https://sites.google.com/site/prayersofreconciliation/,https://sites.google.com/site/godintheuniverse/,
https://sites.google.com/site/menfrancoreconciliation/, www.catholic.org/,www.catholic.org.au/, www.catholic.org/bible/, www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html,
http://diybrickwork.com, http://manneedsgod.co.uk, http://frankmenchise.com
This blog can be found at this link, Welcome to Brisbane.
Brisbane City Hall is one of the land mark in Brisbane, it is in King George Square, with its clock that chimes every quarter of an hour, if you are from London England, you could say that this is the Big Ban of Brisbane.
Welcome to our article,
Dear readers, talking about future welcoming, today while I am posting this blog, I have learned that the Olympic Games in 2032 will be held in Brisbane, so, we will be welcoming a lot of people in the future, anyhow, let me go back to my life story, and how I felt when I first arrived in Brisbane.
Now, let me talk about the past. This story has happened about sixty years ago, so, let me tell you the first impression that I had of Brisbane, when I
disembarked in 1961, and the views as seen through the eyes of an emigrant
arriving in Brisbane by boat in the early sixties, and talk about how I was
welcomed to Brisbane by my relatives and friends.
So, my first impression of Brisbane city, are those
impressions that we keep with us our entire life. Let us start from the docks where
I have arrived and disembarked; as soon as I disembarked in Brisbane I met with
my brother and other friends, so, I let them guide me what to do next, after
all they were here before me, so, they knew what we had to do and where we had
to go. As we know newcomers arriving from a foreign country have to go through
custom to check their belongings, so, we did that and then we were free to go
to our destination, in Brisbane or any other place in Queensland, since this
was the last stop that the ship made in Australia, so, all the new comers disembarked
Anyhow,
after the customs cleared us, we left the port in a car and they took me to one
of our friends house not far from the port, here the lady of the house had
prepared something to eat for everybody and while we were eating and everybody
was trying to make me feel welcome, we were also talking about my native town Genzano
di Lucania and the
people that I had left behind in that town; you see, all those relative or
friends that came to pick me up, they were from the same town and I had brought
presents and news from their families. I must say here that in those times when
transport and news traveled much slower than today, anybody that arrived from
overseas and from where one had come from was welcome, especially if one
brought presents and news from their relative and friends, I thought it was a
good thing and it helped, because one did not feel that complete detachment
from your country of origin that we had left behind, in my case a month
earlier.
Now, everybody that has
migrated or moved away from home for a long period of time knows what being
home sick is; therefore, this finding that there is a group of people from your
own town and they are staying in touch with each other is helpful wherever one
goes and they make the new comer feel welcome. So, I was welcomed from this
group of relative and friends, who soon made me understand among other things
that I was welcomed to Brisbane the land of the kangaroos, and this is how my
relative and friends made me understand we would be labelled from now on.
Anyhow, it was a welcome in the best possible way.
Now, I have to say that at first sights
Brisbane did not look as good as Sydney, the port of Brisbane where I
disembarked was an old timber dock, and we went through customs in an old and
large timber building, but I thought anyhow Brisbane is still a city and our
friends live here; so, we went to one of our fried home, it was a unit in a
brick building, so that was not bad, after all one has to accept whatever there
is available when we go to a different place. But little did I know that I was
going to have a surprise soon, because I was going to see that in Brisbane most
houses were made of timber.
Anyhow, after having eaten and talked for a
couple of hours with our friends, and given them those presents that I had
brought, I was driven to my final destination a few kilometres away, where we
had to go was on the other side of the river, we went across the Brisbane
River on a
bridge called the Story Bridge, which is a very important bridge in Brisbane,
but not as important as Sydney Harbor Bridge. So, Brisbane has also its own
unique land marks the Story Bridge and City Hall are the most important, there
is also Parliament House and the city center with modern tall buildings, these
were the things that gave us migrants hope, because to us migrants it meant
that Brisbane city was a growing prosperous city.
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My final destination.
My final destination was at my uncle home,
where my brother and a few other friends and relatives were also staying. My
uncle had been in Australia 9 years, and somehow recently had been
able to save enough money to put down a deposit
to buy a house; the house was a large wooden house typical of the houses in
Brisbane of those times.
Now, for us that were coming from a country
where almost everything was masonry or built with bricks and mortar and cement,
these houses in Brisbane city make us feel a bit strange at first; but, they
were still houses and they still provided a roof on our heads; therefore, even
knowing that they were made of timber, I was pleased to have been offered that
accommodation. My brother knowing that I was coming had already bought a bed
for me, so, I was already set up. You know it is a great help when you go to a
new country and find that somebody has already prepared everything for you. I
believe that for this reason I have been lucky, and I have escaped some
hardship. Otherwise it could have been a lot harder to start a new way of life
away from your original home.
Let us imagine you reach your destination, as I did when I reached Brisbane city. Now let us say that you don’t have much money to pay for accommodation, you don’t know where to go or what to do next; you don’t know even how to speak the local language, you can end up in deep trouble you know. Therefore, I think that I have been lucky, when I found that I was welcomed. I believe that when we see new arrivals, we should try to understand that they have left their own country, in the hope of finding a better way of living, or they were forced to leave their country for safety reasons. But sometimes people do not see it that way.
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At my new address.
Welcomed at my new address
Now, let me talk how I was welcome at my
uncle house; we reaching my uncle house and were greeted by the people that
were in at that time of the day, since there were people that had gone to work,
you see, there were quite a few people living at my uncle house already, and
they were all from the same town that I came from, so, we all knew each other already.
