Brisbane
Categories: holidays, friends, other-churches
Date: 25 July 2006 05:00:03
As well as the shipmeet, I had a great time visiting friends and seeing the sights of Brisbane: photos can be seen here.
It was great to catch up and spend a few days with a friend originally from Sydney and her fiancé. We spent the day visiting the musem and walking around the city, then we hired some bicycles and rode around the City Botanic Gardens, over the Brisbane River and alongside it on the south side. Good fun. Brisbane seems to encourage exercise and outdoor activity: there were a large number of biycle and walking paths -- and even rock climbing / abseiling along the south side of the river.
Some beautiful buildings also. The first thing I noticed are the distinctive Queenslander homes: there are new developments and new houses not in that style, but the style is still quite prevalent. Some grand buildings in the city also.
The churches and cathedrals in the city are wonderful worship spaces and beautiful buildings. St John's, the Anglican cathedral, is still being completed: thus its claim to be the last Gothic-style cathedral in the world to be completed. St Stephen's Roman Catholic Cathedral is also beautiful, but I found the original cathedral, a small stone chapel next to it, now called St Stephen's Chapel, far more interesting: very few people seemed to enter it and it was a wonderful place to meditate and sit quietly. It also has as its centrepiece the diocesan shrine of Blessed Mary MacKillop -- a shrine made entirely of bark from native trees. I had quite an ecumenical weekened: Sunday Divine Liturgy at the Antiochian Orthodox parish of St Paul; Evensong and Benediction, as part of the shipmeet, at All Saint's Wickham Terrace Anglican Church, Morning Prayer at the Chapel of St Francis' Anglican Theological College and Midday Mass on Monday at St Stephen's. All wonderful and beautiful services that gave a sense of the divine, and yet all very different worship experiences.
A good view of Brisbane can be had from the top of the City Hall's Clock Tower. You also get an enjoyable ride up in a restored antique elevator. I had a very enjoyable chat up there with some visiting German tourists who were having a great time travelling around Australia.
Brisbane, or BrisVegas as it is affectionately known, is indeed a beautiful -- and liveable (though I'm not sure about summer when it gets very hot and humid!) -- city. I had a great time, and look forward to a return visit.