The University of Queensland

Brisbane had been divided by class since the very first party of convicts stepped ashore in May 1825. Although 100 years later the labouring population was no longer confined to barracks, the spatial boundaries demarcating Brisbane's social classes were no less fixed. At a most obvious level, there were specific sites of organised class power, such as the new Trades Hall, built at the top of Edward Street next to Wickham Park in 1923. The Hall was home to a number of individual trade unions, as well as the Trades and Labor Council of Queensland, the movement's peak body in the State. The organised voice of Queensland business occupied no such auspicious structure, though it was often said that Parliament House amply filled this void.

The sites of leisure were also classed spaces. Male working class recreation centred on pubs, sporting grounds, and the river and waterways of Moreton Bay. Some sporting pastimes, like horse racing and cricket, had cross-class appeal, but the spectating facilities were segregated: public enclosures for the masses, exclusive areas for those who possessed the funds, social connections and cultural capital to become club members. Australian rules and rugby league football were played by and to a working class constituency, while rugby union was largely the preserve of private school alumni.

Women's socialising was more spatially restricted than men's. Women in the workforce found some social outlet on the job, while housewives sought companionship through neighbourhood and family. With bread, meat, dairy products, eggs and ice delivered to the door on a daily basis, even outings to the local shop were a rare pleasure for many women in working class and lower middle class neighbourhoods.

Some social and cultural pursuits were shared by men and women. Brisbane's main theatrical venues, His Majesty's and the Regent, attracted bourgeois audiences to a steady fare of professional drama and music, while vaudeville and a lively working class theatre scene kept alive other traditions of theatre entertainment. For pulling power, however, no live show in the 1930s could compete with the movies. By 1938 Brisbane boasted over 60 picture theatres across the city, and on Friday and Saturday nights and Saturday afternoons these were packed by a mostly young, working class audience, eager for the latest offering from Hollywood. ^[6]

While leisure continued to reflect distinct class associations, the most ubiquitous manifestation of class in Brisbane was its residential geography. Brisbane's hills, it was often noted, were dotted with the homes of the city's "well-to-do." ^[7] Workers' homes, in contrast, were built initially in the hollows and on the slopes of the inner suburbs (Red Hill, Spring Hill, West End) and, later, on the flat expanses between the undulations to the north, south and east. ^[8] House styles also reflected class factors. Not only were the homes of Brisbane's rich larger than those of the working majority, they were better appointed, featured more decorative elements and were often designed to accommodate domestic help. Innovations in material technology and design, moreover, did not necessarily permeate the mass housing market. The higher cost of the new brick and tile homes of the 1930s, for example, meant they were largely the preserve of a rising professional middle class keen to express its own social standing and sense of modernity by breaking with the mass forms of tin and timber. Working class families, in contrast, had different aspirations. In the mid 1920s, some workers could hope to own a modest, wooden bungalow in suburban Brisbane. By the early 1930s, many families found themselves with no permanent shelter at all.