We got our culture from the Gallery of Modern Art, which was hosting the 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art - featuring some striking North Korean prints and paintings, a bizarre camper van and playschool by a Japanese artist (Yoshimoto Nara) whose cafe we went to in Tokyo and who has seemed to follow us everywhere since, original art for a Hawaiian comic featuring a history of Hawaii crossed with gods and giant monsters (with the great title Polyfantastica - sadly sold out in the museum shop), and in the permanent collection a few ukiyo-e (of no great interest themselves but accompanied by a breakdown of how the printing process works) and some more modern works in the ukiyo-e style by Teraoka. Enjoyable stuff.
Nara is everywhere. Why?
Brisbane has a whole South Bank area filled with cultural stuff but we didn't have time to see the rest.
I've mentioned before how expensive Australia is, mainly due to the exchange rate, but one thing that is outrageous in its own right is the price of books. (There's an "explains a lot" joke that I've been weighing up whether to use here. Better not I suppose.) This is particularly galling in combination with the exchange rate when you see English editions which have been repriced at a rate unrelated to forex rates and so double in price when converted back. The interesting thing about Brisbane is that it's full of cheap bookshops, even from our brief walk through the CBD*. Unfortunately I have far too many books already so I have had to restrain myself.
* Central Business District is the ubiquitous term over here - sorry if I've used it before without explanation.
[An aside on books - made one good discovery over here, which is Gary Disher's Wyatt series. He's just revived this, and I saw a review comparing it to Richard Stark's Parker books. Valid comparison - the first in the series wears its debt to Parker on its sleeve but pulls it off well. And it was a lot of fun to read a book set in Melbourne, withe lots of local references, while staying in Melbourne - largely by chance, I didn't know what city it was set in. But I digress, and nobody's interested...]
In the afternoon we popped over to Fortitude Valley, which Lilly was hoping would have interesting shopping. Truth be told, it's a bit of a dive. I bought a haircut. It's also one of the big nightlife areas, but with an early start in prospect we just had a couple of drinks - should mention the Elephant & Wheelbarrow, a real split personality place with a fairly grotty faux-English-pub interior and a very airy and stylish 'beer garden' out the back that is well worth a visit - and called it a night.
We've sorted out our itinerary for the next week (and moved our flight to Argentina back a couple of days so we have room to breathe) - up the coast by Greyhound bus, stopping at the Australia Zoo, then 3 days driving a 4x4 around Fraser Island, then a couple of days sailing in the Whitsunday islands and snorkelling the reef. These are supposed to be some of the best bits of Australia so really looking forward to them.
We're just hoping the Whitsundays have recovered from the cyclone that tore through a few days ago! Our trip around Oz seems to be preceded by freak weather - if we'd been a week or so earlier, we could have hit a giant hail storm and flooding in Melbourne, a year's rain in a day and roads washed away in central Australia, and a cyclone up here. If you know anyone in Buenos Aires, you may want to warn them to leave town for a few days...
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