The Carpark At Oxleys On The Brisbane River It Was A Different Time And Our Brains Were Young

The carpark at Oxley’s on the Brisbane river: it was a different time and our brains were young | Ronnie Scott

I drank Red Bull, smoked a Marlboro and listened to one last song before my shift began. Why would anyone give up the perfect gig?

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I never ate at Oxley’s on the River; the restaurant that hung weightless over the Brisbane River on a web of poles like it was floating. But if you ate there in the 2000s and used a serviette to mop up a little lobster or a dab of wine, there’s a good bet our hands were (almost) touching.

Oxley’s opened in Milton around Expo ’88, under the similar name of Oxley’s Wharf. I don’t know when the whole car park arrangement started, but by the 2000s, Oxley’s on the River remained a glassy structure in still-sorta-industrial-looking Milton, hovering on the water and glowing at night.

Seven days a week, from 6.30 to 9pm plus midnight to 2am on weekends, an Oxley’s staffer was posted to the car park that belonged to the business centre over Coronation Drive. This job was famously held by my friend James – who was probably the coolest person I had ever met. James had not gone to my high school, but had been friends with the slightly older people there whom I wanted to be friends with. I went over to his house one day and left with 20 burned CDs, hand-labelled with Stereolab, Pavement, DJ Shadow. We’d stayed friends since graduating, and I heard that James was giving up his perfect car park attendant gig.

Why would anyone give this job up? All I wanted to do was go to uni, date people, go upstairs at Ric’s on Thursdays, go to my breakfast shift at 4ZZZ and try to publish magazines. These were not things I could do while working 9-to-5 in a law firm’s mail room, which I had done, and hospo work meant late nights and long shifts on weekends.

The car park was, well, a car park – multistorey and cavernous – and you didn’t have to open the boom gate or collect money. Instead, the attendant gig was a condition of the office letting the restaurant use the car park after hours.

You accessed the restaurant through an underpass, which smelled like a fishy dock and it’s where I drank a Red Bull, smoked a Marlboro and listened to one last song on my iRiver before a shift. I would duck under the six-lane road to the restaurant, collect a huge plastic tub and a few reams of machine-laundered serviettes. Besides minding the car park, the secondary job was to sit in the booth for 2.5 hours and fold about 200 serviettes, as swan-like cones for standard service and fans for weddings.

When I took over from James, the nine shifts per week were split with a responsible person whom I didn’t know but we texted each other to figure out the roster, triangulated with the restaurant’s duty manager. After a year, that guy quit and I shared the job with a reliable friend. But we both went on the same trip and brought other people into the rotation, who brought other people into it, and then things got weird. Sometimes, the real car park attendants would show up in the mornings and the booth was unlocked and dirty. This seems dumb now, because it’s not hard to spend 2.5 hours working in a tiny room and keep it free of debris. But it was a different time and our brains were young.

So, we were locked out of the attendant’s booth. Brisbane can still get cold in winter, and when the sun went down, wind poured off the river and off Coro Drive. Also – you don’t know until it’s gone – but there is a legitimacy to sitting inside a car park attendant’s booth. By all accounts the restaurant was excellent, but it seemed to attract a particular clientele, especially from the perspective of a hungover 21-year-old. I remember a heatwave when a woman drove in with her high beams on, and seeing behind the windshield nothing but a pair of long, white driving gloves on a 40-degree day. When you’re sitting there folding napkins in a plastic chair, it’s hard to look like you have anything to offer this glamorous person.

Again I ask, why would anyone give up the perfect car park attendant gig? I did it for a few years, I read a lot of books in that plastic chair, and eventually I moved to a different share house that happened to be more than thirty minutes’ walk away. As for Oxley’s, it changed its name to Drift in 2009, and in the 2011 floods, part of it tore loose and floated down the river. The emblems of the 1980s in 2000s Brisbane had already formed a catalogue of the strange – from the Stefan sky needle to Christopher Skase’s hovercraft ramp, still visible on Airport land. Oxley’s had a place in this index of dreamed spaces, even before it broke from moorings and spun away.