Transit Lounge Publishing, 2025
Reviewed by Jane Frank, StylusLit
It’s both a pleasure and privilege to review this memoir of Brisbane arts identity Phil Brown’s life as an always-poet, journalist and writer. Although the self-deprecating notion of Brown as a ‘minor’ poet rather than a major literary figure is the seam that runs through this volume, Brown is well-known and well regarded by poets locally, and the poetry community as a whole, for his support of them and his championing of creative pursuits in a major way.
Brown’s latest memoir is presented in 16 chronological chapters, each covering a different period in his life. They have titles like ‘A Buddha in Suburbia,’ ‘Man Swallows Panadol’ and the amusing ‘I’m Brown, From The Sun.’ Poetry simmers through every chapter and stage and his text is punctuated with musings and lines from verses written at the time, some of which have been published but many that are shared with readers for the first time.
There’s a lovely cadence about the way these rise to the surface of the narrative among the amusing but sometimes bleak anecdotes that document Brown’s struggle to find himself, not only as a poet but as a journalist and a human being dealing with emotional and existential challenges. Here is a poignant example:
Midnight and the suburban wastes / Spread beneath a brittle sky /
I wander the dark floes / Weaving past houses that lie / Pristine,
still / Like butterflies pinned under the glass of the hour (61)
This is Brown’s fourth memoir, following The Kowloon Kid (Transit Longe, 2019), a memoir of his Hong Kong childhood that sets the scene for Confessions by talking about the ex-pat experience and his return to Queensland; Any Guru will Do (UQP, 2006) about his spiritual quests and guru-chasing escapades across Australia and Asia; and Travels with My Angst (UQP, 2004), a collection of travel tales with a wry take on global journalism jaunts.
He is also the author of two poetry collections discussed in the memoir — Plastic Parables (Metro Community Press, 1991), the product of early-career poetry and An Accident in the Evening (Interactive Press, 2001), a collection embracing melancholic motifs and moments from his surfie youth that was launched by the then Queensland Arts Minister, Matt Foley, himself a keen poetry aficionado.
What particularly impressed me in this latest memoir are Brown’s wide-ranging influences and the fascinating intertext throughout. Some of these influences are real people and poets Brown knew or rubbed shoulders with — like his University lecturer and later correspondent Bruce Dawe, the formidable Les Murray who Brown encounters in Sydney or Barry Humphries (who under the guise of Sir Les Patterson, gives Brown valuable life advice). The text is also littered with examples from his wide-ranging reading life—he is a student of Hemingway, the Beat Poets, Plath and Hughes, DH Lawrence, WH Davies as well as Kafka, Ghandi, John Donne, CS Lewis, Swiss-French Blaise Cendrars in an issue of The Paris Review and countless others.
Interests like comparative religion, train travel and music are central to Brown’s writing and musings too so the book creates its own soundtrack of the times – everything from Lou Reed’s ‘Coney Island Baby’ to the Beatles to Leonard Cohen to Jim Morrison and the Doors, many of these musicians considered poets in Brown’s eyes.
TS Eliot’s shadow falls across Brown’s horizon all the way through and I particularly enjoyed the anecdote where Brown carried The Waste Land all around London, and its part-inspiration for a late surge of poetic inspiration in recent years:
Unreal city / Under the brown flog of a winter dawn / A crowd flowed
over London Bridge, so many / I had not thought death had undone
so many. (250)
Poetry and the need to write has been at the core of who Brown is since his youth and at one point in the book, he articulates this process:
Funny how things transmute through the alchemy of the imagination
into poems — or remembrances embellished enough to be poetic
memories — that may not be written down but can still be savoured …
[a] poem is a remembrance of things past, if you want to be Proustian
about it, or in search of lost time … For Proust, it was madeleine
cake that sparked his memory and a flood of literature ensued. Not
sure what it was for me … wine and a cigarette, a vague longing and
‘letting my mind wander where it will go’ as Paul McCartney once
sang. (140-141)
Messages that come through strongly to the reader are the recurring struggle of the literary life and Brown’s unshakeable persistence through long years of rejection, the freelance grind and the sense that poetry is more important to him than his ‘real’ job. It is also inspiring to read of Brown’s recovery in the face of anxiety, substance and alcohol use and stabilising his life to become a well-known writer, journo and arts figure. This mirrors Brisbane’s growth to becoming a city with an upbeat and healthy arts scene.
Brown writes a strong sense of place well throughout, transporting us all over Queensland— Toowoomba, Monto, Rockvegas, The Gold Coast, Brisbane—to Melbourne, Europe and Asia. The Monto years, where Brown worked as a reporter in a sleepy country town and befriends the artist Gil Jamieson were especially interesting to me and highly amusing. I also enjoyed his nostalgic writing about the Brisbane of the 1980s and perhaps I even crossed paths with the poet as it sounds like we both spent much of our time in 1986 at Le Scoops in Paddington though I was drinking traffic light juices and Brown was drinking coffee. Brown brings the atmosphere of times like the Fitzgerald Inquiry to fascinating light and tells of his friendship with a young but already talented Trent Dalton, who describes this memoir as ‘one that makes your heart ache with all the pathos and poetry’.
This memoir will appeal to writers and readers of Australian literary memoirs, lovers of Queensland history, society, politics, Gold Coast surf culture, poets — of course —and anyone interested in vivid, honest portraits of journalistic life and Queensland places:
Suntans and concrete. Plastic smiles / Switch on and off like dreary
dials. / When the clouds are gone the sun’s like ice / On the streets
of Surfers Paradise. (83)