Brisbane Is Home

The Redland Shire is an southern, bayside region of Greater Brisbane (which is not the same as the Brisbane City Council - its my name for a rough area from Caboolture to Beenleigh - click here to see what I call Greater Brisbane).

The Shire has a Ladies’ drum corps - I saw them when I photoblogged Australia Day at Southbank, and Beth Connor from the Drum Corps asked me to let you know more about them.

The Redland Shire Ladies’ Drum Corps practices every Wednesday night in the carpark of the North Stradbroke Ferry Terminal. Click here to see the exact location - click here to see from a distance and click here to see up close.

Any female from 13 to 70 is welcome to join. It’s $25 every 3 months to cover uniforms and drums, and you’ll also get lessons on how to drum in the Corps. After mastering side drumming, and the basic marches and displays, you can learn tenor or bass drumming if you want.

The Corps has performed in festivals and street parades right around the Redland Shire, other parts of Brisbane, and as far away as Stanthorpe (click here to see where it is) to Murwillumbah (click here…)

If you want to start drumming with the Corps, call the Secretary, Ms Jenny Hall, on 07 3206 4765 (+617 3206 4765 from overseas).

Read more to see more pictures of the Corps from Australia Day at Southbank.

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Bunk Brisbane is a backpackers’ lodge in Brisbane’s nightlife area of Fortitude Valley. It’s on the corner of Ann St and Gipps St in the Valley, and as you can see from the picture above, there is a bus stop (citybound buses only) right outside.

Click here to see exactly where Bunk is located.

Read more to see larger pictures and more info about the neighbourhood.

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I went to New Farm Park yesterday to watch people jug. And I made my first real videoblog - that’s it just above.

Jugging is a sport that was invented in the 1990 film ‘Salute of the Jugger‘ (also known as ‘The Blood of Heroes’, starring Rutger Hauer, Joan Chen and Vincent D’Onofrio).

Jugging involves 4 people from each side hitting each other with weapons, while the fifth player on each team tries to score by running through the gaps and putting a dogskull on a spike at the end of the field.

There is an active jugging group in Brisbane that meets every second Sunday at New Farm Park. Click here to go to the details of the games at meetup.com.

Click here to see the exact part of New Farm Park you have to go to.

There are also heaps of information and photos at jugger.org.au

There’s another Brisbane jugging video on YouTube by fiendishfilms:

Warning - there is some coarse language in the soundtrack to that one.

So what sort of sport do you like? Does hitting people with weapons to make room for the quick and his dogskull sound like fun to you? Leave a comment and let me know.

The Carnival of Cities? What? Well, a ‘blog carnival’ is when someone collects lots of blog posts on a particular topic, and posts links to them all in one place.

Home Turf Media, the publishers of Brisbane is Home, will be hosting the first ‘Carnival of Cities’ on February 19th (February 20th here). The deadline is February 18th, but if you are in Australia you might be able to get away with submitting on the morning of the 19th. Personally, I won’t be trying my luck though - my submission is already in - I’ve submitted my Australia Day post.

You can submit your best post about your city here.

What’s your favourite article you’ve written about your city? Tell everyone by leaving a comment.

Livejournal user virtualdan has just plugged Tim Steward’s free gig tonight in the Brisneyland LJ community.

The gig is at the rotunda in the Valley (Brunswick St) Mall - there will be several sets between 6pm and 9pm. Click here to see the exact location.

You can see Tim Steward’s myspace page here, and you can listen to the album How Does It End here, for free, on Last.fm

This video clip is from Tim Steward’s own YouTube page - the song is called ‘Before’.

I’ll be in the Valley tonight, taking photos of the gig. What are your plans for tonight? If you don’t know, check out the list of Brisbane Is Home links, which includes a round up of the best Brisbane entertainment guides.

If you’ve got a story to tell about your weekends, just let me know in the comments.

Livejournal user bookrealm just posted some great news on the brisneyland LJ community.

Famous fantasy/comedy author Terry Pratchett will speak about his books for children next Wednesday. It will be on at 3.30 pm next Wednesday, February 14th, at the Great Hall at Brisbane Boys’ Grammar School, 24 Gregory Tce, Spring Hill.

