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?
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.
Ronnie Scott is an Associate Professor at RMIT and a novelist, whose next book is Letter to a Fortunate Ex