The Daylight Demolitions

The Royal Queensland Show has been cancelled four times since 1876. Once for the Spanish influenza in 1919. Once at the height of the Second World War in 1942, when the showgrounds were given over to the military. Twice for COVID, in 2020 and 2021.¹

A fifth cancellation is now scheduled. It is not a pandemic and it is not a war. The 2032 show will not be held because the grounds will be occupied by the Olympic Games.²

That sentence is the whole argument of this essay, and it is worth sitting with before the objections start arriving, because the objections are all reasonable. Nobody is sneaking. Nothing is being done at four in the morning. There is a budget, a builder, a consultation process and a set of drawings on a government website. And that is precisely the point. Queensland has found a third way to remove its own past, and it is the most effective of the three, because it does not look like removal at all.

I. What is actually happening

Two of Brisbane's oldest continuously used public grounds are being rebuilt for 2032, and the detail matters more than the outrage.

At the Bowen Hills showgrounds, the State has committed $287.5 million to a new main arena, grandstand and horse pavilion, with Hutchinson Builders appointed.³ Machinery Hill — the sloping ground where the farm equipment has been displayed within living memory of everyone who has been to an Ekka — is to be demolished after the 2026 show, with the rebuild paused around the 2027 show and completed in 2028.⁴ The athletes' village, some two thousand dwellings, goes up alongside on Brooks and O'Connell Streets, on the site of the beef pavilion that closed in 2022.⁵

Across the river at Woolloongabba, the Brisbane Cricket Ground was, until quite recently, going to be the Olympic stadium. The plan under the Labor government before 2024 was to knock the Gabba down and rebuild it for the Games, which would have produced among the smallest main stadiums in modern Olympic history. The government elected in 2024 moved the stadium to Victoria Park instead, a new sixty-thousand-seat building at a reported $3.8 billion, and has slated the Gabba site for sale to help pay for it. The ground will keep operating through 2032 and be decommissioned afterwards, the site redeveloped as a mixed-use precinct anchored by an indoor entertainment arena, with housing, retail and public space around it.⁶

That is the second answer the ground has been given in two years, and there was a third in between. In March 2024, after the former lord mayor Graham Quirk reported on the Games venues and recommended a new stadium at Victoria Park, Premier Steven Miles rejected the recommendation and settled instead on a budget upgrade of the Queensland Sport and Athletics Centre at Nathan, with a billion dollars set aside to upgrade the Gabba and Suncorp rather than replace them.⁷ For a few months in 2024 the Gabba was to be saved by being renovated. Then the election came, and it was to be sold.

Demolition, refurbishment, sale: three positions in two years, none of them reached in bad faith, and the ground survives none of them in a form that would satisfy the people who mind about it. The Olympics are not why the Gabba comes down. They are the reason it lasts as long as it does.

There is a further point, and it is the one that ought to trouble anybody who thinks this is a story about a heartless government. The present structure dates from around 2000, which puts it among the oldest of the major grounds in the country, and by May 2024 the Sunday Mail could state without qualification that it had not had a major upgrade in twenty-five years.⁸ It was facing another cycle of knock-down and rebuild regardless of who won an election or where a stadium went. Twenty-five years is now a long life for a large public building in Queensland. Nobody decided that. It is simply the replacement rate we have settled into, and it runs underneath every one of the decisions in this essay.

And the building had stopped working. The Quirk review found the Gabba non-compliant with the Disability Discrimination Act and with modern building codes. It had eighty-five wheelchair positions, two hundred fewer than compliance required; Suncorp has two hundred and twenty, and the newer stadiums in Perth and Sydney have four hundred and fifty each. The accessible drop-off sat a block away on Linton Street, some two hundred and fifty metres from the nearest gate, on a first-come basis. Two lifts served the grandstand. The roof did not fully cover the wheelchair seating, so in rain the people sitting there got wet. A wheelchair user was allowed one companion, which meant choosing between a carer and a member of the family. Ambulances could not get onto the field. Medical vehicles could not reach the medical rooms through the back-of-house corridors. There were no change areas or lavatories for female athletes. Miles, putting his own proposal, acknowledged that no option in front of him delivered full accessibility.⁸

I want that stated plainly rather than left in a footnote, because it is the hardest fact in this essay for the argument I am making. A ground that cannot get an ambulance to an injured player, or seat a woman in a wheelchair beside more than one person she loves, or offer a female athlete a lavatory, is not a heritage case waiting to be argued. It is a building that has stopped doing its job. The case for removing the Gabba is a good one.

