National park
Fort Lytton National Park
Pentagonal river-mouth fortress with grassy ramparts, a moat, and disappearing colonial-era guns.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Fort Lytton National Park in Brisbane turns on an odd habit of colonial Queensland: for roughly forty years starting in eighteen eighty-one, families treated an active gun fort as a day out, riding the train down every Easter to watch volunteer soldiers drill. It traces the Russian invasion scare that got the fort built and engineer Peter Scratchley's pentagon design. Listen for the mechanical trick that let the fort's heaviest gun vanish from view within seconds of firing.
This audio guide was created using AI.