Brisbane Utopian Dreams and Dystopian Nightmares

William (Bill) Metcalf

Brisbane: Utopian Dreams and Dystopian Nightmares tells the stories of little-known, and rather peculiar aspects of Brisbane’s colourful history.

Eleven Brisbane authors from the 19th and 20th centuries wrote about how wonderful, ‘utopian’, Brisbane could be — or how dreadful, ‘dystopian’, it could also be. Some writers imagined a future utopian  Brisbane where inequality has been eliminated, where everyone is prosperous, living in the most beautiful city with wide, tree-lined boulevards, wonderful opera-houses and museums, bubbling fountains and grand squares. They saw Brisbane becoming the centre of the civilised world, a model for humanity. Other writers depicted Brisbane as having been annihilated, violently wiped off the face of the earth except for a few stone ruins overgrown with lantana. These dystopian images saw Brisbane residents enslaved in a racial nightmare, beset with poverty and violence, their lives being precarious at best.

What led to these utopian and dystopian visions? Who were the visionaries? What do they tell us about a little-known part of Brisbane’s quirky history? These are images of a wonderful or dreadful Brisbane that never eventuated — but could have.

This well-illustrated book reveals all in a witty, but sometimes disturbing way.