THE GROUND BENEATH THE FAIR.

Every city that hosts a world’s fair must first answer a question that rarely appears in the official programme: what was there before? The answer is almost never nothing. It is, more often, a place — accumulated, inhabited, economically alive in its particular way, carrying the residue of generations who made use of it without any expectation of being cleared. Brisbane in the mid-1980s was no different. When the Queensland government resolved that the south bank of the Brisbane River would become the site of World Expo 88, it was not choosing an empty canvas. It was choosing a living district — diminished by then, certainly, pockmarked by decades of industrial decline and the aftermath of floods — but a district with a continuous human story stretching back not merely to the nineteenth century, but across tens of thousands of years.

To understand what Expo 88 made of South Brisbane, it is necessary to first understand what South Brisbane was. Not as a sentimental exercise in mourning, but as an act of civic honesty. The transformation wrought by the World’s Fair was real and, in many of its effects, genuinely beneficial. But transformation implies a before. The before, in this case, is a story of colonial layering, industrial pragmatism, periodic flooding and dispossession — a story that the rush toward Expo largely set aside.

THE LONG HISTORY OF MAIWAR'S SOUTH BANK.

The river the Turrbal people called Maiwar — the waterway now known as the Brisbane River — was not a backdrop to life on its banks. It was the organising principle of that life. South Bank was originally a meeting place for the traditional landowners, the Turrbal and Yuggera people. The Turrbal and Jagera people thrived off this country and the Maiwar was at the centre of their livelihoods. They were fishing people and the river supported this as well as other spiritual and recreational activities.

Exactly where the territorial boundaries lay between the two groups is unknown, however, the Jagera traditionally occupied the areas south of the Brisbane River while the Turrbal primarily lived north of the river. The low-lying south bank, its mudflats rich with fish and shellfish, its riverine forest sheltering camp and ceremony, was in regular use as an important gathering place. It is thought that the low-lying swamplands of South Brisbane were one of the main and regular camping spots of the Turrbal. This was not incidental occupation. The south bank of Maiwar was inhabited by people who had organised their lives around it with the sophistication of long acquaintance — across a span of time that dwarfs the colonial period many hundreds of times over.

South Brisbane was a location brimming with history — before European invasion the south bank of the Brisbane River had been central to the lives of the Jagerra people, whose displacement began in the 1830s. By the time European settlement had consolidated itself in what is now the Brisbane central business district, the south bank was already becoming a secondary zone — a place where displaced and marginalised First Nations people continued to live, increasingly hemmed in by a colonial economy that had use for the land but not for its original custodians.

FROM SETTLEMENT TO INDUSTRY: THE COLONIAL SOUTH BANK.

The colonial history of South Brisbane is a compressed version of Queensland’s broader arc: rapid early development, commercial aspiration, vulnerability to natural forces, and the long tail of decline. In the early 1840s South Bank became the central focus point of early European settlement, and from the 1850s, the precinct was quickly established as the business centre of Brisbane. However, this was all disrupted when the 1893 Brisbane floods forced the central business district to shift to the northern side of the river and attain higher ground. This is where the Brisbane central business district still stands today.

That single hydrological event — the catastrophic flooding of 1893 — permanently altered South Brisbane’s civic character. Before the floods, the south bank had genuine claims to being the commercial heart of the young city. After them, it became something else: an industrial and working-class precinct, its waterfront given over to wharves and warehouses, its streets home to the trades and workers that supported port activity. This began the decline of South Bank, and the area became home to vaudeville theatres, derelict boarding houses, and light and heavy industry.

This was not, however, mere desolation. The district carried its own culture — dockside pubs, print shops, small manufacturers, working people living close to the work. It was rough in places, marginal in others, but it was inhabited and functional on its own terms. The south bank of the Maiwar in the early and middle twentieth century was not a wasted landscape. It was a working landscape, and that distinction matters when we consider what was lost alongside what was gained.

THE YEARS OF DERELICTION AND THE RATIONALE FOR CHANGE.

By the postwar decades, the character of South Brisbane’s riverbank was shifting further. The area had been a traditional meeting place for Aboriginals, an important site for early white settlement, and almost became Brisbane’s CBD until the 1893 flood sent businesses fleeing to higher ground on the north shore. But post-World War II, the mostly industrial and port area had fallen into decline.

