Brookfield is just 13km from the CBD, but feels more like a country town
Life in the Burbs is a series that highlights the good, bad and beautiful of the Brisbane suburbs. Every week, writers from across the city write love letters to their (mostly) suburbs.
“Is that a fucking platypus?”
It was nearly midnight, and although Sarah was used to me bringing the injured wild animal home, she was having a hard time comprehending the monotreme, wrapped in a towel and blinking sheepishly on the couch.
He was seriously injured and I wasn’t sure he would make it through the night. I picked it up from the edge of a flooded gorge on our street on my way home. She moved as I picked her up, then blinked her small, dark, round eyes. He didn’t try to escape.
Unfortunately, instead of taking him to the vet the next morning, I handed his lifeless body over to a researcher at the University of Queensland. The autopsy showed he was hit by a car. The researcher told me that there are lots of platypuses in the streams around Brookfield – more than people think.
I first moved to Brookfield in 1990 when I was eight years old. Compared to The Gap, the suburb where I moved, Brookfield was left behind. Although only 12 kilometers from Brisbane’s CBD, Brookfield was a mix of land and working farms.
Our new home was at the end of a dirt driveway surrounded by cow pastures. The old woman who lived on the dairy farm down the road was living without electricity in the house where she was born. Every afternoon he made his way along the roadside collecting sticks to fuel his stove. There were only two buses on Saturdays and one on Sundays, and some children rode horses to school.
Thirty-five years later, I am back in Brookfield and raising my own children. And I was relieved to see that not much had changed.
European history at Brookfield began in the mid-1800s. Lumber gatherers came for the prized hoop pine and red cedar giants that towered over the hillsides, and they cut them down and milled them by waving them down Moggill Creek. Farmers soon moved here to graze cattle and plant pawpaw, pineapple, custard apples and bananas on the bare hillsides.
A school was opened in 1872, but there was no rush to settle the area, despite the discovery of gold in the hard, rocky soil beneath ironbark thickets. In the early 1930s the school consisted of only one teacher and nine students.
He told us about the wild swinger parties in the Upper Brookfield hills and the hippies who moved there in the ’70s.
When I arrived in 1990 there were about 150 children at the school, but it still felt like a country town to me. One of the first people I met was our neighbor Vic, a half-blind Jew who had lived there forever. There would be a twinkle in his one good eye as he told us about the oddities of his youth.
Rumor had it that he won and lost half of Brookfield at the gaming tables. But he didn’t tell us about it. Instead he told us about the wild swinger parties in the Upper Brookfield hills and the hippies who moved there in the ’70s and probably still grow pot in the lantana-filled valleys.
I left a few years later, when I was 19. My family stayed and I returned regularly, but I didn’t pay much attention to this place. That was until 2015, when my wife and I were looking for a place to get married.
Friends talked about the Upper Brookfield Hall: a small community venue on Upper Brookfield Road; It’s a narrow, dead-end road leading into the valley, framed on both sides by dense forest. Alan, the caretaker, told us that his father built the hall before he succumbed to sepsis.
“A few years later they started producing penicillin,” he said.
We shouted into his good ear that the asking price to rent the old hall for the weekend (about $300) was very reasonable, and we agreed.
We were living in Red Hill at the time. We could open our window and touch our neighbor’s house. In Brookfield, block sizes started at 2.5 acres. As you drive down the hill from neighboring Kenmore, concrete gives way to green space and rolling paddocks, and there’s a loud silence where there should be the roar of traffic.
We moved into a small wooden lodge with chickens, a dog, a bunch of snakes, and a one-year-old girl. Today he is eight years old and goes to the local school with his younger brother and 500 other children.
Brookfield is much busier now than it was in 1990. There are more houses, more real estate agents, more luxury cars. The Brookfield Show, which once had gold coin entry, now charges Brisbane Ekka prices. Fortunately, the important things haven’t changed.
Neighbors help each other when roads are blocked due to flood waters or electricity is cut off in case of a storm. We currently share this space with wallabies, king parrots, echidnas, platypuses, koalas, gliders and wedge-tailed eagles.
On our way home from our street we pass sheep, goats, cows, horses and on weekends we pass many cyclists in Lycra. There’s the odd weathered farmhouse still nestled among the shiny LandCruisers in the local pub’s car park. In fact, a couple of kids on horseback showed up as we were leaving school a few weeks ago.
Brookfield is a thing of the past. I hope it stays that way.
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Nick Kilvert is a Queensland Government media officer, a former ABC environment correspondent and one-time ecologist.
