The Queensland I Grew Up In and Why I Keep Going Back
I left Brisbane in my early twenties and did not look back for a long time.
That is not a criticism of the place. It is just what you do when you are young and the world is large and Sydney is calling and everything you want seems to be somewhere other than where you already are. I moved south, built a life, spent nearly twenty years in one of the greatest cities in Australia. I did not regret it for a moment.
But I kept going back to Queensland. I still do. And what strikes me every time I land and drive from the airport into the city is how much has changed and how much has not, and how both of those things are reasons to love it.
The Brisbane I grew up in
Brisbane in the eighties and nineties was a big country town that had not quite decided to become a city. That is not an insult. It was a particular kind of place with a particular kind of life, and I was lucky to grow up in it.
I rode my bike for hours through the neighborhood without anyone worrying about where I was. Summers were spent almost entirely in the backyard pool. The pace was unhurried in a way that felt entirely natural until you left and realized not everywhere worked that way.
The weekends were the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast. An hour in either direction and you were at the beach. As a kid that felt like the most normal thing in the world. As an adult who has lived in cities where the nearest decent beach is a flight away, I understand now what a remarkable thing that was.
And then there was my grandfather’s boat.
Some of my best memories from childhood happened on that boat. Fraser Island. North Stradbroke Island. Byron Bay across the border. Getting stuck on sandbars and having to jump out and push while my grandfather navigated by instinct and experience and a confidence in those waters that I have never seen matched. Catching fish with my dad’s help. Swimming in water so clear and so quiet that it felt like the middle of the world belonged to us.
Those were the days that shaped how I think about travel. The idea that the best moments are usually unplanned. That the point is rarely the destination. That what happens on the way is almost always the thing you remember.
The Brisbane I come back to
I go back regularly now to visit family, and the city I return to is not the city I left.
Brisbane has become something genuinely remarkable. nd then there is Howard Smith Wharves. A stretch of heritage river wharves directly beneath the Story Bridge, transformed into one of the best eating and drinking precincts in the country. My Brisbane friends talk about it the way Sydneysiders talk about the harbor. It’s the thing that defines the city’s relationship with its waterfront. I have spent enough evenings there now to know they are not exaggerating. The Story Bridge lit gold above you, the river below, a cold drink in hand and no particular reason to be anywhere else. That is Brisbane doing what the new Brisbane does best.
The energy of a city preparing to host the 2032 Olympic Games is palpable. There is construction and ambition and a sense of momentum that you feel the moment you arrive. Brisbane is no longer the city people fly through on the way to somewhere else. It has become a destination in its own right.
The energy of a city preparing to host the 2032 Olympic Games is palpable. There is construction and ambition and a sense of momentum that you feel the moment you arrive. Brisbane is no longer the city people fly through on the way to somewhere else. It has become a destination in its own right.
And yet the warmth is the same. The ease is the same. The Queensland way of not taking things too seriously, of having time for people, of measuring a good day by how it felt rather than what it produced, that is exactly as I left it. Some things survive transformation intact, and that quality is the one I hope Brisbane never loses.
What this means if you are planning to go
I include Southeast Queensland on this site because I know it the way you can only know a place you grew up in. Not as a traveler who visited and was impressed, but as someone who has the muscle memory of it, who knows which direction the light falls in the afternoon and what the air smells like after a summer storm and where to go when you want to feel like a local rather than a tourist.
The Noosa I spent weekends in as a teenager is now one of the most genuinely beautiful coastal towns in Australia, and I have been to enough coastal towns in enough countries to say that without qualification. K’gari, which my grandfather navigated by feel, can now be explored in considerably more comfort, though I hope the sandbanks still catch people out occasionally. Brisbane, which was my ordinary, is now someone else’s extraordinary.
I find that slightly disorienting and mostly wonderful.
When clients ask me about Southeast Queensland, I never quite know how to frame the fact that recommending it feels different from recommending anywhere else I send people. It is the only destination on this site where I am not just a traveler who knows the place well. I am someone who was made, in part, by it.
That has to count for something when it comes to planning your trip.