In 1823, responding to political pressure to shift the "worst type of felons" away from Sydney and the southeast - the further the better - the New South Wales government sent the Surveyor General John Oxley north to find a suitable site for a new prison colony. Sailing into Moreton Bay , he encountered three shipwrecked convicts who had been living with Aborigines for several months; they introduced Oxley to a previously unknown river. He explored it briefly, named it "Brisbane" after the governor, and the next year established a convict settlement at Redcliffe on the coast. This was immediately abandoned in favour of better anchorage further upstream, and by the end of 1824 today's city centre had become the site of Brisbane Town.

Twenty years on, a land shortage down south persuaded the government to move out the convicts and free up the Moreton Bay area to settlers. Immigrants on government-assisted passages poured in and Brisbane began to shape up as a busy port - an unattractive, awkward settlement of rutted streets and wooden shacks. By far the largest regional settlement of the times, Brisbane was the obvious choice as capital of the new state of Queensland on its formation in 1859, though the city's first substantial buildings were constructed only in the late 1860s, after fire had destroyed the original centre and state bankruptcy was averted by Queensland's first gold strikes at Gympie. Even so, development was slow and uneven: new townships were founded around the centre at Fortitude Valley, Kangaroo Point and Breakfast Creek, gradually merging into a city.

After World War II, when General Douglas MacArthur used Brisbane as his headquarters to co-ordinate attacks on Japanese forces based throughout the Pacific, Brisbane stagnated, earning a reputation as a dull, underdeveloped backwater - not least thanks to the Bjelke-Petersen regime. As if to remove all trace of his rule, Brisbane underwent a thorough facelift before hosting the 1988 World Expo , when eighteen million visitors came to experience "Leisure in the Age of Technology". Not least for locals, who treated it as something of a coming-out party, the Expo provided a real boost after years of tedium and through the 1990s, under the public-spirited mayor Jim Soorely , the city became an increasingly busy and pleasant place to spend some time.

Seen from the river or the top of Mount Coot-tha, Brisbane is attractive enough, with the typical features of any Australian city of a comparable age and size: a historic precinct, museums and botanic gardens. There's a confused blur of old and new, crammed in side by side rather than split into distinct districts, while new suburbs are blithely added to the shapeless edges as the need arises. The residents, too, have a spontaneous manner, partly because many are new to the area. In the early 1990s, economic malaise in Australia's southern states resulted in a steady northward migration of people seeking work - or at least finding Queensland a better place to be unemployed - and Brisbane was the obvious first stop. It's still a fairly easy place to find casual, short-term employment, and there's a healthy, unpredictable social scene , tempting many travellers to spend longer here than they had planned. As for exploring further afield, you'll find empty beaches and surf on North Stradbroke Island and Moreton Island - both easy to reach from the city - as well as subtropical woods in Brisbane Forest Park , a twenty-minute drive from the centre.