Brisbane City Botanic Gardens
Monday 10 August 2015
Yesterday, at the annual general meeting of the Australian Garden History Society, Queensland, the guest speaker was Dale Arvidsson. Since March of this year he’s been the curator of both the Brisbane Botanic Gardens Mount Coot-tha (opened in 1976) and the City Botanic Gardens (established as a botanic reserve in 1855).
This appointment, as curator of both gardens is a good thing. It hints at the possibility that the city gardens might recover some of their former botanical attributes. Since the new gardens were established at Mount Coot-tha the city gardens have became a general-purpose civic park—over-trampled and under-maintained.
Albert Henry Fullwood (1863-1930), Brisbane. Q. Parliament House, reproduced on a Raphael Tuck & Sons “Oilette” postcard, no 7354 in the wide-wide-world series, published around 1905. The view is from the vicinity of St Mary’s Church, Kangaroo Point, looking across the river to the Brisbane Botanic Gardens and Parliament House beyond. I like the animation of the boats on the river, but the artist seems to have missed Walter Hill’s avenue of bunya pines along the river-edge of the gardens, and drawn some eucalypts instead.