That is exactly why it belongs in this ledger rather than in a list of exceptions to it. The midnight method needed darkness and the quiet method needed an administrative sleight of hand seventeen years in advance. The daylight method needs neither, because it works best when the reasons are excellent.

II. The ground the fixture left once before

The Gabba's claim on Brisbane is older than most of the people defending it realise, and it is not quite what is usually said.

Land at Woolloongabba was reserved for a cricket ground in 1895. The first match on the site was played on 19 December 1896, between Parliament and the Press — a fixture whose participants would recur throughout this book in other capacities.⁹ But for the next thirty-five years the Gabba shared Brisbane's first-class cricket with the Exhibition Ground at Bowen Hills, and it was the Exhibition Ground, not the Gabba, that hosted the city's first Test matches. The Gabba did not take a Test until South Africa came in November 1931.¹⁰

Read that against section I again. Brisbane's Test cricket began on the showgrounds and moved to Woolloongabba in 1931. In 2032 the showgrounds will host the Olympic Games and Woolloongabba will be scheduled for demolition. Both grounds in this story have already changed hands once. Neither of them is being destroyed by a philistine; both of them are being reorganised by a state that has never regarded a building as the point.

The Gabba's best day came on 9 December 1960, when Australia and the West Indies began the first tied Test in the history of the game, a result not matched until Madras in 1986.¹¹ The stands that saw it are gone already, replaced in the staged rebuild of the 1990s and early 2000s that produced the bowl standing there now.¹² The building being demolished after 2032 is not the building where the tie happened. The ground is.

That distinction is the one Queensland has always been able to exploit. A ground is not listed. A fixture is not listed. Continuity of use — the thing that actually makes a place matter to the people who use it — has never been the kind of thing the Heritage Act was built to protect, and no amendment has ever proposed that it should be.

III. The three methods

All We Leave Behind has so far described two ways of removing a building in this state.

The first was midnight. The Belle Vue in April 1979 and Cloudland in November 1982: begin before dawn, work without notice, and present the city in the morning with a fact instead of a proposal. It worked twice, and the second time was easier than the first because everyone involved had watched it work.

The second was quiet. The Regent in 2011: no midnight, no scandal, no need for either, because the Heritage Register boundary had been redrawn in 1994 to exclude the auditorium. The campaign came back, marched, and petitioned Parliament with more than a thousand signatures, and it changed nothing, because by then the decision had been taken in an administrative act nobody had marched about seventeen years earlier.

The third is daylight, and we are living in it. Its features are visible in section I. The work is announced by ministerial media statement. The cost is published. The contractor is named. There is consultation, and the consultation is genuine. Heritage is not ignored — it is itemised. The Stockman's Bar, the drinking place that generations of graziers have treated as the last authentically rural room in Brisbane, is to be retained; the Cattleman's Bar is to be recreated. The Royal National Association's chief executive has said both are "a very important part of the show", and there is no reason to doubt him.¹³ No Ekka will be cancelled by the building works themselves.

This is not vandalism. It is competent public administration, and that is what makes it the most effective of the three methods. A demolition that has been costed, consulted upon and reported cannot be called a scandal. There is nothing to expose. The midnight demolitions produced a rally, a green ban and forty years of civic memory. The daylight ones produce a fact sheet.

IV. What the ledger records

I am not arguing that Machinery Hill should stand forever, or that an ageing stadium is a cathedral, or that the Games should have gone somewhere else. Those are separate arguments and I would probably lose two of them.

The argument is narrower and it is about habit. Set the three methods beside each other and the constant is not the villain, because the villain keeps changing: a state government in 1979, a private developer in 1982, an administrative boundary in 1994, a heritage-conscious statutory authority with a good architect in 2026. The constant is the answer. When this state is asked what to do with an ageing building that stands where something newer is wanted, the answer has been removal for fifty years, under every government, in every economic condition, and with every degree of public notice from none at all to a dedicated website.

The Ekka survived the Spanish flu by cancelling one year and coming back. It survived the war the same way. What is being tested in 2032 is a different proposition: whether an institution that has been in one place since 1876 is still the same institution when the ground beneath it has been rebuilt around a fortnight in July.

I think it probably is. That is what makes the daylight method so difficult to argue with, and why the ledger in this book is a ledger rather than an indictment. You cannot point at a moment when someone did something disgraceful. You can only add the entries up.