Brisbane demolition: O'Reilly's Bonded Stores and Hotpoint House

Demolition in progress.

The Queensland Heritage Council has voted against State heritage listing of three brick buildings located at 105 to 113A Margaret Street in Brisbane city. Queensland Heritage Council Chair, Professor Peter Coaldrake, said O’Reilly’s buildings, also known as the ‘Bonded Stores’, did not meet the threshold of heritage significance to the State as a whole. and "We looked long and hard at how to reuse the facades but the buildings are of such poor quality design and in such a sad state of disrepair that demolition is the only economic option,'' Mr Robinson said. Demolition approval had been given for previous applications by other developers and he expected demolition to occur within months, so that a "green pocket park'' could be ready before the G20 summit.

http://brisbaneheritage.org.au/category/the-bonded-stores/
http://brisbaneheritage.org.au/a-glimpse-inside-the-bonded-stores/

http://www.news.com.au/finance/real-estate/brisbane-heritage-buildings-to-be-knocked-down-and-replaced-by-dog-park/story-fndbalka-1226796382521

The collapsing feeling of self-publishing

[Note: I tried giving this article away. One particular place, the *blog* of the Queensland Writer's Centre —  that is, a centre supporting writers — passed on it. Now, if you can't get a blog to accept your work, then you've been insulted. I present it below for you instead.]

The publishing industry has changed, but very little has changed. Maybe I should be more specific and say the publishing process has changed, that the overall model of what's possible has opened up so that it's both more accessible and cheaper to produce books — especially outside of the regular old channels — in digital or print. Anyone can get into the magic of books; which is a minor revolution, I'd say.

But what hasn't changed? Look at the bookshop window displays: lots of colourful books; lots of diversity. If you think about it, the books on display and reviewed in newspapers, journals and magazines are still largely, or rather almost all, representative of the standard publishing model. By which I mean the large (consolidated, international) publishing houses and the medium trade presses, the industry players.

The window display — our window on publishing — says the industry is healthy because there's so much great stuff being produced. There's familiar and prize-winning authors, authors who can't not get published; there's non-fiction and biographies by the dozen, profile-leveraging tie-ins, young adult and bright fantasy. Now and then a renegade success story, a blockbuster everyone reads on planes or whenever they're not looking at their phone, because everyone else is.

New book - The Humid Canopy

The Humid Canopy by Rino Breebaart - at lulu.com