Susanna de Vries, award-winning author, and Jake de Vries, former City Architect of Brisbane, have pooled their talents to compile a joint book on the building of Brisbane, which transports us back to the first years of Brisbane’s bleak existence. The book shows the Convict and Officers Barracks and convicts digging roads along what became Queen Street and North Quay. Professional artist Conrad Martens paints the Customs House and Kangaroo Point. The book recounts the effects of Brisbane’s building boom of the 1880s when everyone borrowed money and major buildings like the Mansions, the old Museum, the second wing of the Post Office and the Treasury are completed. In the depression years of the 1890s some Queensland banks and architects go broke. A visiting Canadian artist named Lefèvre Cranstone draws rural Toowong, the Regatt a Hotel and the Toowong Rowing Club. River Road, [later Coronation Drive], once used for droving cattle from Brookfield, becomes a thoroughfare for the carriages of the wealthy from Indooroopilly and Milton.

When floods devastated South East Queensland in 2011, who was to blame? Despite the inherent risk of living on a floodplain, most residents had pinned their hopes on Wivenhoe Dam to protect them, and when it failed to do so, dam operators were blamed for the scale of the catastrophic events that followed. A River with a City Problem is a compelling history of floods in the Brisbane River catchment, especially those in 1893, 1974 and 2011. Extensively researched, it highlights the force of nature, the vagaries of politics and the power of community. With many river cities facing urban development challenges, Cook makes a convincing argument for what must change to prevent further tragedy.

Like putting old wine into new bottles, this collection of 7 papers by historian Rod Fisher offers a goodly drop for anyone thirsting for the history and heritage of the Brisbane region. They were originally written from 1991-2010, only a couple having seen the light of day. That was because they were mostly commissioned at greater length – and dealt with specific issues: 1. How ‘midnight demolitions’ of the old Bellevue Hotel, Cloudland Ballroom and Commonwealth Bank brought about the 1st protective heritage legislation in Qld. 2. To what extent the oral testimony of continuity and descent of the Turrbal people around Brisbane was matched by the historical record. 3. How Yeronga Memorial Pk evolved physically and spatially since the early days and by what means. 4. What steps and actions caused Lang Pk to change from a public space to a venue primarily for a single spectator sport. 5. How to write the contextual history for a thematic study exhibition on the Brisbane River which would draw upon the disparate collections of 6 mostly non-river institutions. 6. How the whole region of SE Qld developed thematically and materially, including Brisbane, Ipswich, Toowoomba, both coasts, major islands, many valleys and various ranges. 7. Whether heritage theory and practice should be focussed more sustainably on the character of a locality, as tested on the Killarney Estate. Having been revised as necessary and collected together, these papers are a boon for everyone interested in those aspects, places, buildings, events, related persons – and much more. If you happen to be a glutton for research, these chapters also show the way. That includes discerning patterns, analysing records, exploring buildings, interpreting parks, assessing heritage, examining localities, investigating regions and structuring narratives. Among the many historical sources are municipal records, reserve files, parliamentary papers, state yearbooks, municipal handbooks, heritage reports, judicial records, newspapers, maps, pictures, graves – and of course the actual places and people themselves. Here we see the applied historian at work. The other tie that binds all of this together is the author’s conviction that history must speak for itself, so that only when familiar with the evidence ought we evaluate, interpret and shape it in our own image. This also applies to cultural heritage, which comprises all of those tangible and intangible things we want to retain for ourselves and the next generation. As that is but one type of historical evidence, there is a dynamic reciprocity between the two. What this book really shows is how history becomes heritage through establishing its significance – unless heritage becomes history first!

