Brisbane

Museum

Army Museum of South Queensland

Victoria Barracks has stood on Petrie Terrace since 1864, built on the orders of Queensland's first governor, Sir George Bowen. The original colonial guardhouse, cells, parade ground, hospital and officers' quarters remain intact and in use — a working military facility that also houses this museum tracing the Australian Army's presence in South Queensland across two world wars, Vietnam and beyond.

Museum

Commissariat Store Museum

Two floors of this William Street warehouse were laid by convict hands in 1828–29; the third came later, in 1913. The building is the exhibit — Queensland's oldest habitable heritage structure, now run by volunteers from the Royal Historical Society of Queensland. The weight of that history is easier to feel inside the thick sandstone walls than to explain from the street.

Gallery

Griffith University Art Museum

The Griffith University Art Museum holds a significant collection of Australian works with a particular focus on contemporary printmaking, photography, and works by Queensland and Pacific artists.

Gallery

Institute of Modern Art

Founded in 1975, the IMA occupies the ground floor of the Judith Wright Arts Centre on Brunswick Street — fifty years of showing challenging work, always free. Past exhibitions have included Ross Manning's kinetic sound installations and Marianna Simnett's nine-channel video works. It remains the oldest independent public gallery in Australia, and one of the few still running on curiosity rather than commerce.

Botanical Garden

Mount Coot-tha Botanic Gardens

Spread across 52 hectares at the foot of Mount Coot-tha, Brisbane's main botanic garden features a tropical dome, Japanese garden, planetarium, and the largest sub-tropical botanic collection in Australia.

Museum

Museum of Brisbane

On the top floor of Brisbane City Hall, this city-run museum opened in 2003 and relocated permanently upstairs after City Hall's 2013 refurbishment. The Clock Tower and copper dome are visible from the gallery. Current exhibitions include *Cribb Island: Brisbane's Lost Suburb* and *Stories You Wear: Magpie Goose* — the kind of programming that takes local history seriously without making it dull.

Museum

Museum of Lands, Mapping and Surveying

The source material confirms little beyond what the existing description already holds — historic maps, surveying instruments, and 160 years of Queensland cartography. That's enough. Maps drawn before roads existed. Instruments used to measure a colony into existence. This small government museum holds 160 years of Queensland surveying history — theodolites, field records, hand-drafted cadastral charts — the kind of primary material that shows exactly how a vast, largely unmapped territory was divided, named and claimed.

Heritage Site

Old Government House Queensland

Built in 1862 as the official residence of Queensland's governors, Old Government House on the QUT campus is the finest colonial building in Brisbane. Beautifully restored, it now houses the William Robinson Gallery and functions as a significant heritage attraction.

Museum

Phoenix Sculpture Garden, Graham Radcliffe

Brisbane-born Graham Radcliffe, now in his ninth decade, splits his time between Pietrasanta and a two-hectare rainforest property at the peak of Mount Glorious, 632 metres up. Open Sundays since 1995, the garden holds over 100 marble, onyx, and bronze sculptures — including the four-metre *Phoenix Germania*, made to mark German reunification. Views reach Moreton Bay on a clear day.

Museum

Queensland Maritime Museum

Volunteers cleared three metres of silt from a dry dock to float HMAS Diamantina into her permanent berth — and that spirit hasn't left. The South Brisbane graving dock now holds the world's last surviving WWII River-class frigate alongside a 1925 steam tug, a pearling lugger, and Jessica Watson's yacht. More than 150 volunteers, aged 18 to 91, keep it running.

Museum

Queensland Police Museum

The Queensland Police Museum at Police Headquarters traces the history of policing in Queensland from 1864, featuring original uniforms, equipment and case files that tell stories of law enforcement across a century and a half.

Gallery

QUT Art Museum

Free entry, no apology for it. QUT Art Museum sits on the Brisbane River, drawing on the university's permanent collection for in-house exhibitions alongside commissioned projects and touring shows. Its sister space, William Robinson Gallery, occupies Old Government House and focuses entirely on Robinson's landscape paintings. Both venues are free and open to the public.

Gallery

UQ Art Museum

UQ Art Museum at the University of Queensland's St Lucia campus holds the second largest public art collection in Queensland, with over 4,400 works spanning the colonial period to the present. The museum presents a dynamic program of predominantly contemporary exhibitions designed to intersect with the university's academic disciplines, and is developing a unique National Collection of Artists' Self Portraits.