THE GROUND BENEATH THE SHOWGROUNDS.

Every August, the Brisbane Showgrounds fill with the particular sounds of the Ekka: the low of cattle in the judging ring, the mechanical percussion of carnival rides, the movement of hundreds of thousands of people navigating pavilions and paddocks across twenty-two hectares of inner-city ground. The show has been running, with only rare interruptions, since 1876. It is Queensland’s most attended annual event, a gathering that has outlasted pandemics, world wars, and decades of social transformation. It is, in the fullest sense, a civic institution.

But before the first timber pavilion was erected at Bowen Park in August 1876, before the first public holiday was declared and the first fifteen thousand visitors arrived, this ground belonged to someone. The land at Bowen Hills — where the Brisbane Showgrounds now stand, where the RNA’s grandstands and pavilions and arenas have accumulated across generations — is the Country of the Turrbal and Jagera peoples. These are the First Nations peoples whose connection to this particular landscape long predates any colonial institution, any exhibition building, any agricultural competition. That fact is not a preamble to the history of the Ekka. It is part of the history of the Ekka.

Any serious account of First Nations presence at Queensland’s great gathering must begin here: with the land itself, and with the honest acknowledgement that the relationship between that land, its original custodians, and the institution that has occupied it for a century and a half has been neither simple nor static. It has been shaped by the full weight of Queensland’s colonial history — displacement, exclusion, spectacle, survival — and is still being worked through in the present.

WHAT THE ARCHIVE RECORDS.

The State Library of Queensland holds one of the most extensive collections of Ekka-related material in existence, spanning from the first official catalogue of 1876 through to the present day. It includes photographs, annual reports, correspondence, and oral history. When the University of Queensland published Showtime: A History of the Brisbane Exhibition in 2008 — authored by historians Dr Joanne Scott and Dr Ross Laurie — the book drew on this archive alongside approximately fifty oral history interviews to produce the first comprehensive scholarly account of the show’s social history.

Among its findings, documented and discussed with academic care, is one of the darker threads running through the Ekka’s early twentieth-century history. As reported in University of Queensland coverage of the book’s launch, the research noted that “aspects of Queensland’s tragic race relations history are visible at the Ekka, including the display of Aboriginal people early in the twentieth century, as an illustration of the government’s ‘enlightened’ policies.” This was not a peripheral footnote. It was a reflection of how the colonial Queensland government of the time understood its own relationship to First Nations peoples — as objects of policy, subjects of management, exhibits in a narrative of progress that was entirely constructed by others.

The display of Aboriginal people at colonial exhibitions and agricultural shows was not unique to Queensland. It was a practice that extended across settler-colonial societies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — a form of living spectacle that positioned Indigenous people as artifacts of a supposedly vanishing world, rather than as living nations with ongoing sovereignty over their Country. In Queensland, this practice operated against the backdrop of the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897, which created the position of Protectors of Aboriginals and effectively subjected much of the state’s First Nations population to government control over their movement, labour, and daily lives. The Ekka, as an institution of the Queensland government’s era, was not insulated from these structures. It reflected them.

What makes this historical reality important is not simply that it happened — though it did happen, and it is documented — but that it forms the necessary context for understanding what First Nations presence at the Ekka has meant across different periods. Presence, in this context, is not a neutral fact. It has been coerced, instrumentalised, excluded, and eventually, slowly and partially, reclaimed on different terms.

THE COUNTRY IN WHICH THE SHOW WAS MADE.

Queensland is, by any measure, one of the most linguistically and culturally diverse regions in the world in terms of First Nations heritage. As documented by the State Library of Queensland, there are more than 150 distinct Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language groups across the state. This is not a historical figure — it describes a living reality. Queensland is described in publicly available material from the Queensland Museum as “unique in being the ancestral home to two First Nations groups,” referring to the distinct cultures of Aboriginal peoples of the mainland and Torres Strait Islander peoples of the islands to the state’s north.

The Ekka, by its nature, has always been a statewide gathering. Historically, produce and livestock travelled to Brisbane from stations and farms across the enormous Queensland interior — from the Darling Downs, from the Gulf Country, from the Cape York Peninsula, from communities far beyond the southeast corner. Much of that country is, and has always been, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Country. The men and women who worked the land from which those agricultural products came — the stockmen, the ringers, the station workers across the Queensland pastoral frontier — included a very large number of First Nations people, many of them working under conditions that, particularly before the reform of wages legislation in the 1960s, amounted to indentured labour.

