We have just spent nearly three weeks in and around Brisbane, the capital of the state of Queensland. We love it. Started in the 1820s as an offshoot of the Sydney Penal Colony it became a separate State in 1859. Some lovely older buildings survive in the city centre which has been completely rejuvenated since the 1970s when the port moved downstream to the river mouth. We arrived in the middle of the Brisbane (cultural) Festival and got to see some really second rate plays. Culture? Bah!

Here is the vessel, at anchor in Town Reach right next to the old Botanic Gardens (they were established at the time of settlement, initially to test which crops would grow, and have lasted ever since. They are now a very pleasant city centre botanical and recreational park:

 

 

Here is the main city centre ferry dock. There are high speed catamarans every few minutes, plus slower free ferries and several trip boats including the two Mississippi-type paddle steamers you can just see here. A busy place:

 

 

 

Some nice buildings survive, cheek by jowl with the modern stuff. Here is the Customs House from 1889:

 

 

The modern city centre is very nice, and everything is of the highest standard and spotlessly clean. There are heavily used dedicated cycling and walking tracks everywhere and a very good integrated bus train and ferry service, some of it free, with an excellent ticketing system. Here is the City Hall, a very grand 1930s edifice:

 

 

And Government House: Queensland had a Governor General before its Parliament was established. This is adjacent to the gardens and is now part of the modern QUT Queensland University of Technology:

 

 

Only two buildings remain from convict days. This is one of them, the Commissariat Stores dating from 1829 – basically the prison colony’s main stores. The bottom two floors are original, with a third added (using the original roof!) in 1909. It’s now the HQ of the Royal Queensland Historical Society, and next door is the Queensland National Trust in a late Victorian pile:

 

 

Brisbane looks from old photos to have been a drab and dismal place until the 1980s – 1960s concrete monstrosities and semi-derelict wharfage. All that changed with Expo’88. A huge area of the South Bank was cleared for the exhibition, and remakably is now a jewel. There are theatres, even opera and ballet,  a school of music, several art galleries, the State Library and Queensland Museum (science and natural history). And a quite wonderful array of leisure facilities the equal of anything in the world (much assisted by the climate). Here we are enjoying a (free) twilight music event during the Festival:

 

 

 

There is a city beach, complete with white sand and real lifeguards, all free and spotlessly clean:

 

 

 

Added to this is a huge range of eateries, sunbathing lawns, cycle paths, formal gardens, wedding gardens etc etc etc. It really is amazing, and a huge credit to the city.

We also got to see the end-of-Festival fireworks, along with about 300 000 other people. Private fireworks are banned in Australia because of the fire risk. They were good, but not as good as the Fourth of July in Boston (500 000 people). This is Story Bridge – same designer as the iconic Sydney Harbour Bridge: