Under a Modern Sun: Art in Queensland 1930s–1950s

Constructing Brisbane City Hall, c.1926 Geoffrey Powell, (Construction of Story Bridge, Brisbane) (detail) 1939, printed 2005 Painters with an eye for the decorative market preferred ‘the old Brisbane’, including the convict windmill at Spring Hill, along with Victorian-era hotels with their iron lace balconies, and gracious timber-and-tin mansions. In the 1920s, Brisbane continued to be a rather dowdy city, with locomotives belching out smoke throughout the rapidly growing suburbs. During that decade, Brisbane’s much larger southern rivals, Sydney and Melbourne, were electrifying their suburban rail lines. Vida Lahey caught the look and mood of Brisbane during the Great Depression with her 1931 painting Sultry noon (Central Station, Brisbane) (p.118), with a bird’s-eye view of the terminus. Modernity arrived in Brisbane in the late 1950s via some adventurous architecture, especially the Centenary Pool in Spring Hill designed by James Birrell to mark the 100th anniversary of Queensland becoming a separate colony from New South Wales. Torbreck at Highgate Hill, a 22-storey high-rise apartment block, was pipped at the post as Australia’s tallest building only by the AMP Society’s office block at Circular Quay in Sydney. But at least Torbreck, reviled by local residents in their timber‑and‑tin cottages as ‘the slums of tomorrow’, was twice as high as Kinkabool, the Gold Coast’s first high-rise building at 11 storeys. 6 From the early 1960s, scores of interwar two-storey fibro blocks of flats — from Southport to Coolangatta — were replaced by ever higher apartment blocks jostling for a view of the sea. The city Brisbane makes notable claim to early political modernity. In 1924, its radical Labor government amalgamated 13 small municipalities into one vast metropolitan-wide council. ‘Greater Brisbane’ boasted Australia’s only City Hall, a grand neoclassical edifice completed in 1930. Similar attempts to create metropolitan-wide councils in Sydney and Melbourne failed. Brisbane City Hall, with its commanding clock tower, dominated all the buildings around it and could be seen from many vantage points. Painters and graphic artists were quick to place it centrestage in their work. The construction of the Story Bridge — the only other feature on Brisbane’s skyline that could compete with City Hall — proved a boon to photographers, who captured the drama of its steelwork gradually extending out from both sides of the Brisbane River. This steel suspension bridge, the most photogenic structure ever built in Brisbane, had a certain glamour. 3 It began life as a toll-road bridge and did not carry trams or trains, meaning that wooden-hulled ferries, also a popular subject for artists, remained a vital way of getting from one side of the Brisbane River to the other. The more modest Art Deco Grey Street Bridge (now named the William Jolly Bridge), built in 1932, also captivated artists. 4 Vida Lahey’s watercolours of the structure under construction contemplate a serene Brisbane River. Conversely, artists rarely depicted the floods that periodically engulfed the city. 5 Vida Lahey , The new bridge (detail) 1931 William Bustard , Brisbane townscape (detail) 1928 Cover of The Steering Wheel and Society & Home October 1939