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.

Gallery

Boxcopy

Seven art school graduates started Boxcopy in 2007, running early shows out of the basement of a Queenslander house in New Farm before the collective moved, in 2013, to its current space at the Normanby Fiveways on Petrie Terrace. Almost two decades on it remains one of Brisbane's active artist-run initiatives, offering affordable studio space, equipment and peer support to emerging artists — with a particular focus on working-class, LGBTQIA+, neurodivergent and disabled practitioners who find institutional galleries harder to access. The exhibition program runs to moving image, sound, performance and installation as much as painting or sculpture, favouring experimental and collaborative work over anything market-ready. It's a DIY model, run by artists for artists, but the gallery is open to the public Thursday to Saturday, 12pm to 6pm. In an inner-city precinct increasingly given over to commercial development, it's one of the few remaining spaces where Brisbane's emerging scene shows work on its own terms.

Botanical Garden

Brisbane City Botanic Gardens

Brisbane's oldest park occupies 20 hectares along the river in the CBD, with sub-tropical plantings, heritage figs, and a waterfront walkway — a green sanctuary at the heart of the city.

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.

visual_art

Gallery of Modern Art

One half of QAGOMA, the Gallery of Modern Art sits 150 metres from the Queensland Art Gallery within the Queensland Cultural Centre, both architecturally acclaimed and set on the riverbank at South Brisbane. Exhibitions lean toward the art of the Asia Pacific, alongside cinema, kids' programs and the Collection. Entry is free, with some exhibitions and events ticketed.

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.

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Institute of Modern Art

Australia's oldest independent public art gallery, founded in 1975, occupies the ground floor of Fortitude Valley's Judith Wright Arts Centre. Entry is always free. Past shows have stretched from Khadim Ali's large-scale installation work to Ross Manning's kinetic light pieces — the kind of programming that makes the IMA genuinely useful to anyone tracking where contemporary art in the Asia-Pacific is headed.

Museum

MacArthur Museum

On the eighth floor of the heritage-listed MacArthur Chambers, this not-for-profit museum keeps the restored office from which General Douglas MacArthur ran the South-West Pacific campaign between 1942 and 1944, once the boardroom of the AMP Society before the Commonwealth requisitioned it. Galleries around it cover Brisbane's war years, the million American troops who passed through, and the Australian-US alliance forged in the Pacific. Open three days a week.

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

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

Newstead House

Brisbane's oldest surviving home sits on the headland the Turrbal and Jagera peoples called Garranbinbilla — where Breakfast Creek meets the Brisbane River. Built in 1846 for Scottish squatter Patrick Leslie, the two-storey house was reportedly overseen by pioneer architect Andrew Petrie. Now a house museum, it's worth visiting less for the Victorian furnishings than for how legibly it holds the collision of colonial ambition and dispossession.

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.

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Queensland Art Gallery

Queensland Art Gallery stands as one of Australia's leading visual arts institutions, located at the heart of Brisbane's cultural precinct. This expansive gallery presents an extraordinary range of work—from classical to contemporary, Australian to international—across beautifully designed spaces that invite deep engagement. The consistent daily hours make it an accessible destination for serious collectors, casual visitors, and curious explorers alike. Within these walls, you'll encounter world-class exhibitions, significant permanent collections, and the sense that contemporary visual art is not a distant concern but a vital, living conversation shaping culture and community.

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 Museum

South Brisbane's state museum spans geological deep time to recent decades, with collections covering palaeontology, biology, and Queensland's cultural history. The Kurilpa building holds the flagship permanent galleries; satellite sites in Ipswich (rail history), Toowoomba (the National Carriage Collection, more than 50 horse-drawn vehicles), and Townsville (Great Barrier Reef and tropical natural history) extend the network across the state.

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.

Museum

State Library of Queensland

Founded in 1896, Queensland's state library holds the documentary and cultural record of an entire state — genealogy, history, public archives — freely accessible to anyone. The South Bank building is serious architecture for serious research, connected to more than 320 public libraries and Indigenous Knowledge Centres statewide. Come with a question worth answering.

Gallery

UQ Art Museum

The art collection of the University of Queensland, held on the St Lucia campus and counted among Queensland's most significant. More than 400 works from the collection are displayed across UQ's campuses under an Art on Campus program. The museum is presently closed while a purpose-built gallery is constructed in the Forgan Smith Tower, expected to open in 2027, with programs and events continuing in the interim.

Drive-In Cinema

Yatala Drive-In Theatre

South East Queensland's last open-air drive-in, opened 27 October 1974 by Peter Sourris and now run by his grandsons Stephen and Peter — third-generation family stewardship across three screens, the largest 33.5 metres wide. A 1950s diner with life-size Elvis and Marilyn statues serves between sessions. First-run films, retro screenings, the Real Steal and Chrome car show, and Boot Bargains markets the third Sunday of each month. Stapylton, between Brisbane and the Gold Coast.