Gone with the Wind; The Petries swept away for a bus lane…
While recently visiting Queensland, my mother asked me to take up the issue of the Petrie memorial that was recently removed from King George Square in central Brisbane to make way for a bus lane. There are apparently no plans to return the sculpture to the square. As the Petrie family are my mother’s forbears her distress was understandable. I don’t quite know how to go about this task. Write a letter to the “Courier Mail” to begin with I guess.
The memorial is not old. Having been commissioned in 1988 to commemorate the bicentennial, it is the work of the sculptor Stephen Walker. It has a somewhat folksy, kitsch character, but found considerable favour with families and children who used to climb over it. My mother is very fond of it because it depicts Andrew Petrie’s wife Mary as well as some of his children playing with Aboriginal children, elements that she feels are often missing in the celebration of prominent colonial men. She believes that the struggles and suffering of women in early Australia have been largely overlooked. An oft quoted poem at my parents place is "The Women of the West" by George Essex Evans.
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| | They left the vine-wreathed cottage and the mansion on the hill,
The houses in the busy streets where life is never still,
The pleasures of the city, and the friends they cherished best:
For love they faced the wilderness -- the Women of the West.
The roar, and rush, and fever of the city died away,
And the old-time joys and faces -- they were gone for many a day;
In their place the lurching coach-wheel, or the creaking bullock chains,
O'er the everlasting sameness of the never-ending plains.
In the slab-built, zinc-roofed homestead of some lately taken run,
In the tent beside the bankment of a railway just begun,
In the huts on new selections, in the camps of man's unrest,
On the frontiers of the Nation, live the Women of the West.
The red sun robs their beauty, and, in weariness and pain,
The slow years steal the nameless grace that never comes again;
And there are hours men cannot soothe, and words men cannot say --
The nearest woman's face may be a hundred miles away.
The wide bush holds the secrets of their longing and desires,
When the white stars in reverence light their holy altar fires,
And silence, like the touch of God, sinks deep into the breast --
Perchance He hears and understands the Women of the West.
For them no trumpet sounds the call, no poet plies his arts --
They only hear the beating of their gallant, loving hearts.
But they have sung with silent lives the song all songs above --
The holiness of sacrifice, the dignity of love.
Well have we held our father's creed. No call has passed us by.
We faced and fought the wilderness, we sent our sons to die.
And we have hearts to do and dare, and yet, o'er all the rest,
The hearts that made the Nation were the Women of the West.
George Essex Evans
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Andrew Petrie was born in Scotland and came to Moreton Bay in 1837, where he practised as a builder and architect. He was responsible for most of Brisbane’s early public buildings such as Parliament House, old Government House, the Post Office, the Custom’s House, as well as various churches. He explored the immediate environs of Brisbane, and the monument in question depicts him mounting a horse and farewelling his wife Mary as he sets out on one of these treacherous expeditions. His children cavort with aboriginal children in the foreground while a mystified kangaroo looks on. The Petrie family lived in Queen Street on the river at Petrie’s Bight, and their home was one of the social centres of early Brisbane.
John Petrie their son was the first Lord Mayor of Brisbane, and Thomas Petrie (fourth son) was allowed to mix freely with the Aboriginal children, playing their games and speaking the Brisbane tribal dialect. My great grandfather was, as a result, in constant demand as a messenger and companion for exploratory expeditions, as he was accepted by the aboriginal population as a friend. He was an authority on Aboriginal customs and culture before they were compromised by contact with European settlers and wrote his memoirs in 1904 (Reminiscences of Early Queensland). Unbelievably, in 1851 he and friends rode on horseback to the gold fields in Victoria finding only enough gold “to make a ring”. Much of the family history resides at the John Oxley Library. He later took up a considerable land holding near Brisbane and died in 1910.
King George Square itself, where the Petrie memorial was situated, has been the subject of controversial redevelopment over the years. In my childhood it was an elegant small square with the impossibly imposing Venetian inspired City Hall on one side facing the elegant Tivoli Theatre on the other. The Albert Street Methodist church formed a third backdrop. The grand Tivoli Theatre featured an additional theatre perched on its roof called “The Roof Garden” which was accessed by a lift. The Roof Garden Theatre gave the impression of being an elaborate latticed gazebo featuring a lush sub-tropical garden, and seeing a movie there was a special childhood treat.
The Tivoli Roof Garden boasted open sides which were designed to let evening breezes cool the audience while specially designed steel shutters could protect the audience from rain. According to Australian Variety the Tivoli Theatre was one of only six theatres in the world to have a roof garden at that time (Australian Variety 29 Dec. 1915) and it was promoted as “the Coolest Theatre in Australasia” and the management claimed that it provided “full protection from inclement weather” (Brisbane Courier 10 Feb. 1916, p.2). One of the attractions of the Roof Garden Theatre was that smoking was allowed, “and the modern appointments tend to make the theatre a veritable Eden” (Brisbane Courier 25 Apr. 1916, p.5).
Sadly all of this was swept away in 1965 to make way for a vast underground car park and a new enlarged and ugly city square that featured an unattractive concrete pebble finish. During construction of the car park it was feared that the city hall would collapse into the excavation site.
Here is a link to the Tivoli Theatre in King George Square in Picture Australia:
http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an23000857
