If you want the argument of this book in a single administrative act, it is this one.
The Regent Theatre in Queen Street was entered in the Queensland Heritage Register on 21 October 1992, under entry 600140, in the first months of the Heritage Act that Queensland had taken until 1992 to pass. That entry is what a reasonable person would take to be protection.
In 1994 the boundary of that entry was cut back to exclude the theatre box.
Nobody marched. There was nothing to march about. A boundary is a line on a plan in a government file, and redrawing one is not an event. There is no photograph of it, no crowd, no wrecking machine, no spokesman attributing an order to a higher authority. It is the least dramatic thing that can happen to a building.
Seventeen years later, when the auditorium came down under a development approval granted in 2010, the campaign that had saved the Regent in 1979 came back. It marched. It petitioned Parliament. It attracted more than a thousand signatures. And it could not have won, because the decision that mattered had been taken in 1994 by people whose names are not attached to it, in a process nobody thought to attend.
I want to be careful here, because the 1979 campaign is remembered as a victory and it was not quite that either. The interior was gutted in 1979. What the green ban and the rallies preserved was the foyer sequence, under a scheme the Brisbane City Council had approved in June 1978. The four gold cinemas that generations of us watched films in were not the auditorium. They were built in what was left of it.
I include myself in the misunderstanding. I saw films in those cinemas between 1997 and 2009 and took them to be the original room. I am a Queensland historian and I had the story wrong in exactly the way the city has it wrong.
That is what makes the 1994 line worth writing about. Heritage protection in this state has rarely been removed by anybody willing to be seen removing it. It has been adjusted, in daylight, on paper, years in advance, by people doing their jobs. And when the machines finally arrive, everyone looks at the machines.