Here I am not going to tell you their names, because I don’t know whether they
like the idea of being mentioned here; therefore, I am going to tell you in a
general way just things that happened and keep everything impersonal.
So, reached my final destination at my uncle house, and greeted those that were there, we unloaded my
luggage and we started to talk about the town I came from, Genzano di Lucania,
with the people that were present, because they were all from the same town as
I have said, and they wanted to know as much as they could about their
relatives. While we were unloading at the same time I was telling them about
the presents that I brought from my own family to my uncle, they were mostly
local town produce the largest of them was now a seven litre demijohn of wine,
since the ten litre broke on the way, I had also some 6 litre of pure olive oil
and a large tray of homemade large biscuits that we make in Genzano when
somebody gets married, there were other presents that I was going to give them
as soon as I would unpack my own luggage.
Soon everybody came back from work, and I
greeted every one of them and told them as much as I could about things that
they wanted to know. Evening came and we had dinner and after that I retired to
my bedroom, where my new bed that my brother had bought me was ready for a good
night sleep on firm ground, after being a whole month on the ship. Now before we
go on about telling about the timber houses of Brisbane city, let us first tell
about some positive sights that we can see in this city of Brisbane.
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Brisbane city views.
Wherever you go there are always interesting
things to see, also Brisbane city has got several thing to show the world; I know that most people that come to Australia will say that Brisbane
does not look as good as Sydney, but so what, it is still a nice city to live
in and has got things that we are proud of; like the Story Bridge, City Hall
with its clock tower that strikes the time every quarter of an hour, the city
center with its shopping center, Parliament House and the botanic gardens
next to it, where we can stroll around looking at the garden or the pond, with
its ducks and swans or sitting on the lawn on a hot summer day and listening to
a band during the weekends.
Now there are more parks in Brisbane and most
of them have a playground for children, so, most people used to go to these
gardens or parks in those times, perhaps today they are not used as much as
they used to be used then; of these parks the most important after the City
Botanic Garden is, New Farm Park, this park is well known for the roses that
are grown there, so, we call it the park of the roses, it is also a sight to
see early in spring when the jacaranda trees are in flower, this park has a
large playground for children, it has a kiosk, where you can have a cup tea or
buy an ice cream for the kids and a few other things, on hot summer days one can
sit under the trees near the Brisbane River and fill almost as if you are at
the beach; you see Brisbane River is a very wide river and it is navigable for
many miles, so, while we were sitting in the shade of the trees, we can see the
traffic of bouts on the river, some of these boats are carrying people that
were sightseeing on the river, or going to another destination.
Another important garden that needs mentioning here is the new Botanic
Garden at Toowong Brisbane, near Mt-Coot-Tha forest this is a western suburb on
the fringes of Brisbane city, this new botanic garden has been opened because
the old botanic garden in the city lost some of its land, as they have built
another university there; now apart from seeing what we can see and find in a
botanic garden; from this new botanic garden, you can visit also this
observatory;
The Sir Thomas Brisbane Planetarium is a planetarium located on the grounds of Brisbane
Botanic Gardens[1] in the suburb of Toowong, Brisbane, Queensland,Australia. The Planetarium was officially opened on 24
May 1978.
Now, let us forget for a moment that this article is mainly to talk about
the early sixties here, as we have done above, so let us add what else could be
attractive today in Brisbane, here we are talking about the year 2014 and we
can add also that in Brisbane there are many shopping centers that are the size
of a small town, and they are all well organized and air conditioned all under
one roof that it is a pleasure to go shopping specially in those hot summer
days, when we can go there and stroll from shop to shop doing the shopping and
keeping cool at the same time, what else would you want?
Anyhow, let us go back to talk about the sixties and those wooden houses.
---------------------------------
The wooden houses of Brisbane.
At my new address in Brisbane Australia, even
though it was a wooden house I was welcomed and soon I felt no difference at
all to live in it, after all that is the way that most of the local people live
in these parts of Australia. But now, just for the sake of knowing what I am
talking about here let me describe this house for you. It was a four bedroom
house, in addition to the four bedrooms there was a lounge room, a large
kitchen where there was enough room for a large dining table, there was a
bathroom with bathtub and shower that had a gas heated hot water devise that
you could light up and have a hot shower, the toilet was downstairs under the
house; now all this large house and floor space was set on wooden stumps, I
know that those people that have never lived or seen a house on wooden stumps
before are saying; what is he talking about a house on wooden stumps, I have
never heard of this before what a strange country Australia is.
I know it sounds strange and feel a bit
strange too to live in these houses at the beginning, but anyhow, they are there,
and they have a pretty good reason why people built them like that in these
parts of the world. After all is not even a new idea when we think about it;
you see when I was at school I remember that my teacher was saying that a long
time ago for safety reasons, some people that lived by the sea would build their
house on stilts over shallow water, so that they could defend them easily if
they were attacked; Now we could say, okay that was a good idea then, but what
are the reasons for these houses to be built like that here?
Anyhow, I believe that I have said enough in this
article, we will talk about these wooden houses, in our next article, Australia
wooden houses, because we want to explain the reasons why these houses in
Brisbane were built with timber on wooden stumps.
But I want to add this observation, at the beginning of this blog I said that the 2032 Olympic Games will be held in Brisbane, so, I wonder what people will thing about this type of housing when they come to Brisbane.
To see more click on this link, Welcome to Brisbane.
See
you soon.
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