Perhaps that is why I remember the preliminary journey with some affection. On paper, it accomplished very little beyond confirming a route. In practice, it gave Robyn and me time to meet that part of Brisbane before we began moving through it to a timetable. We had seen the journey at walking pace while there was still room to get it wrong.
The Places We Found and the Things We Never Went Looking For
We went into Brisbane the day before we needed to, which might sound unnecessarily conscientious until you consider the alternative. I have never found arriving late in an unfamiliar city improves whatever it was you were meant to be doing there, particularly when you discover that the building you want is somewhere beyond the building you thought you wanted. There is very little dignity in consulting your phone at an intersection while the minutes disappear, especially if you have previously assured your wife that you know where you are going.
We had come to Brisbane for a particular purpose, with somewhere to be and a time at which we were expected. That would give the coming days their shape, but there was room beforehand to sort out the practicalities. We could catch the train from Morningside, establish the route from Central and find out how much walking belonged at either end. None of this would alter the business ahead, although it would remove the unnecessary complication of arriving flustered.
I have a reasonable appreciation of preparation when it saves me from having to demonstrate how poorly I manage without it. A street address is useful, but it does not tell you quite what the journey will feel like on foot, or how readily you will recognise the place when you reach it. Walking the route seemed the simplest way to turn tomorrow’s instructions into something familiar. It also gave Robyn and me a reason to get out into the city while we still had time to look around.
So our walking began with an errand rather than an ambition to explore Brisbane. We were checking a journey, giving ourselves enough time to find the destination and retrace our steps without watching the clock. Along the way, there was the equally practical matter of noticing somewhere for a coffee or lunch. We would need to get there again in the days ahead, but on this first walk the streets between the station and our destination could have a little of our attention too.
There was a purpose to our visit, and it would occupy much of the days ahead. For the moment, though, Robyn and I had a smaller undertaking: catch the train, find our way from the station and establish how the journey worked before time became part of the calculation. It was the sort of preparation that can look rather dull on a holiday itinerary, assuming anyone would bother to put it on one.
Morningside to Central was the railway component. After that came Ann Street, George Street and the final stretch to where we needed to be, a sequence which sounded straightforward when reduced to names. Street names are very accommodating in that respect. They omit the business of emerging from a station and deciding which way to point yourself.
It was a public holiday Monday, giving our preliminary expedition a slightly different character from the mornings that followed. There were people making their own use of the day, while we were rehearsing a journey that would soon become familiar. We had come with somewhere to go, but no immediate requirement to hurry there, which left a little room between finding the route and simply following it.
That is a useful margin to have in a city. When there is a deadline, a street becomes a length of ground to get through, and any interesting interruption is liable to be assessed according to how much time it might cost. Remove the deadline and the same street becomes available for inspection. You can work out where you are without resenting the fact that you have had to stop to do it.
We found our destination, noted a nearby café and traced the way back. There was nothing particularly adventurous about it, but by the end we had converted a collection of instructions into something we had actually walked. Tomorrow would still have its own demands, although finding our way through Brisbane no longer needed to be one of them.
I like that small change in the ownership of a place. A city does not become yours because you have successfully located a building, but a route you have walked is different from one someone has described. There are now connections between its names. Central, Ann Street and George Street had acquired the ground between them.
In the days that followed, those connections became part of a routine. We were staying at Julian’s unit, and the walk to the station, the train journey and the streets at the other end gave our mornings a practical shape. Repetition might seem an unlikely contributor to a book about looking around, yet it does something that a single visit cannot. It gives you another chance at the same patch of ground without requiring you to remember everything the first time.
On an initial walk, finding the destination takes priority. Once you know where you are going, some of that attention becomes available for the place you are passing through. You no longer need every corner to confirm that you are on the correct route, and a familiar street can begin to offer more than reassurance. Whether you continue to notice it is another matter, because familiarity also provides permission to stop looking.
I thought about the people for whom our journey into Brisbane would have been an ordinary commute. The walk to the station, the train into Central and the streets beyond could be repeated morning after morning until the whole exercise required very little consideration. You would know where to turn, how long you had and perhaps which carriage left you closest to the exit. There is an efficiency in that familiarity, particularly when the journey is merely the necessary arrangement between leaving home and starting work.
I tend to think of that collective movement as the grey brigade, although the description has very little to do with what anyone is wearing. You could put on the brightest shirt in the wardrobe, add a tie that required sunglasses to appreciate properly and still take your place in the same daily procession. The colour would travel with you, but so would the timetable, the familiar turns and the expectation that you would be at your desk by a particular hour. Even a floral shirt has limited authority over the starting time.
The greyness belongs to the repetition, to the possibility that the journey has become a portion of the day to be used up before the real business begins. Morning delivers you to work, evening delivers you home, and the streets between become so familiar that you scarcely need to register them. A person can be quite conspicuous in appearance while moving almost invisibly through their own routine. All that effort choosing something cheerful to wear, and the city might still pass largely unnoticed.
Of course, I could not tell from someone’s clothing or direction of travel how they were experiencing their morning. The person I imagined to be enduring another weary commute might have been thoroughly looking forward to the day, while someone walking slowly could simply have been early. There would be private pleasures and interests within that procession that a visitor could never identify. My grey brigade was a way of thinking about the habit, rather than a reliable assessment of the people caught up in it.
I recognised the habit readily enough because I had contributed plenty of working days to it myself. When there is somewhere you must be, the journey can become an exercise in arriving, with your thoughts already occupied by what awaits you. Robyn and I were now establishing our own short version of that arrangement, for reasons vitally important to us. We could deepen our rut in quite cheerful clothing too, unless we occasionally remembered to look up.
