The country comes to town: Encounters at a metropolitan agricultural show

For much of the twentieth century, the Brisbane Exhibition was the most significant annual event in Queensland’s capital city. Until the 1980s, show week – a ‘week’ that could stretch from a few days to a fortnight – was when Brisbane came closest to being a bustling urban centre, ‘a miniature London’, according to one enthusiast. Ironically, that status was achieved through an influx of rural Queenslanders, rural products and rural values. As the state’s preeminent display of pastoral and agricultural industries and the occasion for celebrating the interdependence of rural and urban Queensland, the core values of the Brisbane Exhibition proved remarkably resilient across the twentieth century, despite (or perhaps because of) the profound changes that occurred in Brisbane and beyond. Drawing on interviews with rural and urban visitors, exhibitors, volunteers, employees and business owners, this paper explores the significance of the Brisbane Exhibition’s urban context for individual showgoers and for the show itself. It reflects on the extent to which the show has contributed to definitions of urban life in Brisbane and the extent to which Brisbane’s expansion shaped the Exhibition and individuals’ understandings of the event’s significance