They’re different in Queensland | The Spectator Australia

As the child of migrant parents, growing up in Brisbane, I learned fast that Mexicans were not, as I had imagined them, men in big hats, but also Australians, people who came north to escape the ‘bloody awful winters’ as our neighbour Fred put it. 

“They come up here from Melbourne, buy a place, then run screaming back south when the heat and humidity kick in,” he would say, pruning his hedges with devoted ferocity.   

Queenslanders are different. Growing up in Brisbane, there was always a touch of the tropics in those long days of summer, the necessary slowing down of everything, including speech and movement, to counter the heat. Queenslanders had different words too in those days – a port was something you…