I had spent enough years working to appreciate how easily a day could become something you were preparing for before you had properly arrived in it. The mind could be at the desk while the body was still making its way there, organising the first task, anticipating a telephone call or revisiting something left unfinished yesterday. Meanwhile, the streets continued beneath your feet. You could cover a considerable distance without giving much attention to any of it.
From the outside, it would be easy to call that monotony, although the person making the journey might have good reasons for wanting it to be uneventful. There is comfort in knowing that the train will take you where you need to go and that the remaining walk holds no surprises. Most working mornings do not need an adventure before nine o’clock. They need you delivered with enough energy left to do whatever earns the money that makes tomorrow’s journey necessary.
Our own purpose in Brisbane was vitally important to us, but that did not make the mechanics of getting there especially different. We, too, wanted a dependable train journey and a route we could follow without hesitation. We were establishing, for a short period, precisely the sort of routine someone else might have spent years wishing they could escape. Having gone out to learn the way, we would keep walking it until there was very little left to work out.
In other words, we were making ourselves a rut, with every successful journey helping to deepen it. I could hardly congratulate myself on noticing the city while assuming that everyone heading to work had somehow failed to appreciate it. Give us enough mornings and we might have become just as economical with our attention. The importance of the destination could quite readily consume the journey, regardless of how long we intended to keep making it.
What we had in our favour was the temporary nature of the arrangement. We knew these streets would only belong to our daily routine for a little while, and they had not yet become entirely predictable. There was still an opportunity to look beyond the next turn, even when we were certain which turn it needed to be. A familiar route could get us there efficiently without having to account for every step we took during the day.
There was also lunch to consider, a subject which has supplied a surprising amount of direction to our travels. People plan journeys around monuments, galleries and views, all perfectly reasonable choices, but the need to eat has probably introduced us to as many otherwise unexamined streets. Hunger has a practical approach to broadening the mind. It wants to know what is around the next corner.
Lunch gave us a second, smaller purpose once the morning’s journey had been completed. We wanted somewhere to eat and sit quietly, close enough to make the return practical, but finding it required us to consider something beyond the established route. For a while, knowing the way ceased to be the entire point of being outside. We could leave our newly deepened rut for a street or two, provided we remembered how to get back.
For us, finding lunch meant finding somewhere we could sit quietly as well as eat. We were spending time with family, and a table offered a chance to collect ourselves and talk before returning to the afternoon’s commitments. The food mattered, but so did the space around it. Somewhere suitable could not be judged entirely by what appeared on the menu.
Someone familiar with the area showed us a quieter place we could use for a pause. After that, we were left to find our lunch, which brought the city down to a pleasantly manageable scale. We did not need to understand Brisbane in its entirety. A suitable place within walking distance would do for the present.
I find that a much easier introduction to a city than the demand to see its principal attractions. A recognised sight comes with expectations before you arrive, including some notion of what you are supposed to appreciate about it. A lunch stop has a simpler test. Can we eat here, sit for a while and get back when we need to?
Even that modest requirement changes what you notice. A café noted on the trial walk becomes useful rather than merely another business passed along the way, and the distance from one street to another acquires a meaning beyond the length of the walk. You begin to assemble a small, working version of the city. Its important places are those which fit the day you are actually having.
That version need not bear much resemblance to the one in a visitor’s brochure. Ours began with a station, a route through the streets and somewhere to stop for lunch. There was no particular view we had to capture before we could claim to have been there. Much of our Brisbane was being put together in the intervals between other things.
Those intervals varied. On some days we needed to be back, making the outward walk only half of the arrangement and leaving the return journey with a claim on our time. On another afternoon, our commitments finished with more of the day still available. We dispersed and went looking for something to see, allowing the streets to take a larger part in proceedings.
There is a difference between having an hour to fill and having an hour to spend, although both begin with the same sixty minutes. Filling it encourages you to keep checking how much remains. Spending it allows the place you are in to make a suggestion. We had been given some time in Brisbane, and walking seemed a reasonable way to use it.
Our wandering brought us to the tower at the casino, where we stopped for afternoon tea. I would not have thought to nominate a casino as an essential component of a walking chapter, but our purpose there was comfortably within my tolerance for risk. We had found somewhere for tea. There was no need to improve the occasion by giving the establishment access to the rest of our money.
The stop belonged to that afternoon in its own right. We had finished what we needed to do, walked through the city and found somewhere to sit, without constructing much of a programme around any of it. That left the afternoon free of the obligation to become more impressive in the telling. Tea was sufficient, and so was being there together.
I would be misrepresenting the visit if I turned those days into an uninterrupted holiday. We had other things occupying us, and our movements through Brisbane fitted around them. Yet it would be equally misleading to treat the streets as blank spaces between the things that had brought us there. We walked them, found our way, looked for lunch and spent an afternoon in them. They became part of the visit through use.
Perhaps that is why I remember the preliminary journey with some affection. On paper, it accomplished very little beyond confirming a route. In practice, it gave Robyn and me time to meet that part of Brisbane before we began moving through it to a timetable. We had seen the journey at walking pace while there was still room to get it wrong.
There are places I associate with a single arrival, a view or an incident substantial enough to carry the whole recollection. This part of Brisbane sits differently in my memory, made up of repeated journeys and the smaller decisions within them. Where do we go from the station? How far can we walk before we need to turn back? Where might we find somewhere quiet for lunch?
None of those questions required a grand answer, but each took us into the city rather than leaving us merely delivered to an address. By the time we had made the journey several times, the streets between Central and our destination were no longer an unfamiliar problem to be solved. We knew the way. Somewhere along it, there was also a café we had thought worth remembering.
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