Evenings at night markets can be hectic: bump in at noon and you have a few hours to set up your marquee and prep food on site. We’d be unpacking a van full of signage, lights, appliances, pans, steamers, and kitchen utensils — wait, where were the knives? We forgot the bloody knives. The Coles across the street was a sanctuary for the forgotten utensil. I bought this shiny thing that could barely graze skin. Some acclaimed but obscure chef had obnoxiously signed his namesake as a brand on the blunt blade. Never forget those cursed knives again. Remember when you could just walk in and buy a knife off the shelf with just an ID?
Before Jacob Elordi played Elvis in the film Priscilla, Brisbane had its own incarnation of the famed singer. An Elvis impersonator would arrive in full garb, pull out his portable speaker behind him and greet the audience in a southern American drawl. After such pleasantries, he'd cycle through the ten songs he had arduously perfected then cycle through them all again from late afternoon into the evening. I remember my only respite was the relief of that blaring music stopping for forty minutes during his break. Don't get me wrong, he was great, but the market manager for the Boundary Street Markets thought musical entertainment meant hiring the same bloke week after week — how about some acoustic folk singers or maybe even a mime?
It was on one of these nights, with the bustle of crowds clamouring to order dumplings, steam spilling out of our marquee and that Elvis impersonator ritualising my disdain for his music, that a customer quietly approached us. “Did you know there was a woman giving birth behind your stall?” I froze. Surely we would have noticed and rendered her some aid? I peered behind the wall of our stall and, sure enough, flashing lights from the ambulance came into clear view. The paramedics were already on the scene. There was actually this ornamental red tractor parked right behind our stall. Kids would often climb inside — a true novelty for urban folks. I understood that she probably had to find a relatively private place to lie down and our stall obstructed views from the crowd. I never could have imagined that the red tractor would become the vessel for human life, or that we would somehow become part of this funny anecdote in this family’s birth story. The child would be turning ten this year.
I sometimes walk past that exact spot where we used to trade on the side of Mollison Street. The asphalt carpark was lined with fake grass, wooden pallets used as seating, a few shipping containers and the red tractor. All gone. The husk of the former ice cream factory now sits among towering high-rise apartments and pockets of cultivated greenery. Ironically, there is an ice-cream shop positioned centrally called Anita's Gelato, dispensing the very thing the factory used to produce. What was once an industrial centre of locally made ice cream has now been displaced by an international gelati chain with their flagship store founded in Tel-Aviv. Much of West Village reads like a gallery of culinary elegance. Visitors have their pick of several dining concepts — Greek brought to you by the Tassis Group or Italian by Blue Coral Concepts?
I'm reminded of this cocky twenty-something-year-old who was definitely cooking authentic Italian as a real “half-Italian”. There was this explosive moment where his seemingly demure mother morphed into this irate shrew once she realised the Filipino stall beside her was committing the deadly sin of selling spaghetti. While she wasn't Italian by blood herself, her son certainly was, as they had both made known numerous times. The one-sided yelling match of “spaghetti is Italian” and this food-fascist, lineage-only ideologue about what you're allowed to sell didn’t go anywhere. I mean, there’s a cart with a white guy selling chai and I'm a Vietnamese-Australian selling dumplings. Filipino spaghetti is completely different taste-wise but I digress.
My neighbouring stallholder, however, was an actual German selling German sausages. He would emphasise the importance of loading on the sauerkraut for gut health to absolutely everyone. We would do food swaps most nights. He would guzzle ten pork dumplings topped with shredded lettuce and soy sauce and, as stereotypical as it sounds, accompany them with a schooner. We, on the other hand, would get several sausages to enjoy for breakfast the next day. He would gleefully look forward to his dinner since stallholders rarely got to eat so the food swaps were our only sustenance after a long night. Even if there was no food exchange involved, I would get handed a plate of gozleme from this kind Turkish couple or this older Dutch lady would emerge with a plate of poffertjes. Blood sugar spikes didn't get better than that.
The main adversary of the markets was any big storm, specifically strong winds. There was a spontaneous supercell that came barreling towards West End once. The gutters were overflowing with water and chairs were flying across the carpark. We didn't have sandbags at the ready so once the winds began plucking marquees out of the air, I was single-handedly holding down the fort. The exasperated market manager, who had given early assurances that it was going to be business as usual, had this genuine look of fear in his eyes, as though the market had reached its apocalyptic end. Once the rain had drenched us, there came the calm after the storm. The clouds parted and the sun began shining as if this seismic weather event hadn't even occurred. Just another Queensland summer. I saw that same fearful man laughing affably, drink in hand, as we continued trade that very night.
The real end of the market was much less eventful or colourful. We had been told on numerous occasions that the site owner had very little interest in sustaining the Boundary Street Markets for too long. “Not enough profit,” the market manager would say as he did the rounds, collecting rent at the end of the night. We had packed our van ready for the final night of trade in April 2016 as the site had been sold for complete development. We approached the gate which had been completely barricaded. Strange. The market manager, red-faced, shook his head, saying trespassers had “completely trashed” the Motor Room and that blame for the market's abrupt closure lay solely on them. I believe he meant activists were protesting the removal of what felt like community property. Since this bruised the ego of the “big boss”, the rightful lord, he made it known that there would be no send-off for the stallholders or the wider community. A final farewell was haphazardly squeezed into the parking lot of the Rumpus Room, but since we had arrived too late, we simply had to drive home.
I've seen previous faces from the markets throughout the years. The white guy selling chai has put those days behind him, the Transylvanian stall opened a store in West End but unfortunately closed down a few years ago, and Little Nyonya Kitchen has since opened a few physical locations around Brisbane. The trees and shrubbery cushioning the upscale dining and boutique stores dislocate the memories I have of diverse cuisines and eclectic wares. The person who handed you the paper plate of pad thai made that pad thai. The market allowed tourists to mingle with locals, stallholders to share a piece of home and gave kids a sense of exploration of Brisbane's industrial history. The communal space was demolished to make way for a sterilised version of food, culture, and lifestyle. I sometimes wonder if the woman would have made a pilgrimage to the red tractor with her ten-year-old, only to find that special place only exists in memory.
Originally published in Good Ari Magazine for issue one, Locality.