The decline was real. South Bank, badly damaged in the 1973–74 floods, was chosen and the site acquired for $150 million. The flooding of 1974 — a disaster that struck Brisbane with devastating force — compounded the existing deterioration of the precinct. Buildings that might have been repaired were instead abandoned. Industrial tenants relocated. The river frontage that had once been South Brisbane’s economic engine was becoming an eyesore of rusted infrastructure and empty yards.

It was against this backdrop that the rationale for choosing South Brisbane as the Expo site was constructed. The Queensland government were interested in staging a global event to reposition Brisbane as a ‘new world city’, rather than a regional centre. Staging an Expo was seen as the ideal opportunity to achieve this new status. The pro-development Queensland administration also saw the Expo as a vehicle to revitalise Brisbane’s dilapidated South Bank.

Local Brisbane businesspeople were big supporters, many looking to examples of earlier expos in places like Spokane, USA, where Expo had provided a rationale for large scale redevelopment of a decaying riverside site. Queenslanders first heard that Brisbane had been successful in winning the 1988 expo in 1983, and opposition was strong from the get go. A few sites were considered, including the Gold Coast and Beenleigh, however South Brisbane was chosen.

With federal representation, at the December 1983 Bureau International des Expositions General Assembly in Paris, Brisbane won the right to hold the 1988 World Exposition. Immediately, the Brisbane Exposition and South Bank Redevelopment Authority was formed, with Sir Llewellyn Edwards, State Deputy Premier, at the helm. The mechanism of civic transformation was now in motion, and the first task was clearance.

WHAT WAS CLEARED: THE STRUCTURES AND THE LIVES.

World Expo 88 occupied a mixed usage 40-hectare resumed parcel of land on the South Bank of the Brisbane River, opposite the city’s central business district. For many years this mainly industrial area had been largely derelict. The resumption — the compulsory acquisition under eminent domain principles — swept through a district that, while frayed, was still inhabited and working.

Among the structures that fell were two that had long marked the character of the neighbourhood. One photograph captured just as the bulldozers were about to move in shows the View World Hotel, once one of the roughest South Brisbane dockside pubs. It began life in the 1890s and quickly gained notoriety for selling watered-down alcohol, illegal trading hours, and being the scene of many drunken altercations. In the 1950s it traded as the View World until its demolition in 1986 to make way for Expo, near the site where the Wheel of Brisbane now sits.

The other landmark of note was a printer’s works with a longer and more distinguished history. The other landmark standing in the way of progress was printers Watson and Ferguson, built in 1910. The company was one of Brisbane’s oldest, trading in Queen Street from the 1870s, well-known printers of stationery and novelty items and maps. When they expanded to the Stanley Street site, more than 200 printers were employed, and it was regarded as the training ground for master printers in Queensland. At the start of World War I, the Defence Department took over the building, but then printing resumed until 1985 when the Expo Authority took over the land.

Watson and Ferguson’s building is a telling example of the complexity of what was erased. This was not simply a derelict shell. It was a functioning enterprise — indeed, a firm with more than a century of presence in Brisbane’s commercial life — that found itself in the path of a government decision made on a scale that individual businesses could not contest. At the start of World War I the Defence Department took over the building, but then printing resumed until 1985 when the Expo Authority took over the land. With much of South Brisbane’s history cleared away, Expo was ready to take off.

The clearance was not only of buildings. Like many other mega-event projects and waterfront schemes, the development of Brisbane’s South Bank displaced low income groups and ‘scruffy’ industries that were swept aside by a growth regime intent on attracting external investment. The working residents of the area — those in cheap boarding houses, those whose livelihoods depended on the dockside economy — were part of the human geography that made way for the world’s fair. Their displacement was the necessary precondition for the spectacle that replaced them.

Following from Spokane’s example, it was hoped that the excuse of Expo could force out unsightly tenants and businesses, and ‘revitalise’ a part of the inner city. The language of revitalisation is worth examining carefully. From one vantage point, the south bank was genuinely in need of renewal — damaged by floods, hollowed by industrial retreat, its built fabric deteriorating. From another, the district was functioning on terms that suited a particular kind of resident and worker, and revitalisation was simply the polite term for their removal.

Stanley Street was permanently excised between Melbourne Street and Vulture Street while Grey Street was reinstated after the showground was demolished. The very street geometry of South Brisbane was redrawn. The urban form of the neighbourhood — its lanes, its connections, its pedestrian logic — was reorganised in service of an event that would last six months.

