Queens Gardens

Not only is Queens Gardens the city’s only intact heritage-surrounded green square but it holds archaeological importance, having been part of the convict settlement in the 1820s. It is also a legacy of one of the city’s revered landscape architects Harry Oakman, the gardens having being established as an ongoing project between 1905 and 1962.

Harking back to the convict era, a weatherboard engineer’s cottage, thought to be the first house in Brisbane, once occupied the corner of Elizabeth and William Sts, with the rest of the site a lumberyard that supplied the colony’s timber for their shanty town style buildings.

Come the 1850s the church had moved in, with St John’s Pro-cathedral erected adjacent to William St and a scattering of church-related buildings followed in the latter half of the 19th century. By 1899 they had all been purchased by the government and in 1904 were demolished to make way for the first gardens, known as the Executive Gardens. Today the only reminder is a marble slab which marks the spot where the alter of the pro-cathedral was located.

In 1906 the bronze statue of Queen Victoria, a replica of the statue in Portsmouth by English sculptor Thomas Brock, was unveiled on Empire Day to an admiring crowd of thousands, many of whom had paid by subscription as a contribution to its cost, and it remains the only statue of this monarch in Brisbane.

Also funded by public subscription and incongruously sharing the limelight with Her Majesty is the bronze statue of ex-Premier TJ Ryan. Decked out in Kings Counsel Robes the revered 19th century statesman and Federal Labor leader, sculpted by prolific empire statue sculptor E Bertram MacKennal, holds court in the opposite corner. In the middle sits a captured World War I German Krupp field gun, gifted by Victoria’s grandson George V (father of stutterer George VI).

Surrounded by the low rise century old grandeur of the Old Museum, Treasury buildings and Family Services building, the trees are kept at an appropriately low height for scale as part of the garden layout which was instigated in the early 1960s by Harry Oakman.