the Online Dating Dilemma is here.
FEEDBACK
Regarding abandoned shopping trolleys, Mike writes: “They should all be fitted with a homing device, Brett. Around here, lost and lonely shopping trolleys provide a job for a local bloke whose job it is to wander [town] searching out abandoned carts and taking them home.”
Jim says: “My experience is that most of them are used for taking groceries home but a return journey is never part of the deal...much like the shopping centre car-parks where a push of more than 5 metres into a trolley bay is deemed torture.”
Natalie says: “I do wonder if some of them are taken home by people who cannot carry their groceries by themselves, and do not have a car or cannot afford a taxi/Uber. Maybe they are embarrassed about returning them. Sure there’ll be some drunks or whatever who’ll take one because they think it’s funny. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there are other reasons that might deserve compassion, not scorn.”
And Christine says: “Good for filtering compost, then discard (totally joking!)”
On Brizbrands, Janelle says: “… the first one I thought of was Nanda pasta that was owned by Victor de Pasquale and family. Big sponsors of Bullets and Norths Devils in 1980s. Family members still operate restaurants here, one opposite Kedron Wavell RSL.”
Thanks to Drano for some insights regarding the new development in West Caboolture, and to Peter for providing me with a link to this audio from an old 4BC radio interview about the fate of the big racquet that once stood at Milton tennis courts.
AFTERTHOUGHT
For no particular reason, I was looking into conspiracy theories, urban legends and fake news — and I came across some articles about the rumours that spread in the late 1960s that Paul McCartney was dead and had been replaced by a lookalike. I suggest you Google it for a bit of fun. And, perhaps, watch this short film called Paul Is Dead.
On a not-entirely-unrelated note, my current Spotify playlist includes a live recording of a Noel Coward gig in Las Vegas. While some of his songs would be regarded as inappropriate today, and he sounds very much like a man whose era has ended, I can’t help but admire Coward’s incomparable wordplay. His singing isn’t brilliant, but his diction is superb.
My 60 year old set of wheels is a Jaguar pussycat, she’s also painted pearly white so she got the name PURRL