Creating Creative Tension – The End of The Line Festival Launch

LAUREN BICKLEY

Woolloongabba’s first The End of The Line Festival kicked off some new traditions as part of the G20 Cultural celebrations.

The Festival refered to the role Little Logan Road Cul de Sac plays in Brisbane’s public transport history and took place on Jurgens street, near the iconic Gabba.

End of the Line Festival Creative Director Morgan Jenkins “My thesis for architecture was on the subcultural play in urban public space, basically it concentrated on graffiti, parkour and skateboarding and how a city needs to express itself through public spaces and how public spaces are becoming increasingly privatised and increasingly controlled,” Mr Jenkins said.

“I find that really exciting, that tension where on the one hand we have really high calibre restaurants  and on the other hand we’re going to have the kids active with the Brisbane lions across the road doing a classic catch thing, skateboarders skating on ramps they’ve made themselves which we painted by friends of ours who are, we’ve got musicians and antiques from businesses around here that sell really amazing kind of stuff so that’s the fun part for us, the sort of chaos of it all.”

“We’ve been really lucky in terms of the G20 especially as it’s our first year as well, we proposed it for last weekend initially then the G20 came and Athol Young the creative director of G20 and Jeremy Willard came down to one of the meetings we had to see if we could possibly do it this weekend so we could tie it into the cultural celebrations. G20 has been brilliant, they’ve helped us with funding and the local government has been great,” Mr Jenkins said.

The End of The Line festival is run by the community for the community and aimed to showcase all that Woolloongabba has to offer. Cafes and restaurants extended their licenses into the Logan Road cul-de-sac and live music stages made for an incredible day out.

Woolloongabba Antiques Centre Owner Paul Butler is part of the substation antiques collective which ran during The End of the Line Festival, a collective of 14 separate vintage dealers gathering together and there was a great range of collectibles and retro pieces to see.

“Woolloongabba is an antiques and vintage hub in Brisbane, there’s lots of antique stores here so we thought we better go down and represent what’s on offer here for antiques and collectibles so we’ve gathered everything up and [took] it on the road,” Mr Butler said.

“I’m excited about lots of people coming to the area, it’s a very urban centre and there’s not many urban centres in Brisbane, most of Brisbane is post suburban which is fine but it’s good to have an urban centre like this, it’s a very diverse area in terms of it’s a bit industrial, a bit commercial, quite high end restaurants, a few bars, it’s a very unusual mix of things that’s very unplanned actually so it’s got that kind of do it yourself vibe.”

The End of the Line festival was held on the 8^th November 2014 and was a free community event.