This second edition has been reviewed and expanded to include some of Australia’s best qualified historians and researchers in Aboriginal history. Many of these authors continue to campaign for more research into First Nations history and the Frontier Wars. This second edition of Brisbane: The Aboriginal Presence now comprises a foreword which examines recent research in Aboriginal studies, and seven instead of six papers on race relations in the Brisbane region between 1824 and 1860. It covers the convict and early settlement periods until the Separation of Queensland from New South Wales in late 1859. The papers provide overviews of race relations during each of these periods, and highlight various themes, including: • Aboriginal occupation before European settlement • The impact of European settlement • Reciprocal attitudes and relations • Aboriginal resistance and European repression • Sexual relations between Aborigines and Europeans • The role of law, administration and the press • Aborigines in the local economy • The failure of assimilation • The fate of local clans These themes are illustrated by numerous incidents and case studies including: • The observations of explorers, missionaries and administrators • Convict, runaway and settler experiences • Violent clashes on Stradbroke Island in 1831–32 • Aboriginal hangings between 1841 and 1859 • Unrest in the ‘suburbs’ during the late 1840s to 1850s • Squatters, Governor Gipps and the Kilcoy poisonings between 1841 and 1843 • The white raid on Yorks Hollow camp in 1846 • The police attack on Breakfast Creek camps in 1846 These papers are based on detailed research of primary sources by experienced historians who are distinguished for the originality and calibre of their work. This attractive and informative volume is for everyone interested in race relations generally and Brisbane in particular, including students, teachers, schools, libraries, academics and the general reader.

In this complex novel from the winner of two of Russia's biggest literary prizes, a celebrated guitarist robbed of his talent by Parkinson's disease seeks other paths to immortality. For readers of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Umberto Eco, and Solzhenitsyn, this richly layered new novel from the author of Laurus follows a musical prodigy in search of inner peace as he faces an incurable disease. Like Vodolazkin's earlier novels, this personal story of a lifetime quest for meaning will resonate with any mortal who has grasped for eternity. At fifty, Gleb Yanovski, an acclaimed guitar virtuoso, is diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Gleb accepts an offer from a writer, Sergei Nesterov, to recount his life for a biography. They meet regularly for several years and Gleb recalls his life: a childhood spent in Kiev, university studies in St. Petersburg, and years in Munich, where Gleb lives with his German wife, Katharina, and launches his career, rocketing from a tutor of Russian to a celebrity musician touring major international venues. In the dueling interplay between these first-person recollections and the biographer's narration, Gleb's life unfolds amid his changing attitudes towards music and death; over the years these two obsessions grow inextricably linked. Witnessing a girl drown in the Dnepr River causes Gleb to abandon music school - he sees that death defies music, as it does any other activity. His grandfather points him to religion, through which Gleb comes to see music as a way to overcome time, as a path to eternity. This is why Parkinson's disease shatters Gleb so severely: the illness deprives him of music, his only bulwark against death. And then Gleb meets Vera, an exceptionally gifted thirteen-year-old musician, whom he and his wife embrace as a longed-for daughter. Vera, however, is dying of a rapidly spreading kidney cancer, and their determination to forstall her imminent death is not enough. In his phone conversation with the girl's mentally ill mother, Gleb explains Vera's absence by saying the girl departed for Brisbane. Gleb's mother, too, has moved to Brisbane, the city of her dreams. From there, Greb receives fortuitous phone calls. Expanding the literary universe spun in his previous works, Vodolazkin dwells on time and eternity, belonging and the search for meaning. In Brisbane, the carefully knit stitches unravel into a puzzle: Whose story is it - the subject's or the writer's? Are art and love really no match for death? Is Brisbane our only hope for the future?

Opening with a macabre mid-nineteenth century murder, The Mayne Inheritance unfolds like a gothic thriller. Was it the murder victim's money that founded patriarch Patrick Mayne's Queen Street business empire? And were the whispered accusations of murder and genetic madness true? For 150 years scandal and mystery have surrounded the Maynes, a wealthy family who donated the magnificent site on which the University of Queensland now stands.

Have you ever been on the CityCat and wondered what heritage lies beneath the buildings that you are looking at along the river? This book explores the Brisbane River Heritage Trail one section going upstream and the other one downstream. Let the book be your guide. The Brisbane River is the longest river in South East Queensland and flows through the city of Brisbane before emptying in Moreton Bay. From its source around Mt Stanley, 344 kilometres to Moreton Bay, the Brisbane River with its many twists and turns presents the interested travelling public with a series of reaches with names that are at once geographic, historic and of social importance.