14. Highgate Hill Park/Torbreck

There are many vistas from which to absorb the sound of Brisbane’s ever deepening sound field. Each one of these perspectives allows an interface with the connective vasculature of the city itself. Roads and streets form a pulmonary mesh, through which the city breathes; sometimes heaving, sometimes with a mere shallow pulse, on the edge of ignorable.

Near Torbreck, Highgate Hill Park casts a direct line to the southern face of the city. From there a macro sensing of the city is possible. Leaning into the sound, individual elements can often be drawn out, the passing of a train, a car’s muffler echoing in the valley of buildings along Grey Street, the dim constant of industrial air conditioning units and the blanket of tires across the Riverside Expressway.

Peel each of these away though, and another sound is revealed. Even when the city is at its quietest in the hours after midnight, the city murmurs to itself, its nocturnal agents such as cleaning vehicles and after-hours transportation trucks guide your ear through an imagined cityscape, one which is held and framed in the mind’s ear. There is no bottom to the sound, no gaps or way to an end, just a constant exhaling of this place.

– Lawrence English