Brisbane

The river flats and ridges here are the country of the Turrbal and Jagera peoples, who knew the site by names recorded as Meanjin, and who used the bend in the river as a crossing and a meeting place. European settlement began as punishment: in 1824 a penal station for repeat offenders was placed at Redcliffe on the bay, and moved the following year to the river, where fresh water and a defensible bend suited the authorities. It was named after Sir Thomas Brisbane, then governor of New South Wales. The regime under Captain Patrick Logan in the late 1820s was notoriously brutal, and free settlers were kept away until 1842.

Once opened, the town grew as a river port for wool, timber and sugar, and when Queensland separated from New South Wales in 1859 Brisbane became the capital of the new colony. Floods in 1893 and 1974 shaped where people built. In 1925 the local authorities of the area were merged into a single City of Brisbane, then Australia's largest municipal authority.

In 1942 General Douglas MacArthur made the city his headquarters for the South West Pacific, thousands of American servicemen passed through, and tension with Australian troops broke into two nights of rioting. The 1982 Commonwealth Games and World Expo 88 rebuilt the riverfront and gave the city South Bank; the Fitzgerald Inquiry of the late 1980s ended a long era of police and political corruption. The city has since grown quickly, flooded again in 2011 and 2022, and won the 2032 Olympic Games.

For most of the twentieth century Brisbane was described, by southerners and by its own writers, as a large country town — humid, conservative and half asleep. That version of the city has largely gone, but the habits it left are visible: life is lived outdoors, on verandahs, at the river and in parks, and the timber Queenslander house raised on stumps, with lattice and wide verandahs, is the local emblem.

Music is the city's strongest cultural export. The Saints, formed here in the early 1970s, were among the first punk bands anywhere; the Go-Betweens, whose name is on one of the river bridges, and later Powderfinger came out of the same inner-suburban circuit, and Fortitude Valley still has the live-music rooms that produced them. The cultural precinct on South Bank draws very large audiences to its galleries, and the Asia Pacific Triennial has shaped how Australians see art from the region.

Sport organises the year: rugby league above all, with the Broncos at Suncorp Stadium and the State of Origin series against New South Wales, along with cricket and Australian football at the Gabba and the approach of the 2032 Olympics. The city is markedly multicultural, with large Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese, Korean and Pacific Islander communities, and festivals to match, from the Greek Paniyiri at Musgrave Park to the Buddha Birth Day gathering on South Bank. Manners are casual and direct, and Queensland's refusal of daylight saving is still argued about.

About 1.3 million people live within the City of Brisbane and roughly 2.8 million in the wider metropolitan area, which now runs almost continuously from the Sunshine Coast to the Gold Coast. Growth is fast, much of it migration from the southern states, and it is the central fact of daily life: house prices and rents have risen steeply, new apartment towers fill the inner suburbs, and motorways and tunnels have been pushed through the ridges.

The economy rests on state government, health and education, construction, the head offices of mining and energy companies, the Port of Brisbane on the river mouth and a busy airport. Older industrial land along the water has been turned over to flats and restaurants. The inner ring is still mostly timber houses on stumps under mango trees and poincianas; further out are brick and tile estates and the satellite cities of Ipswich, Logan and Moreton Bay.

The rhythm of the day is set by the heat. People run, swim and walk the river paths early, the middle of a summer day is spent indoors or in water, and evenings move outside. Weekends mean sport, the coast or the bay. The recurring public arguments are about housing costs, flood risk and where to build, public transport for a spread-out city, and the cost and value of the coming Olympics.

Brisbane eats outdoors and eats Asian. The city's seafood comes from Moreton Bay and the reef: Moreton Bay bugs, a flat slipper lobster named after the bay, mud crab from the mangrove creeks, spanner crab, prawns, barramundi and coral trout. Tropical produce arrives from the state's north and from the farms immediately inland, so mangoes, lychees, custard apples, macadamias and avocados turn up in everything through the summer.

The food map follows the city's migrations. West End keeps Greek delicatessens and cake shops alongside Vietnamese and Lebanese kitchens; the Chinatown mall in Fortitude Valley covers most of China's regional cooking as well as Korean and Japanese; and Sunnybank, in the southern suburbs, has become the centre of the city's Chinese and Taiwanese food, with whole shopping centres given over to it. Weekend markets — at Davies Park in West End, on South Bank, and on the wharf at Northshore Hamilton — are where much of the city eats.

Coffee is taken seriously, as everywhere in Australia. The brewery at Milton has brewed since 1878 and makes XXXX, the state's standard lager, craft breweries have multiplied along the river and in the Valley, and wine comes up from the Granite Belt on the New South Wales border, high enough for cool nights.