Claire Moore sips a cup of tea as she looks out over a wide river from the back porch of a stately home surrounded by beautiful fig trees and an avenue of queen palms.
“I don’t think there’s a more beautiful place in Brisbane,” says the former senator.
But despite the ease with which Moore moves through the opulent 19th-century interior, the city’s oldest surviving European residence is not alone.
Once the domain of the city’s colonial elite, Newstead House is now public property. Over the decades, it has hosted hundreds of weddings and countless Devonshire tea parties for the city’s more modest population. Its wooden floors have echoed to the plodding of many a school group.
The 178-year-old building closed in 2021 for government-funded renovations, but reopened this month. $6.6 million later, the exterior was painted a vibrant azure blue and the interior was hung with the Victorian extravagance of its heyday.
Moore, chairman of the house’s board of trustees, is looking forward to welcoming students back and hosting weddings.
“We want it to be a living museum,” she says. “Brisbane has its home back.”
But the view from the wraparound veranda of Newstead House is a poignant reminder that it’s no accident that it’s survived. For four decades, from the 1940s through the ’40s, the venue offered glimpses of a nearly 60-foot-high neon parabolic arch. Built by the man behind Melbourne’s Luna Park and perched on a hill, the Cloudland Ballroom was a landmark in the city’s skyline and psyche, with dances, concerts and debutante balls held for generations on its sprung wooden floor amid Corinthian columns, potted palms and twinkling lights.
Until Cloudland was suddenly and violently demolished by the infamous Deen Brothers in the dark early hours of 7 November 1982. This was Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland, an era when many of the city’s built icons were sacrificed on the altar of progress.
Decades earlier, Moore says, Newstead House escaped a similar threat.
There was another world war going on and with its spacious grounds, river front and proximity to the harbour there was talk of turning the estate into a factory. In 1939 however the state government put such talks aside.
“Newstead House is the only heritage site in Brisbane with its own Act of Parliament,” Moore says.
Upstream, a few bends further and on the other side of the winding river, stands another large old house that has recently been restored to its former glory – but not with government money.
The World Heritage-listed house, or Lamb House as it was known for much of its 120-year history, stands on the convict-carved cliffs of Kangaroo Point and offers what its new owner, Racing Queensland chairman and former stockbroker Steve Wilson, calls “one of the finest urban views in Australia”.
“It is blessed with an elevated position in this beautiful location, with views over ‘the Brown Snake’ and across the botanical gardens to our thriving city,” he says.
This prominence also made Home’s gradual dereliction a very public affair. The city watched in horror as the roof of the abandoned building collapsed, its walls were covered in graffiti, and its floors were littered with trash.
Until the city forced its sale in 2021, and Wilson and his wife Jane – a physician and prominent business executive – purchased the property for the princely sum of $12.75 million.
Over the next two and a half years, the Wilsons invested approximately $15 million in restoring Home, and spent an additional $6.6 million to purchase an adjacent 19th-century mansion.
This was hardly Wilson’s first foray into heritage revival. He supported the recent renovation of Queensland’s oldest surviving theatre in nearby Woolloongabba, as well as one of the state’s oldest cattle stations, not to mention the Wilsons’ former Highgate Hill home of 38 years, designed by the same architect behind Lamb House.
“I’m a seasoned heritage expert,” says Wilson.
Wilson says he was driven by a sense of social responsibility to hire a small army of specialized craftsmen, who could work on everything from stained glass to clay roof tiles, to ensure the restoration was done right.
“I just think Home is a shining beacon of good architects responding to place,” Wilson says. “And Queensland needs places like this being regenerated.”
According to architect and heritage conservation expert David Gole, who worked on the restoration of the Newstead and Lamb houses, the projects represent “a maturity in Brisbane and Queensland’s attitude and approach to their significant heritage sites”.
Speaking from Addis Ababa, where he is leading a decade-long renovation of Ethiopia’s iconic Africa Hall, Gole said the “very public deterioration” of Home had become a symbol of the risk to Brisbane’s heritage and a “poignant” reminder of the Deen Brothers days, when buildings were “lost” overnight.
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“Instead, it became a symbol that we are no longer willing to lose important places,” he says.
But Gole, a member of the Queensland Heritage Council, says the city has been on a “long journey” since those dark days, with heritage protections strengthened at local and state levels.
“I think people in Brisbane identify strongly with the housing typologies here,” he says. “There’s definitely a sense of pride, civic pride, and that’s reflected in the way people look after their homes.”
Home’s near-death experience indeed prompted the Ministry of Environment, Science and Innovation to adopt 22 recommendations from an advisory committee to improve heritage protection.
A spokesperson said the department was “on track to implement all of these recommendations by 2026”.
Others, however, are concerned about the fate of Brisbane’s architectural heritage. Historian and director of Brisbane Living Heritage Christopher Dawson warns that the city’s character remains “very much at risk”.
Dawson says the public investment in Newstead House has been “very surprising”, though promising, and describes the private refurbishment of Lamb House as an “absolutely wonderful thing to do”. But the former, he says, appears to be “a one-off”, while the latter is “not something that will happen very often”.
The Brisbane Powerhouse arts centre is a rare example of a major heritage being kept ‘alive’ through ‘events and interpretations’. But Dawson says he doesn’t see this kind of investment anywhere else.
He points to the once-infamous Boggo Road Gaol, now languishing and which he and many others have campaigned for years to transform into a “thriving, dynamic space” with a mix of artist studios, libraries, museums and community spaces.
“In Queensland they don’t seem prepared to invest in that way for the long term,” he says. “I think they see these big structures as loss-making in the long term and not something they can make a return on.”
But such “economic rationalism”, he says, impoverishes Brisbane and risks turning it into “a new, blank city”.
And it’s not just the big buildings that are neglected – historic homes, shops and streets across the city are being “overshadowed or redeveloped to the point of complete disrepair” in a “pro-development” culture where property values triumph but heritage “isn’t respected at all”.
“Heritage is what makes a city special,” says Dawson. “But heritage often doesn’t make money.”