WHAT WAS KEPT: THE HERITAGE THAT SURVIVED.

Not everything was levelled. The clearance was comprehensive, but not without discrimination. Five heritage-listed buildings in South Brisbane were refurbished and repurposed for Expo 88. They were retained after its closure and can still be seen today: Plough Inn, Ship Inn, Central House, Collin’s Place Spaghetti House, and South Brisbane Municipal Library.

These five buildings represent the considered judgment of what the Expo’s planners deemed worth preserving — structures old enough, architecturally notable enough, or symbolically legible enough to be incorporated into the world’s fair rather than demolished for it. The South Brisbane Municipal Library, in particular, carries a certain civic weight: a public institution retained within a privately organised event, its continued existence an implicit acknowledgment that the neighbourhood had history worth keeping.

The Expo House building on Sidon Street, which housed ‘Club 88’ and administrative offices, has been incorporated into today’s Griffith University South Bank Campus. The story of what was retained is, in some ways, as revealing as the story of what was cleared. The pattern of survival — civic institutions and heritage-listed pubs, rather than working businesses and lower-income housing — reflects the priorities of those who made the decisions.

The creation of Expo, along with the recent construction of the Queensland Cultural Centre, helped to revive the area. The Cultural Centre — completed in stages through the 1980s on the adjacent site — had already begun the transformation of the south bank’s civic character before the Expo machinery arrived. The Queensland Art Gallery, the Queensland Museum and the Performing Arts Centre had established a cultural presence on the river’s southern edge that the Expo would dramatically amplify.

THE POLITICS OF CLEARANCE AND THE VOICES OF OPPOSITION.

The decision to clear South Brisbane for the World’s Fair was not made in the absence of dissent. Although Expo 88 is now regarded very positively by the citizens of Brisbane, in the years leading up to the event many people were opposed to it. The opposition was not merely aesthetic or nostalgic — it was grounded in questions about who bore the cost of urban transformation, and who reaped its benefits.

Even Brisbane City Council was sceptical about the Expo — they were worried that the South Bank development would affect the viability of the existing city centre. There were also criticisms of the costs involved from local and national media. The scepticism extended across the political spectrum, though it was those with the least political capital — the low-income residents, the small business operators, the working poor of the dockside neighbourhood — who had the fewest avenues through which to register it.

The Queensland of the mid-1980s was not a jurisdiction where dissent moved easily through official channels. The Bjelke-Petersen government was known for its concentrated executive authority and its willingness to use state power in service of development. The Expo Authority had the powers of resumption and the backing of a government that regarded South Brisbane’s renewal as a settled question. For those in the path of clearance, the choices were limited.

"South Bank was just dirt and warehouses. Expo turned it into the open, vibrant place it is today, a space Brisbane still treasures."

That recollection — offered by a Queenslander who performed at Expo as a high school student and whose words appear in coverage by the Australian government’s official Expo Australia presence — captures something true. And yet it also performs a kind of compression characteristic of how mega-events are later narrated. Dirt and warehouses is not inaccurate, but it is not complete. The dirt and warehouses were inhabited. The lives lived in proximity to them were real. The question of what was cleared, and by whom, and at whose cost, sits beneath the warmth of collective memory like sediment beneath a river.

WHAT THE SITE BECAME — AND WHAT IT ALMOST BECAME.

World Expo 88 was held in Brisbane during a six-month period between Saturday, 30 April 1988 and Sunday, 30 October 1988. The theme was “Leisure in the Age of Technology.” For those six months, the cleared and rebuilt riverbank hosted a spectacle of genuine international scale. Expo 88 attracted more than 15,760,000 visitors who bought tickets worth A$175 million.

But the question of what would become of the site after the fair closed was, for a time, genuinely open — and the answer that eventually prevailed was not the one originally planned. The original legacy plan was to sell the riverside expo site to developers. In the Official Souvenir Programme the organisers proudly announced that “a proposal has already been accepted to transform the Expo site on the South Bank of the Brisbane River to include a residential area, a luxury hotel, a world trade centre and a retail section.”

The vision was of a privatised riverfront — precisely the kind of waterfront development that was proliferating across post-industrial cities globally in the late 1980s. That this did not ultimately happen is largely the result of what Expo 88 did to the people of Brisbane. The behaviours, emotions and expectations engendered by Expo 88 influenced the reconfiguration of the site. People enjoyed the expo so much that it led to a change of plans for the South Bank site.

