Australia

Walking over a bridge called Goodwill with the sun on my back and a visit to one of Australasia’s most exciting art museums ahead, not even a sign warning of dive-bombing territorial birds — including crows and magpies — was going to rain on this particular parade.

Then, as I crossed over the Brisbane River and started to walk leisurely along the city’s stunning South Bank, it hit me harder than a mad magpie in full flight: the first time I was here was 30 years ago. A whole three decades; more than half my life.

That was with a group of school friends. None of us had mortgages, kids or credit cards with limits much over $500; we’d never flown overseas without Mum and Dad nor had we eaten buckets of prawns with cold beers on rooftop terraces or got lost in department stores so big that we couldn’t find an exit.

We had an idea there was a world outside suburban Pakuranga, which brought us to Brisbane in the first place (along with a lot of organisation by our friend, Kevin). We joined 15,760,000 other tourists who came to see World Expo 88 — and learn about “Leisure in the Age of Technology” — with 100 pavilions from 52 governments including New Zealand. Talk about getting a taste of where we might want to head next! South Bank, originally a meeting place for traditional landowners the Turrbal and Yuggera people, was Brisbane’s first commercial district but flooding in 1893 saw the city fathers shift the CBD to higher ground on the opposite side of the river. As the new CBD soared, South Bank’s fortunes plummeted — until the 1970s when parkland along the river bank was reclaimed and Queensland’s visual and performing arts hub started development. By 1988, South Bank, the World Expo site, also boasted the Queensland Cultural Centre complete with the Queensland Art Gallery, the Queensland Museum, the Queensland Performing Arts Centre and the State Library of Queensland. Not that we knew it; we were there for sun, surf, shopping and late nights that turned into early mornings.

Brisbane hasn’t forgotten Expo 88; it’s marking the 30th anniversary with an extended self-guided World Expo 88 Public Art Trail, with sculptures and artworks — many have been restored or moved — scattered throughout the city.

Meanwhile, its residents are probably marking the anniversary by thanking their lucky stars that someone had a bit of foresight and didn’t turn South Bank into a secondary commercial centre as was planned. Instead, they got 17 hectares of some of the best parkland, cafes and restaurants, pagodas, human-made beaches, sculpture parks and cultural institutions that you’ll find in a modern city anywhere in the world.

The already impressive cultural facilities were added to in 2006 with the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) where I was lucky enough to see one of the best exhibitions I’ve seen in a long time, Melbourne-based artist Patricia Piccinini. Her work took over pretty much the entire ground floor of GOMA and is the institution’s largest exhibition of an Australian artist’s work.

That night, I was back — outside, anyway — to watch US artist James Turrell’s Night Life which lights up the gallery from within and, according to its PR, “realises the architects’ vision of animating the building’s facade at night”.

To see art displayed so confidently in an expansive cultural precinct is a sure sign of a city’s cultural coming-of-age. Many regard Melbourne and Sydney as the cultural hearts of Australia, but I reckon Brisbane gives them a run for their money.

In a little over a month, Brisbane will turn it on and up for its annual festival with South Bank one of the main hubs for a celebration of arts and culture that gets bigger every year. In 2018, there are close to 600 performances — 100 of them free — of almost 70 shows across 17 venues.

If you want further proof of how much Brisbane has matured, consider that eight new works — many of them large-scale — get their premiere