Toni Risson - Historian

Dr Toni Risson is a storyteller and a cultural historian who has penned everything from children’s picture books to a doctorate on the magic of lollies. An expert of the Greek café phenomenon, Toni curated Meet Me at the Paragon for the State Library of Queensland (2019-2020), and her book Brisbane’s Greek Cafes: A Million Malted Milks was a finalist in the 2019 Queensland Literary Awards.

Lounge room of 'Cremona', Ipswich, c.1920s

There’s a vague memory. It’s the late 1960s and I’m in the loungeroom of an elderly lady in Ipswich. The window is heavy with drapes, which are trimmed much as the ones in this photograph. Pale light slides between them. It glints in bevelled mirrors, hints at geometric and floral patterns, peeps at decorative objects that are half hidden in dark corners. In a room that is rich with texture, I’m enthralled. And a little bit scared. Lingering in the ambience of that lady’s home was the 1920s décor captured in this photograph: thick fabrics and bentwood chairs, table legs of tortoiseshell bamboo, the oriental fan and potted palm on the table in the foreground. Though I’ll never find a room like that again, this photograph evokes the childhood memory of an afternoon that shaped who I would become.

Group of people standing in the Water Hyacinths on the Bremer River, Ipswich, 1908

I love this photograph because it is just so bizarre. Imagine, in the early twentieth century, rafts of hyacinth floating in the Bremer River made platforms that could support an adult’s weight! It looks like the locals had fun with that. Risson’s Produce was at the end of Nicholas Street from the 1910s so my father-in-law Don Risson may have seen the river choked as it appears in this image. He told me he was involved at some stage in hauling hyacinth out of the water. Rivers that flow through cities can be beautiful community spaces. The Bremer has never quite reached its potential.