Renee Coffey (Griffith, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Tall buildings now surround 12 Edmonstone Street in South Brisbane, in my electorate of Griffith. The old weatherboard queenslander is gone. It was a place that David once called home. Today, I pay tribute to David Malouf AO. David is one of Australia's great writers, a Queenslander and, importantly, one of Brisbane's great literary voices. David was born in Brisbane on 20 March 1934. He grew up in South Brisbane. He passed away on 22 April this year, aged 92, leaving behind a body of work that reached across poetry, novels, short stories, essays, libretti and memoir. His writing took us across continents and centuries, from hot, suburban Brisbane to ancient worlds, but it returned us again and again to the questions of memory, identity, belonging and home.

In my 20s, I worked evenings and weekends as an usher in Brisbane Powerhouse, a performing arts and cultural centre on Brisbane River. During that time there was a stage production of Johnno, my first introduction to the writings of Malouf. Watching that show from the darkened wings of the theatre night after night, I couldn't quite believe how consistently and magically I was transported through time to 1940s and 1950s Brisbane and how his writing made me strangely nostalgic for a time I never knew. In Johnno, Malouf gave Brisbane one of its great literary portraits, revealed through memory and affection as anything but ordinary. And 12 Edmondstone Street, named after his childhood home, showed us how a vanished home could remain alive in the mind long after the street had changed. In Earth Hour, which he wrote much later in life, he turned again to the fragile gifts of the natural world—light, breeze, blossom, birdsong—and small moments that ask us to notice while there is still time. That is where Malouf's work so often begins—a street, a house, a fall of light, the heat held in a timber floorboard, the shade of a verandah, the river turning quietly through a city. From Edmondstone Street, from South Brisbane and West End, from the remembered textures of an older Brisbane, his imagination opened onto the largest questions: who we are, where we belong, what we carry and how the past continues to live in us.

The city has changed. Houses have given way. Streetscapes have shifted. Skylines have most certainly risen. But Malouf reminds us that place is never only in its buildings. It is weather, memory, family, language, longing and return. It is the city we inherit, the city we make and the city that goes on making us. Perhaps that was true of Malouf himself—gentle, generous, exacting, attentive, a writer who taught us to look again at the world closest to us and to find there the whole world. My condolences to David's nieces and nephews and to everyone who loved him. Vale, David Malouf.

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