Temporal setting: Circa 1996
Location notes:
The Broadway shopping centre in Brisbane City's Queen Street Mall is the site for a comic scene in the novel, in which protagonist Richard Derrington accidentally knocks out a young woman with a shoe he has just had repaired.
Temporal setting: Circa 1996
Location notes:
Richard Derrington's love interest, Rachel Vilikovski, lives in Drake Street (p. 263).
Quotes
We park outside her house, a wooden place with a leadlight porthole window next to the front door and a lawn dominated by tall, slender weed-stalks. The house looks about the same age as mine but it's painted a colour that might be peach.
(p. 200–01)
Temporal setting: Circa 1996
Location notes:
Richard and his friends have a birthday dinner for Jeff at Le Chalet restaurant, a short walk from Richard's house in Zig Zag Street (pp. 74–77). Now home to a feline vet practice, Le Chalet was located at 26 Great George Street, Paddington.
Temporal setting: Circa 1996
Location notes:
Protagonist Richard Derrington stands under the replica Eiffel Tower in Park Road, Milton, during a rain storm. Derrington also frequents the Baan Thai restaurant, located at 20 Park Road.
Quotes
There's a storm coming, picking up in the west and pushing in over Mount Coot-tha. Rain starts to fall in big unhurried drops as I park the car. The cicadas go crazy in the gardens near Park Road.
The storm breaks as I leave the restaurant. I stand barefoot in the shelter under the mock Eiffel Tower as ten minutes of astonishing rain thrashes all around me, pounds the bushes and the awnings, overflows gutters, runs warm over my feet.
(p. 129)
Temporal setting: Circa 1996
Location notes:
Richard and Rachel have dinner at Qan Heng's restaurant (p. 263), now closed, but which was formerly located at 151 Boundary Street, West End.
Temporal setting: Circa 1996
Location notes:
Richard and his friends go to The Underground nightclub following a dinner for Deb's birthday. Although the nightclub is no longer in operation, during the 1990s The Underground was located in the Victoria Barracks at the intersection of Caxton Street and Petrie Terrace. Before this, it was located in the old boot factory at the intersection of Caxton and Hale Streets, Brisbane (the "old Underground" is also mentioned in the novel). The boot factory building was demolished for the construction of the Hale Street bypass in 1990, prompting the nightclub's move to the other end of Caxton Street.
Quotes
Then we're at The Underground. I haven't been there for ages and it's packed and smells of smoke and spilt beer. I end up squeezed in a corner, which is fine, and whenever it's my shout someone takes my wallet to the bar and comes back with drinks. My bladder starts to strain and in the confines of the corner this is far from convenient, and I remember it was maybe the old Underground but maybe somewhere else where I saw a prominent Rugby League identity, obviously caught in the same dilemma, flop his dick out and piss very substantially into a pot plant.
(p. 169)
Temporal setting: Circa 1996
Location notes:
Protagonist Richard Derrington visits the KMart in Toowong Village shopping centre (p. 34).
Quotes
We used to live in a rented two-bedroom flat near here. We were saving for a deposit on a house and we were just about there. So I can't help shopping at Toowong. It's what I'm used to, even if it's no longer quite the closest shopping centre to where I live.
(p. 35)
Gallery
Temporal setting: Circa 1996
Location notes:
Characters Richard Derrington, Jeff Ross, Freddie Stuart, and Gerry Venster regularly play tennis at the Queensland University tennis courts.
Gallery
Temporal setting: Circa 1996
Location notes:
Zig Zag Street (called Zigzag Street in the novel) is a street in the Brisbane suburb of Red Hill. The novel covers six weeks of 28-year-old Richard Derrington's life after he moves back to his grandmother's home at 34 Zig Zag Street after being "trashed" by his girlfriend in Melbourne.
Quotes
The sun is setting as I walk down the hill, a bottle of red wine in one hand, and a blue haze is settling over the brewery and Toowong and the west. Lights are coming on, and there's traffic blocking Milton Road in the distance and moving slowly along Waterworks Road behind me. But not many cars in these small streets, crazy streets like Zigzag Street, made up of curious angles and unexplained decisions, streets that lose themselves in the contours. That end, and maybe somewhere else, begin again. Finding their way among old cottages in every state imaginable, some confidently renovated, some dealt with cruelly in the fifties and sixties, a few leaning as though they could fall with only a lapse in concentration.
Gerry and Freddie, not unpredictably, live in an 1880s colonial with all the work done, right down to the authentic clawfoot bath.
(p. 37)
