Outback Queensland Trip 2024, Day 23: a little extra

In Turrbal country.

Commenting on our last post, my American friend Carolyn said “I bet you’ll find interesting things to write about on your remaining half-day tomorrow too.” She knows us too well, because of course we did!

Sky Deck and the Queen’s Wharf Precinct

We did have one plan for the morning – to visit the new Sky Deck, a free observation deck which looks over Brisbane in a few directions. It is 100 metres above the $3.6 billion redeveloped Queen’s Wharf precinct, in the ”Star” casino-hotel-restaurant complex. This opened very recently, we believe, and is not yet complete. We walked through the complex many times over our five days – because the Neville Bonner pedestrian bridge over the river to SouthBank leads off it, and because walking through the complex offered the fastest route to the North Quay CityCat wharf (which Len worked out, as Google hadn’t caught up yet). The complex looks shiny, new, and unfinished – and if you didn’t know it was a casino it may not be immediately obvious because the casino components seem to be on upper floors. Anyhow, we hadn’t “done” (to use tourist speak) the Sky Deck to now because it wasn’t high priority, but as it was near our hotel and we had this free morning, it seemed worth doing. And, it was interesting, though I didn’t go out on the “glass” bottomed ledge, like Len did. However, the view across to SouthBank and its artificial Streets Beach was worth seeing. (This Beach is an “icon” and a “must visit” apparently but, you know, beaches! I was happy to look at it from afar.)

The question then was, what should we do next given we had nearly three hours? I wanted to see some of the older buildings again so we walked past many that we had seen on previous walks given they are part of the wider Queen’s Wharf Precinct redevelopment. The buildings included the Government Printing Office (1911), the Treasury Building (a huge building, built between 1886-1928), and the Land Administration Building (1901), and there is also the pretty Queens Gardens which is surrounded by some of these old buildings. Some buildings in the area are still off-limits – like the Mansions (1889) – and while many look renovated on the outside, they haven’t all yet been ‘repurposed”. One building which felt less successful to us is the Adina Apartment Hotel. It has been incorporated into “a grand, heritage-listed building” which was built between (1913-1922) and was, apparently, Brisbane’s first high rise government office building (for the Queensland Government Savings Bank). To us, the modern building poking out the top looked wrong. Overall, however, it’s exciting to see so many great old buildings appearing to be in good nick, and serious money being invested not only in preserving the history but in bringing the buildings to life. 

City Hall

From here we headed to another special older building, in the CBD proper, Brisbane’s City Hall with its famous Clock Tower. While we were here, we discovered that our direct flight to Canberra had been cancelled, and that we’d been put on a slightly earlier flight to Sydney but would be arriving in Canberra at 17:30 (fingers crossed) rather that the original 16:50 Ha! We ended up arriving in Canberra at 20:40, after being bumped to a later flight out of Sydney, and then sitting on the tarmac at Mascot for well over an hour before we could take off. Oh well, our trip up to Cairns, via Brisbane had been seamless, so our flying-gods luck was due to run out (we suppose!)

But, I’ve jumped ahead. City Hall is a beautiful building, and it’s so good to also see it being well used. It was built between 1920 and 1930, and features, says its website, “sweeping marble staircases, vaulted ceilings, chandeliers and mosaic-tiled floor”. It too has gone through a major renovation. There are tours of its Main Auditorium, Father Henry Willis Organ and the Clock Tower, but our focus was the Museum of Brisbane which occupies one of the floors. It is a fairly small museum but it felt vibrant, with a variety of exhibitions and some hands on activities, one relating to Aussie author Trent Dalton’s Love stories project. (We saw some assiduous writing of love stories/letters as we walked through.)

We saw the following exhibitions (they were relatively small but I find that easier to comprehend sometimes):

• Perspectives of Brisbane : providing a survey, in a way, of Brisbane’s history through the city’s “people, events and changing landscape”. I particularly liked the significant respect paid here to pre-settlement history, particularly having so recently read Melissa Lucashenko’s novel Edenglassie.
• New Light: Photography Now and Then (including Viewfinders) : this included contemporary photographers responding to the photographs taken by amateur Brisbane photographer Alfred Henrie Elliott (1870-1954), with their own photographs, thereby creating a sort of conversation between past and present. Having spent a few days in Brisbane, old and new, we could relate to a lot of the photographs we saw.
• Rearranged: Art of Flower : “invites”, says the promo, “visitors to stroll through a lush collection of paintings, textiles, sculptures, ceramics and new media”. I liked the thematic approach here, which drew on the ways we interact with flowers, like Contained (mostly still lifes in vases etc), Grown (referencing the dynamic properties of flowers), Collected (looking at flora in terms of “historical and contemporary collection, documentation and categorisation”). This was a beautifully varied and engaging little exhibition.

Before we left City Hall to make our way to the airport, we popped into the original Shingle Inn, with its 1936 interior, for a cuppa, and a light lunch. I loved my gf frittata made with goat’s cheese. Such a treat.

From here it was our long, weary trip home, which took far longer than it should have, so the less said about that the better – and now that, dear readers, really is that! (Until our next bloggable Oz Trip that is.)

Today’s pics