Lessons and
Love Stories

In June 2021, Trent set up a writing station on the corner of Adelaide and Albert Streets in Brisbane’s CBD. He had a folding table and two supermarket chairs, a typewriter bequeathed to him by a close friend’s aunt, and a sign: Sentimental Writer Collecting Love Stories.

He sat down, and waited. And over two weeks, more than 200 strangers sat down with him and shared some of their most intimate recollections: their love stories. One hundred of these he has written into his book, Love Stories.

The purpose of the book, he says, was to get out of his head, and into the stories of others. But as they had in Boy Swallows Universe and All Our Shimmering Skies, the “themes of his life”—of love and hate—emerged in almost every one of the Love Stories.

“That’s me, still dealing with that concept of home,” Trent says. “I’ll probably be dealing with those themes for the rest of my life.”

Trent’s thoughts about home changed each time he talked to one of the storytellers.

“[Each time] I learned a little bit more about home—my home, and where I’m from and what’s inside me—even in the darkest places. Those people taught me more about it, sitting on the corner of Albert and Adelaide, and I learned about myself, more, maybe, than I did writing Boy Swallows Universe and All Our Shimmering Skies.”

Boy Swallows Universe was a part fact/part fiction account of Trent’s often violent 1980’s early childhood in Brisbane’s outer suburbs. In All Our Shimmering Skies he says he was “running away from Eli Bell” (his Boy character), but found him deep in Northern Territory bushland.

“In Love Stories, I ended up writing about my dead dad, how I could be a better husband to my wife, Fiona. Home is the first and final poem. You can’t stop talking about home. That’s where the love is.”

Trent, 44, has lived all his life in Brisbane and doesn’t expect to live anywhere else.

“It’s a done deal. I love this city so much. It’s so deeply entrenched in me that it’s just home.”

A journalist for the past 18 years, he would seek out the most harrowing stories and some left him “immersed in darkness”.

“I need a city to be a sanctuary, a place where you can just step out of your brain for a bit. I can trust this city to heal me, on a regular basis, from stuff Monday to Friday that I just don’t want to be thinking about.”

“Brisbane just brings the light. There’s a simplicity about this place that I love.”

As Trent sat with his footpath storytellers, somewhat extraordinarily, they opened up to him. Many had no idea who he was. What inspired people to speak so frankly with a complete stranger? And not only that: share what Trent describes as “your most sacred thing”—their story?

“That’s the power of storytelling, of listening,” he says. “You would be surprised how many people are just wanting a pair of ears that are open for a good length of time. I found that so beautiful. And when do we get to do that?”

But there was something else.

“This is the thing: the topic. The topic, ‘love’ cut through, instantly,” he says. “We humans talk around all the important stuff, even when we catch up with our best friends. It takes us two hours to get to the important stuff, like: Are you grieving?, Who do you miss?, Who are you loving? The most important stuff in our lives we rarely get to talk about with people because we’re talking about real estate or the latest Netflix show.”

So, on the footpath, he asked the storytellers: “Let’s start at the important stuff, and then work back to the details. But hit me with the deeper stuff first.”

“And when someone starts so deep like that, you connect instantly. You can connect in 10 minutes.”

Surreptitious meetings in the aisles of Archive Books in Charlotte Street. Rendezvous in the ‘50s and ‘70s at the Wallace Bishop corner at Albert and Queen Streets. Dances at Town Hall.

For others, Brisbane was their love story.

Ashish Sood slept rough on an Ann Street bench when he arrived in Brisbane at 22 years old. The Punjabi chef now opens his Adelaide Street restaurant late each night to feed the city’s homeless—a vow he made to himself in those early days: that he would give back to the city that gave him refuge.

Moana flew into Brisbane on January 11, 2011, as the city flooded. She was escaping her former home, and she was suicidal.

“She told me: ‘My love story is this city. I saw this city broken, and it saved me’,” Trent says. Moana joined the volunteer mud army in West End and, as she cleaned up the damage of the flood, she healed herself. “She said: ‘That’s why I love this city’.”

Seeing Brisbane through others’ eyes has enriched Trent’s love of the city.

“I love the journey of this city, the story part of Brisbane, and the fact that my story has been completely enriched by it.

“I love the fact my old man got a job at the Golden Circle cannery and I would get the train into Toombul Shopping Centre and go past the cannery and smell it. And then, when I’m in school, I would do a tour of the Golden Circle cannery. And then at Christmas we’d get a St. Vinnies box of Christmas goods and it would be filled with Golden Circle pineapple pieces packed at the freakin’ cannery! These places right through this city are part of my DNA.”

As are the jacarandas, cricket pitches, the Brisbane Broncos on a Friday night, fish and chips at Sandgate.