People who have lived in Brisbane for a long time may come to understand the ways of Brissos and join them in many Brisso rituals: for example, going on annual fishing or golfing holidays with the boys, or joining early morning cycling packs. Or gaining membership in a proper Brisbane club. Brissos are actually quite welcoming to new arrivals, if they are positive about living in Brisbane.
However much the newcomer may be accepted into the fold, they are never considered a Brisso. Even if the person has lived in Brisbane for 17 years, Brissos will think of them as someone who has moved to Brisbane from somewhere else. They may say to them …Gee Wazza, you’ve been here a while now haven’t you? When did you move here? And will then be gob-smacked that it has been so long.
Brissos may also reminisce fondly with these friends about their funny stranger ways – those effeminate characteristics that stood out back then like dog’s balls. For example their try hard haircut, or the fact that they wore a hat everywhere, the wrong sort of shorts, overdid their vowels even when swearing, or the sissy way they reacted when they put a huntsman spider on them.
The threshold for true belonging as a Brisso is early adulthood. If a person moves to Brisbane in their teens, to start work or attend university (and better still, to live in a college at uni, where newbies are initiated) that person may be accepted as a Brisso over time. If a person moves to Brisbane later in their lives, say at 25 years of age or more, they are unlikely ever to be thought of as a Brisso– as ‘one of us’.
There is a scene in the 1932 movie Freaks, by Tod Browning http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022913/
that is much loved by Brissos. A troupe of freaks from a circus sideshow (the half man/half woman, the pin heads, the armless girl, and so on) meet their dwarf leader’s new girlfriend, Cleopatra, the beautiful trapeze artist. Before they discover that she is after his money, they welcome her into the fold, singing “One of us, One of us, We accept her, We accept her” As they wriggle and hobble over to her chanting, she shudders and can’t hide her revulsion. (Despite her horror, she continues her manipulative scheme, and is later punished, transformed by the freaks into the horrific spectacle of the ‘duck girl’. Cleo eventually truly became one of them.)
There is something in this film for everyone. Brissos love it because they love stories about tight knit communities and betrayal by outsiders. Newbies who have been invited into the homes of Brissos, may relate to it too.
The Freaks.
A still frame of the duck girl lifted directly from the picture.