You can browse Terry Pratchett’s books here at Amazon.com I’ve already booked my ticket. To book yours, ring Riverbend Books on 3899 8555.

Above picture of Terry Pratchett can be seen if you click here - photo by flickr user Jutta Degener.

Click here to see the exact location of Brisbane Grammar School.

Click here to see the list of buses that go to BGS.
Read more to see a larger picture.

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On George St, between Adelaide St and Ann St, there are some kangaroo sculptures made out of scrap metal

Read more to see bigger photos. You can click on any of the photos to go to where they are stored on flickr, where you can download them, see different sizes, and see exactly where the sculptures are.

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The Grates (official website here, myspace page here, Last.fm page here) are a Brisbane band, and they’ve just made the shortlist for the Australian Music Prize 2006.

They also had four songs in the Triple J Hottest 100 vote this year, including 19-20-20 which came in at number 10 (see this chart of all Hottest 100 songs).

(BTW this clip is from The Grates’ own YouTube account - you won’t be seeing copyrighted video clips here without permission, even if they are on YouTube)

Keep reading to see more YouTube vids of The Grates, and links to their music available on-demand at Last.fm.

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If you’re coming to Brisbane for the 2007 Australian Blogging Conference in August, you might be wondering where to stay. So I’ll write some articles letting you know exactly where some of the better-known cheap hotels, hostels, backpacker lodges and other places to stay in Brisbane are.

These will all be unpaid, unsponsored posts. I’ll never write a post for money, and I’ll let you know if I get any freebies out of any article here on Brisbane is Home. (If you want to advertise on Brisbane is Home, send me an email via the contact form and I’ll let you know our prices.)

Keep reading to see more pictures of the Tinbilly. You can click on the pictures of the Tinbilly to go to where they are stored on flickr, where you can see different sizes, download photos for your own use or see them on a map.

The Tinbilly is directly across from the Transit Centre. If you go to the food court on the first level above ground at the Transit Centre, and walk to the end AWAY from the KFC and the carpark, you’ll come out to a balcony and a pub. Keep walking to the end of the balcony and you’ll come to an overbridge that ends in the escalator that you can see in the photo - go down, cross the road, and there you’ll be.

Fans of the British Lions Rugby League team at the Tinbilly last November for the Kangaroos v British Lions Test match, which Australia won 33-10.
Anyway, the Tinbilly Travellers’ Lodge is in a very convenient location (click here for the exact location), directly opposite the Roma St Transit Centre (click here to see location of Transit Centre). Roma St is where all the long-distance intercity buses and trains end their journeys, and it also has a suburban railway station where all the Airtrains from Brisbane and Gold Coast (Coolangatta) airports stop.

However, if you’re feeling timid, it might not be the sort of neighbourhood you want to stay in. The Transcontinental Hotel (a pub) is next door, and Brisbane City can sometimes get rough.

To get this in perspective, the police media unit reports 5 assaults or robberies in the last 60 days (Dec ‘06 and Jan ‘07) in all of the Brisbane City area - none were directly next to the Tinbilly, and the closest was about 600 metres down the road - and 99 people were arrested on New Year’s Eve in the CBD, but mostly for public nusisance or public drunkeness. Inspector Ben Hainbridge said that the NYE arrests were ‘comparable’ to other nights in the CBD.

If you’ve got a story you’d like to tell, or something you’d like to know about staying in Brisbane, let me know in the comments

Archives Fine Books is on Charlotte St, Brisbane City, near the corner of George St (click here to see the exact location).

I heard about Archives when I first visited Brisbane in 1998 - it’s a huge bookshop that has over a million books on site. When I moved in 2002 I wanted to study military history, so I poked around and found all three volumes of JFC Fuller’s Military History of the Western World there - and I was hooked.

(The English edition is called The Decisive Battles of the Western World and their Influence upon History)

Wes at the I Love Brisbane blog also has a picture of the outside of the building, featuring the stonework saying, oddly “John Mills Himself”.
Read more to see more pictures of Archives Fine Books. You can click on any of the photos to see where they are stored on flickr, so you can download them to use, see them in a slideshow or see different sizes.
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