Claire Moore nurses a cup of tea as she drinks in the view of a broad sweep of river from the back veranda of a stately home set amid august figs and an avenue of queen palms.
“I think there is no more beautiful place in Brisbane,” the former senator says.
Yet despite the proprietorial ease with which Moore moves through its lavish 19th-century decor, the city’s oldest standing European residence is not hers alone.
Once the domain of the city’s colonial elite, Newstead House belongs to the public and over recent decades has hosted hundreds of weddings and served countless Devonshire teas for the city’s more humble folk too, its timber floors resounded with the trudge of many a school group.
Closed for government-funded refurbishments in 2021, the 178-year-old building threw open its doors once more this month, $6.6m later, its exterior painted a vibrant azure blue and interior wallpapered in the Victorian extravagance of its heyday.
Now Moore, chair of the house’s board of trustees, is looking forward to welcoming students and hosting weddings once again.
“We want it to be a living museum,” she says. “Brisbane has got its house back.”
But the view from Newstead House’s wrap-around veranda is a poignant reminder that its survival was no accident. For four decades from the 1940s, this spot would have offered a glimpse of a nearly 18-metre-high neon light parabolic arch. Built by the man behind Melbourne’s Luna Park and perched atop a hill, the Cloudland Ballroom was a landmark on the city’s skyline and psyche, with dances, concerts and debutante balls held upon its sprung timber floor and amid its Corinthian columns, potted palms and twinkling lights for generations.
Until, in the dark early hours of 7 November 1982, Cloudland was suddenly and violently torn down by the infamous Deen Brothers. This was Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland, an era in which many of the city’s built icons were sacrificed upon the altar of progress.
Decades earlier, Moore says, Newstead House dodged a similar menace.
World war was once again brewing and, with its spacious grounds, river frontage and proximity to port, there was talk of turning the estate into a factory. In 1939, though, the state government put any such talk to bed.
“Newstead House is the only heritage place in Brisbane with its own act of parliament,” Moore says.
Upstream several bends and on the other side of the serpentine river is another grand old home to have been recently restored to former glory – though not by the public purse.
The heritage-listed Home, or Lamb House as it was known for much of its 120-odd-year history, sits atop convict-carved cliffs of Kangaroo Point and commands what its new owner, the Racing Queensland chair and former stockbroker Steve Wilson, calls “one of the great urban views in Australia”.
“It is blessed with perching high on this magnificent site which looks down over ‘the Brown Snake’ and across the botanical gardens to this booming city of ours,” he says.
This prominent perch also made the gradual dereliction of Home a highly public affair, the city looking on in horror as the abandoned building’s roof collapsed, its walls covered in graffiti and rubbish carpeted its floors.
Until, in 2021, the city forced its sale and Wilson and his wife, Jane – a medical doctor and prominent corporate director – bought the place for the princely sum of $12.75m.
Over the subsequent two-and-a-half years the Wilsons invested a figure in the order of $15m restoring Home, not to mention the other $6.6m splashed buying an adjoining 19th-century mansion.
This was by no means Wilson’s first foray into heritage resurrection. He backed the recent refurbishment of Queensland’s oldest standing 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 battle-hardened in heritage,” Wilson says.
Wilson says he was driven by a sense of civic responsibility to hire a small army of specialist craftspeople, skilled in working everything from stained glass to clay roof tiles, to see the restoration done properly.
“I just think Home is a shining beacon of good architects responding to a place,” Wilson says. “And Queensland needs to have places like that restored.”
The architect and heritage conservation expert David Gole, who worked on the restorations of Newstead and Lamb houses, says the projects represent a “maturity in Brisbane’s and Queensland’s attitude and approach toward its significant heritage places”.
Speaking from Addis Ababa, where he is leading a decade-long renovation of Ethiopia’s landmark Africa Hall, Gole says Home’s “very public deterioration” became a symbol for the risk to Brisbane’s heritage and a “distressing” reminder of the days of the Deen Brothers in which buildings were “lost” overnight.
“Instead, it became a symbol that we are not prepared to lose important places any more,” he says.
But Gole, a Queensland Heritage Council member, says the city has been on a “long journey” since those dark days, strengthening heritage protections at local and state levels.
“I think people in Brisbane do have a strong sense of identifying with the housing typologies here,” he says. “There is definitely a sense of pride, civic pride, and you see that in how people are caring for their homes.”
Indeed, Home’s near death experience saw the Department of Environment, Science and Innovation adopt the 22 recommendations of an advisory panel to beef up heritage protection.
A spokesperson says the department is “on track to implement all these recommendations by 2026”.
However, others are concerned about the fate of Brisbane’s architectural heritage. The historian and Brisbane Living Heritage director Christopher Dawson warns the city’s character remains “very much at risk”.
Dawson says the public investment in Newstead House was “highly surprising”, though promising, and described the private refurbishment of Lamb House as an “absolutely wonderful thing to do”. But the former, he says, seems to be “a one-off” while the latter “not something that is going to happen a lot”.
The Brisbane Powerhouse arts centre is a rare example of a large heritage site being kept “alive” through “events and interpretations” – but Dawson says he’s not seeing these kinds of investments elsewhere.
He points to the once notorious Boggo Road Gaol, now languishing, for which he and many others have campaigned for years to convert into a “thriving dynamic space” mixing artist studios, libraries, museums and community spaces.
“In Queensland, they seem very unwilling to invest in that manner long term,” he says. “I think they see these large structures as loss-making over time and not something they can get a return on.”
But such “economic rationalism”, he says, impoverishes Brisbane, and risks turning it into a “blank slate new city”.
And it is not just the big structures that have been neglected – heritage homes, shops and streetscapes are being “overshadowed or redeveloped until they have changed completely” all around the city in a “pro-development” culture in which the value of real estate triumphs but that of heritage “is not respected at all”.
“Heritage is what makes a town special,” Dawson says. “But, often, heritage doesn’t make money”.
