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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

I arrived in Australia the year of expo 88. The site is now a fantastic urban park with a sanded outdoor swimming pool complete with lifeguards and barbie, you can swim and eat a sausage watching cars on the freeway over the river. Odd, but nice. Expo was majority "meh".

The great exhibition on the other hand was most definitely not meh: the building by Joseph Paxton was a wonder in itself.

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I’m Australian and born in 88. I’m really curious where this is. Is this the Brisbane City beach? Being born in Melbourne and participating in the inter city warfare between Melbourne and Sydney, it took me too long to realise how beautiful Brisbane is.

If you hate the cold (like I do, my physical health suffers greatly in the cold) check out Brisbane. An absolutely gorgeous city, quiet (relatively) and lots of nature.

Yep. South bank parklands was industrial wharfs (it's where my FIL parked his Kingswood to go work in the city) and then a huge urban blackspot which was rejuvenated after expo '88 into a self funded, self managed not for profit parkland. A lot of the expo sculptures dot the city, not the least of which is Stefan's lighthouse in West end: he conned a property developer into letting him park it there, it stayed so long council scheduled it as a local monument and pradella had to build around it.

"had to" is a strong term; they called the development Skyneedle and all the branding is centered around playing it up. (Also, let's be honest, Pradella were kind of running out of names otherwise.) It is very reminiscent of the 1982 Wigsphere from The Simpsons though.

I attended Expo 88 (my family drove up from Sydney) but was too young to take it all in properly. All I remember is a Rube Goldberg machine that I stared at for at least half an hour.

A machine in a glass case with cueballs going around a maze? I think I remember it too. It may be by Roland Emmet

I know that you mean something else, but lifeguards and barbie means something slightly different in American English (i.e. not a food thing).

International English is breaking down

Barbie=barbecue right?

Yeah, that's not obscure in American English, because it's one of a handful of Australian words that've made it into phrases we'll say when we're trying to mimic Australian English, i.e. "throw another shrimp on the barbie".

Except we don't say shrimp: that was translated when Paul Hogan did the advert.

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