The Queensland pastoral industry, which the Ekka celebrates and represents, was built in substantial part on First Nations labour. This is not a contested historical claim. It is documented extensively by historians of the Australian pastoral frontier, and acknowledged in public records. The cattle, the wool, the agricultural wealth that travelled to Brisbane each August for the show ring competitions did not emerge from an empty or exclusively European landscape. It emerged from country that had been occupied by force and worked, often without fair wages or legal rights, by people whose connection to that country predated any pastoral lease. The Ekka as a celebration of Queensland agriculture is therefore, whether it has always acknowledged this or not, also a gathering at which First Nations contribution is present — embedded in the very products being judged, in the history of the industries being celebrated.

EXCLUSION, SURVIVAL, AND THE LONG MIDDLE.

Between the colonial display of First Nations people as ethnographic curiosities in the early twentieth century and the contemporary moment, there is a long and complicated middle period. For much of the Ekka’s history, First Nations culture was neither displayed with dignity nor absent entirely. It occupied a complicated position: sometimes romantically invoked in the imagery of an imagined Australian bush, sometimes simply invisible within an institution whose official narrative centred a particular — white, agrarian, European-descended — version of Queensland identity.

This is a pattern recognisable across Australian civic institutions of the same era. Royal Shows, agricultural exhibitions, and civic gatherings across the continent were, for the first century or more of their existence, primarily designed to celebrate and consolidate a particular vision of the settler colony as a productive, civilised, and European achievement. First Nations peoples were either absent from this narrative or present within it only as background, contrast, or curiosity. The arc of change — from exclusion toward recognition — has been slow, uneven, and is not complete.

Queensland itself grappled formally and legislatively with this history across the second half of the twentieth century. The reforms to pastoral wages and conditions in the 1960s — which resulted in a mass departure of Aboriginal stockworkers from Queensland stations, displacing many communities in the process — sit in the background of any account of the post-war agricultural show. The community land rights movements of the 1970s and 1980s, the Mabo decision of 1992 — handed down by the High Court of Australia in a case brought by Eddie Mabo of Mer Island, in Torres Strait — and the subsequent Native Title Act of 1993 all changed the legal and political landscape within which Queensland’s civic institutions had to situate themselves. The Ekka, like every other institution of its vintage, was operating within a society whose understanding of First Nations rights, culture, and sovereignty was being profoundly renegotiated.

CONTEMPORARY FIRST NATIONS PRESENCE.

The contemporary Ekka exists in a Queensland that formally acknowledges Country. The Brisbane Showgrounds at Bowen Hills sits within a city that has adopted the practice of Welcome to Country and Acknowledgement of Country as standard civic protocol. The show itself opens each year with formal acknowledgement of the Traditional Owners of the land — the Turrbal and Jagera peoples — as part of the opening ceremonies. This is not cosmetic. It is a marker of a changed civic norm, one that would have been entirely absent from the Ekka of a generation prior.

More substantively, the question of First Nations cultural representation at major events in Queensland — and specifically at Brisbane’s civic gatherings — has been an active part of the conversation about what these institutions are and what they are for. Queensland’s broader cultural sector has, over recent decades, worked to integrate First Nations voices, stories, and cultural practice into the mainstream of civic life. The Queensland Museum’s First Nations collections — encompassing more than 22,000 objects in the Aboriginal collection alone, along with more than 28,000 items from outside Queensland and over 12,000 historic photographs — represent the institutional depth of that commitment. The State Library of Queensland’s kuril dhagun, described as the library’s centre for Queensland’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures since 2006, operates as a gathering place for cultural exchange and community engagement. These institutions do not operate in isolation from the civic events that share their city.

For the Ekka itself, First Nations cultural presence in recent years has extended beyond formal acknowledgement to participation. Indigenous arts, crafts, and cultural demonstrations have formed part of the show’s programming at various points, recognising that Queensland’s cultural identity — the authentic identity, not the invented one — is inseparable from its First Nations foundations. The agricultural competitions at the show include categories that connect to a pastoral industry in which First Nations people were participants, and increasingly, where land management practices informed by Indigenous knowledge are being recognised as relevant to a sustainable agricultural future.

What remains incomplete — and it would be dishonest not to acknowledge this — is the full integration of First Nations cultural authority into the governance and programming of the show itself. The RNA, which runs the Ekka, is a private association established in 1875. Its governance structures have reflected the society from which it emerged. The project of genuinely shared authority over civic institutions, rather than invited participation within structures designed by others, is a longer undertaking than any single institution can resolve in isolation. But the direction of travel is documented, and the Ekka in 2026 — as it approaches its sesquicentennial — is a different institution in this respect than it was at its centenary.

