David Malouf

The pier at Redcliffe was the really grand one and it had all those games that you could play.

It had big silver weighing machines where you got to

with a story on it and lots of those machines where you could play with two sides of a football team wiggling the controls.

Oh, the tris-balls, yes.

And the Cooper, which was the boat that went from Brisbane to Bribie Island and stopped off at Redcliffe, that was the place where it stopped on its way between the river and

Bribie Island so that was all very much like an English watering place they were modelled on English watering places and they had the names of English watering places Scarborough Margate Ramsgate Sandgate and even Southport because Southport was on still water on one side of the Narang River there and then on the other side of the river there there were old surf beaches

but they had not yet really come into existence.

They didn't really... Through the 30s, they began to be built up, but they only kind of sprang into existence as an alternative place for Brisbane people to go.

In the very, very last year of the war or after the war.

And then it all changed sometime in the early 60s or thereabouts, I think it all changed.

Huge change.

And the culture became California.

It became a surf culture, a proper surf culture based on...

surfing shorts rather than swimming costumes, which even for men had a top because men didn't appear in a swimming costume that didn't cover their torso as well as their rest.

All of our lifestyle became Californian.

Everything became Californian.

We shifted out of those old English homes into bungalows.

Yes, yes.

And that was a huge change.

There were beer gardens, for example, sprang up.