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

59 to cargo ships, with agricultural produce the main trade. The city had large industrial plants, including a sugar refinery and power station at New Farm, a milk-processing factory at Kurilpa Point, and flour mills, breweries and a huge pineapple-processing plant in Northgate. Regional cities also had large industrial undertakings, from Ipswich’s vast railway workshops to Maryborough’s thriving shipbuilding industry. Artists at the time were more inclined to paint scenes of picturesque cargo ships in decaying wharves than grimy industrial plants. For middle-class buyers looking to enhance their lounge-room walls, paintings of holiday-makers strolling around and children frolicking in the calm waters of Moreton Bay were popular. Farmers — virtually all male — and their families grew crops in a variety of rural environments. Near the coast, tropical fruits, including avocados, pineapples and bananas, were loaded onto trains for both the Brisbane and interstate markets. Such produce was also found in north Queensland, especially from Cairns to the Atherton Tablelands. Sugar cane, grown from the New South Wales border to north of Cairns, had to be processed within 12 hours of being cut, so large cane mills dotted rural towns, including at Nambour, Tully and Mossman. Cane trains sometimes shared the main street with trucks and cars. To the west, the rich soil of the Darling Downs provided a wide variety of vegetables. The tilling patterns of these landscapes were captured by painter Kenneth Macqueen who grew wheat, sorghum, linseed and barley to supplement his dairy farm, which provided milk for the area’s cheese producers, including the Rocky Creek Cheese Factory. from McWhirters to Finney Isles, still ruled the roost. But Brisbane did have one claim to retail modernity. In 1957, Australia’s first large ‘drive‑in shopping centre’, developed by Brisbane retail firm Allan and Stark, at Chermside, featured light-filled courtyards and a single-storey footprint, unlike the multistoried emporia of old. Then premier Vince Gair claimed at the opening that Chermside was the first large-scale drive-in shopping centre outside the United States. Brisbane got in first because, with its metropolitan‑wide council, planning applications could not be disputed by abutting municipalities. In Sydney and Melbourne, Roselands and Chadstone shopping centres, respectively, took years to come to fruition because those cities’ councils were at loggerheads with developers over the impact on their traditional shopping high streets. 7 A big state Because Brisbane is located only 100 kilometres north of the New South Wales border, and the vast state of Queensland stretches 2000 kilometres to the north of its capital city and up to 1000 kilometres to its west, the country railway system became the backbone of the state’s economy. Major rail routes went west from Brisbane, Rockhampton and Townsville, carrying freight and passengers to and from their river ports. Grand, neoclassical sandstone customs houses held commanding positions at river ports in Brisbane, Maryborough, Rockhampton and Townsville, reminders of colonial and international tariffs before Federation. Even the much smaller settlement on Thursday Island (Waiben) in the Torres Strait had a customs house. The Brisbane River hosted scores of wharves tailored Bellevue Hotel, Brisbane 1933 Interior of Allan and Stark Limited, Chermside c.1957 James Wieneke , Fishing boats, North Quay (detail) c.1941