LANGUAGE, COUNTRY, AND THE MEANING OF GATHERING.

There is something worth dwelling on in the concept of gathering itself. The Ekka is, at its core, a gathering — a moment when dispersed communities converge on a single place over a defined period of time. It is, as other articles in this series explore, a ritual as much as an event. The word “gathering” carries weight in this context because gathering — corroboree, ceremony, meeting on Country — is among the most fundamental of First Nations cultural practices. The gathering is not incidental to First Nations culture; it is constitutive of it. It is how knowledge is transmitted, how alliances are formed, how Country is honoured.

The Ekka is not a First Nations gathering. It was not conceived as one, and it would be false to describe it as such. But the observation that Queensland’s largest civic gathering takes place on Turrbal and Jagera Country, and that the act of gathering in this place is itself layered with meanings that predate the colonial institution by tens of thousands of years, is more than a rhetorical flourish. It points to something real about the relationship between place, culture, and collective meaning-making in Queensland.

The State Library of Queensland notes that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages are “intrinsically connected to and inseparable from Country, culture and community.” Language is Country. Country is culture. And the Country at Bowen Hills — the ground beneath the showgrounds, the creek that once ran through what is now the Main Arena — does not become neutral or unnamed simply because a colonial institution was built upon it. The Turrbal name for this country, and the Jagera connection to it, persists beneath and alongside every other layer of meaning that has accumulated since 1876.

This is the kind of understanding that a mature civic institution must work toward: not the erasure of one layer of meaning to make room for another, but the capacity to hold multiple layers simultaneously, in full awareness of how they were made and what they cost.

THE SESQUICENTENNIAL AND WHAT COMES NEXT.

In 2026, the Royal Queensland Show marks its 150th year — its sesquicentennial, as the State Library of Queensland’s Royal Queensland Show Fellowship documentation describes it. The State Library has noted that this anniversary will be supported by fellowship research into the Ekka’s history, and that “new archival content, including photographs, diary excerpts, letters, and audio interviews, will be collected for public display.” The sesquicentennial is, among other things, an opportunity for the institution to reckon honestly with the fullness of its own history.

That reckoning, if it is undertaken seriously, will need to include what UQ researchers documented in 2008: the display of Aboriginal people under colonial policy frameworks. It will need to include the First Nations labour that underpinned the pastoral industries the show celebrates. It will need to include the long exclusion of First Nations cultural authority from the governance of an institution built on First Nations Country. And it will need to include the genuine, if incomplete, work of the present — the formal acknowledgements, the cultural programming, the changed norms — without overstating that work as resolution.

One hundred and fifty years is a long time for any institution. It is also, measured against sixty thousand years of First Nations presence on this continent, a brief interval. The ground at Bowen Hills has absorbed many histories. The question for the Ekka’s next chapter — for its role in the civic life of a Queensland that is also preparing for the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games — is whether those histories can be held honestly, together, in a gathering that is large enough and old enough to bear that weight.

PERMANENCE, RECORD, AND THE CIVIC LAYER.

One of the distinctive features of civic institutions in the present moment is the opportunity to anchor their identity — including the full complexity of that identity — in forms of permanent public record. The onchain namespace project that assigns ekka.queensland as the permanent civic address for the Royal Queensland Show is part of this broader effort: a recognition that an institution of this age, this reach, and this civic significance deserves a fixed point of reference in the emerging infrastructure of verifiable public identity.

That fixed point matters particularly for a subject as layered as First Nations presence at the Ekka. The historical record — the documented display of Aboriginal people under colonial policy, the First Nations labour embedded in the pastoral industries the show celebrates, the slow and ongoing work of cultural recognition — is not a peripheral story. It is central to what the Ekka is and has been across its nearly one hundred and fifty years. A permanent civic record that excludes or smooths over this dimension is not a record of the Ekka. It is a record of only part of it.

The civic function of ekka.queensland as an onchain identity layer is precisely that it creates the conditions for permanence without reduction. A gathering this old, on land this storied, with a history this complex, earns an identity layer that can hold the full weight of what it has been — including what it is still working to become. First Nations presence at the Ekka is not a contemporary addition to an otherwise settled story. It is, and always has been, part of the story itself: embedded in the Country, in the labour, in the colonial archive, in the ceremonies of acknowledgement, and in the ongoing life of peoples whose connection to this place is older than any institution that has ever gathered upon it.