January 1993. The Compass Airlines plane door opens and the heat walks in before anyone walks out. That thick, wet Brisbane summer heat that presses on your chest like a warm towel. A young man steps onto the tarmac and into a city for the very first time that Australia’s southern capitals still call, with a smirk, “a big country town.”
And honestly? They aren’t entirely wrong.
The Brisbane of 1993 is a city still blinking in the afterglow of Expo 88, not quite sure what to do with itself now that the world has gone home. South Bank has only just reopened as parkland. The river is something you cross, not something you use. The CityCats won’t exist for another three years. Lang Park is a suburban footy ground, not a cauldron. The Valley after dark is somewhere your mother tells you not to go. Half the inner suburbs are full of rundown Queenslanders on stumps that nobody wants, selling for prices that would make you weep today. You can park in the CBD. On the street. Easily.
Jim Soorley is in his second year as Lord Mayor. Wayne Goss is Premier, running a state that’s only just emerged from another era entirely. Around 1.3 million people call Greater Brisbane home, and the joke down south is that they roll the footpaths up at 9pm.
The edges of the city are close too. Places like Morayfield and Burpengary to the north, or Park Ridge down south – they aren’t Brisbane. Not really. They’re far, far, far away. Paddocks and pine trees and a servo, somewhere you’d stop for petrol on the way to somewhere else. Nobody in 1993 calls them suburbs.
And the drive to the Gold Coast? An actual drive. You leave Brisbane, and Brisbane ends. The highway rolls through long, empty stretches of bushland and farmland. Beenleigh, Yatala, Ormeau flickering past as gaps between the trees. Two separate cities, with genuine countryside breathing in between.
Now step off a plane in 2026.
The city that greets you has more than doubled. Some 2.8 million people and climbing, swollen by decades of southerners who came for a look and never left. Interstate migration has been running hot for years; the very people who once smirked at the “country town” now bid against each other at its auctions. Those unloved Queenslanders on stumps? Renovated, celebrated, and trading north of two million dollars in the inner ring.
The river the young man barely noticed in 1993 is now the city’s main street. Ferries gliding past a skyline that has sprouted like bamboo. Queen’s Wharf towers over the CBD. Cross River Rail is threading new stations under the river itself. Lang Park became Suncorp Stadium, one of the great rectangular grounds on earth. And somewhere in a drawer at City Hall sits the paperwork for the biggest show of all: the 2032 Olympic Games, awarded to the “country town” the rest of the world now watches with envy.
And those far, far away places? Morayfield and Burpengary are now simply the northside. Established outer suburbs of the metropolitan area, with train stations, shopping centres, schools and tens of thousands of residents. Park Ridge is a booming growth corridor that planners talk about in the tens of thousands of future homes. The paddocks the young man flew over in 1993 are now somebody’s street.
The empty drive to the Gold Coast is gone too. The bushland gaps filled in, one estate at a time. Beenleigh to Ormeau to Coomera to Pimpama. Until the two cities quietly fused into one continuous metropolis. Today you can drive from Caboolture to Coolangatta and never really leave the city. The countryside that once separated Brisbane from the Gold Coast didn’t disappear overnight. It disappeared one subdivision at a time, while most people weren’t paying attention. And every one of those subdivisions made someone money.
House prices tell the same story in fewer words. What that young man could have bought in 1993 for the price of a decent car deposit has, in many suburbs, multiplied more than tenfold. The people who bought back then weren’t geniuses. They just happened to be standing in the right city before everyone else realised it was the right city.
And that’s the real lesson of Brisbane. Cities change. Slowly, then suddenly. The place everyone overlooks becomes the place everyone can’t afford. It happened to Brisbane over thirty years. And right now, somewhere in Australia, it’s quietly happening again to a suburb most people have never heard of.
The young man from 1993 couldn’t have known what Brisbane would become. But someone, somewhere, was reading the signs.
That’s the job. Reading the signs. Before the plane lands.
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