Customs House

About this audio guide

Customs House in Brisbane spent its first century as a working customs post on the river, and this guide follows one unlikely night in May nineteen oh one when the building itself joined a citywide royal celebration. It traces the structure from its eighteen eighty-nine opening and a flood that soaked its basement records, through three hundred working officers, to its nineteen eighty-eight closure and University of Queensland restoration. Along the way it asks how a building made to be feared by smugglers ended up hosting weddings under its own copper dome.