In 1988, Brisbane held a successful World Expo 88, following which the Government intended to develop the site for commercial interests. However, a public campaign successfully lobbied for the site to be redeveloped as parkland for the enjoyment of people in Brisbane. In 1989, the South Bank Corporation, a Queensland Government statutory body, was established to oversee the development and management of the new South Bank Parklands.

The parkland, on the transformed site of Brisbane’s World Expo 88, was officially opened to the public on 20 June 1992. The people of Brisbane, having experienced what an activated riverfront felt like during the months of Expo, refused to surrender it to private development. They demanded a public inheritance, and they obtained one. This is perhaps the most underappreciated civic fact in the entire Expo 88 story: the public park was not planned from the start. It was won.

READING THE LAYERS OF A PLACE.

Every significant place carries layers — of occupation, use, memory and loss — that do not disappear simply because a new layer is placed on top. The south bank of the Maiwar is, in this sense, one of Brisbane’s most densely layered precincts. It was a place of First Nations gathering and fishing, of colonial commerce, of industrial labour, of dockside culture, of flood damage and abandonment, of compulsory acquisition and erasure, of spectacle, of public contestation, and finally of parkland reclaimed by civic will.

Understanding the site of what became South Bank Parklands requires holding all of these layers simultaneously. The Expo’s contribution to Brisbane’s civic and cultural life was substantial and real — documented in the memories of a generation of Queenslanders, confirmed by the endurance of public space that followed. But the narrative that begins with dereliction and ends with transformation skips something important: the human lives and accumulated histories that were in the path of change, and the choices that were made about whose presence on that riverbank was considered expendable.

The Watson and Ferguson printing works, which trained master printers for more than a century, stood on the south bank until 1985. The View World Hotel, which had served the dockside trade since the 1890s, was demolished in 1986. The wharves and yards and boarding houses that had organised working life along Maiwar’s southern edge were cleared. In their place rose the pavilions of fifty-two nations.

This exchange — between the particular and the universal, between a local working district and a global spectacle — is the fundamental transaction of the world’s fair. It is rarely a simple one. The residents who were displaced did not receive the same dividends from transformation that subsequent visitors and property owners enjoyed. The histories that were erased were not commemorated within the event that erased them. The ground was made clean, and then made spectacular, before anyone paused to read what was written in it.

PERMANENCE, RECORD AND THE NAMING OF CIVIC MEMORY.

The story of what stood on South Brisbane’s riverbank before the world’s fair is the kind of history that tends to dissolve in the brightness of what came after. The pavilions were vivid. The crowds were enormous. The cultural opening that Expo 88 delivered to a city that had long thought of itself as peripheral was genuine and lasting. These things are documented and celebrated, and rightly so.

But the civic record requires the harder work too — the accounting of what was cleared, who was cleared, and what commitments were implicitly made when a government resumed forty hectares of inhabited urban land and handed it to an international event. The record of South Brisbane before Expo exists in archive photographs held by the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, in the memories of those who lived and worked there, in the footprints of streets that no longer run in the same directions, and in the foundations of buildings that were demolished before the flags were hung.

It is with this understanding of layered civic memory — of places that carry multiple histories simultaneously — that a project like expo88.queensland finds its purpose. The onchain namespace is not merely a digital address for an event. It is a permanent civic identifier for an entire transformation — one that anchors the name of Expo 88 to the record of what that event was, what it cost, what it replaced, and what it ultimately made possible. The domain name as civic infrastructure implies a kind of fidelity to the complete record, not only to the spectacle.

The south bank of Maiwar has been many things. It has been a place of gathering and ceremony for the Turrbal and Jagera people across tens of thousands of years. It has been a colonial commercial district and a post-flood industrial zone. It has been a cleared site and a world’s fair and a contested piece of public real estate. And it is now a parkland — imperfect, revised multiple times, beloved by Brisbanites — that exists because ordinary people demanded it be public rather than private.

Each layer deserves its place in the record. The function of permanent civic infrastructure — whether physical parkland or the onchain naming layer encoded in expo88.queensland — is to hold that record open: not as a finalised verdict, but as a continuing act of civic honesty toward the ground beneath our feet and the lives that preceded ours on it.