STANDING ON YUGGERA AND TURRBAL COUNTRY.

The south bank of the Brisbane River was a place of gathering long before concrete was poured and a performing arts centre rose from its banks. The south bank of the Brisbane River was a gathering place long before the building of QPAC. Traditionally home to the Yuggera and Turrbal people, the areas surrounding the southern bank of the Brisbane River were originally known as ‘Kurilpa’ — meaning ‘place of water rats’. For tens of thousands of years, that stretch of river country functioned as a place to meet, exchange stories, sing, and dance. The gathering impulse encoded in the land did not disappear with colonisation. It endured. And it is that endurance — the unbroken continuity of culture through and despite historical rupture — that gives the First Nations programming at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre its particular weight.

The Queensland Performing Arts Centre is located on the corner of Melbourne Street and Grey Street in Brisbane’s South Bank precinct. Opened in 1985, the venue forms part of the Queensland Cultural Centre, and includes the Lyric Theatre, Concert Hall, Playhouse, Cremorne Theatre, and Glasshouse Theatre. In institutional terms, QPAC is the state’s peak performing arts venue — the place where cultural life in Queensland is most formally concentrated. That concentration carries responsibility. A venue of such civic weight cannot be neutral about whose stories are told within its walls, whose artists are given resources, and whose cultures are represented as living rather than archival. The question of First Nations presence at QPAC is therefore not merely a programming question. It is a question about what Queensland, as a polity and a place, understands itself to be.

QPAC has acknowledged that it is located on Yuggera and Turrbal Country, honouring the First Nations ancestors, their spirits and legacy, and acknowledging that for thousands of years this Country has been a place to meet, to share stories, sing and dance. The organisation believes the arts is in a unique position to enable those traditions to continue and to provide opportunities for contemporary expression. That acknowledgement is the starting point. But it is not, in itself, sufficient. What distinguishes QPAC’s current approach is the attempt to move beyond acknowledgement into structural, resourced, and First Nations-led commitment.

FROM PRESENTATION TO STRUCTURAL COMMITMENT.

The shift in how QPAC approaches First Nations arts over the past decade is best understood not as a change in programming taste but as a change in institutional philosophy. QPAC’s First Nations programming strengthens connections between First Nations Peoples and the mainstream arts industry through strategic leadership and partnerships. The phrase “strategic leadership” is significant. It signals that this is not a matter of occasional booking decisions — of slotting First Nations performances into gaps in a predominantly Western calendar — but of orienting a significant strand of the institution’s operational identity around a specific civic purpose.

The program is created, produced and managed by a team of First Nations creatives, and supports new works in development while training and upskilling new artists and arts workers through full-scale stage works, festivals, and community events. The distinction between a program that presents First Nations work and a program that is led and managed by First Nations people is not a bureaucratic nicety. It reflects a genuine epistemological difference — between an institution that treats Indigenous culture as content to be curated by others, and one that recognises First Nations people as the appropriate custodians of their own artistic and cultural production.

QPAC is committed to supporting the creative and cultural development of works created by First Nations artists from Queensland and across Australia. QPAC will support and empower First Nations artists to create work that explores love, life, celebration, loss, pain and grief through a black perspective. That breadth of emotional and thematic territory — grief alongside celebration, pain alongside love — matters. It resists the reduction of First Nations arts to didactic cultural explanation or ceremonial performance. It insists on the full range of human experience as Indigenous artistic terrain.

CLANCESTRY: A FESTIVAL ROOTED IN CONTINUITY.

The clearest expression of QPAC’s First Nations programming identity is the Clancestry festival. Clancestry returns from 30 July to 8 August 2026 for an extraordinary celebration of First Nations storytelling, music, dance, art and culture at QPAC. An iconic event on QPAC’s calendar since 2013, Clancestry celebrates identity, connection and cultural continuity, providing a platform for both established and emerging First Nations artists to share their stories and talents.

Celebrating First Nations arts, cultures and storytelling at the state’s premier performing arts venue, the 2023 Clancestry festival kicked off at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre marking a decade since its inaugural presentation. A decade is long enough to assess whether a festival has become genuinely embedded in the life of an institution, or whether it remains a periodic insertion into a programme that is otherwise organised around different assumptions. By the evidence of Clancestry’s trajectory, the former is closer to the truth.

Featuring an exciting program of live events, activities, concerts, workshops, theatre, and children’s events, Clancestry is a contemporary festival with a timeless heritage supporting more than one hundred First Nations artists every year. Importantly the festival includes performances and participation by both emerging and established artists and provides vital exposure to new and broad audiences. In addition to the performance and activity schedule, the festival also includes professional development opportunities for First Nations artists including creative development of new work, workshops and presentation of new work.

Proudly curated and led by First Nations people, Clancestry is a space to create, listen and share — just as our ancestors have done for thousands of years. The temporal framing in that statement — “just as our ancestors have done for thousands of years” — is not rhetorical flourish. It is a claim about cultural continuity that gives the festival its foundational meaning. The gathering of First Nations artists at a venue built on the banks of Kurilpa is not a new cultural practice imported into an alien space. It is the resumption and continuation of a practice with deep roots in the ground on which the building stands.

Clancestry is particularly important as Queensland looks to the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games, which is set to be a powerful celebration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts and cultures in Queensland. Brisbane 2032 adds a new civic dimension to what Clancestry has been building since 2013. A global audience will eventually arrive in Queensland seeking to understand what this place is and what it values. The accumulation of programming depth, artist relationships, and community trust developed through a decade of Clancestry will form part of the cultural foundation on which that encounter rests.

BANGARRA AND THE DEPTH OF PARTNERSHIP.

QPAC regularly hosts many of Australia’s leading performing arts companies including The Australian Ballet, Sydney Dance Company, Australian Chamber Orchestra, and Bangarra Dance Theatre. Of these partnerships, the relationship with Bangarra Dance Theatre is perhaps the most consequential for understanding QPAC’s First Nations commitments. Since its founding in 1989, the story of Bangarra Dance Theatre has been the story of First Nations culture and tales leaping, spinning, swirling and twirling across the stage via some of the best dance works that Australia has ever produced.

Bangarra Dance Theatre is described as Australia’s leading contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander dance company, with deep and enduring connections to Queensland including annual seasons at QPAC. Bangarra and QPAC have forged a close relationship as presenting partners for more than two decades. The length of that partnership matters. A relationship measured in decades is not a transactional arrangement between a venue and a touring company. It is a sustained creative and institutional alliance with shared investment in continuity.

The breadth of Bangarra’s work at QPAC illustrates the range available when First Nations performance is taken seriously as an artistic form. From the extraordinary Bangarra Dance Theatre comes an iridescent theatrical experience, drawing together dance, music and visual arts to explore the ways light has captivated and sustained Indigenous cultural existence for millennia. Today, artificial light pollution disrupts ecosystems and obscures the dark night sky, devastating First Nations people’s connections to sky country and limiting their ability to share celestial knowledge and skylore. Work of this complexity — where cosmological knowledge, environmental concern, and choreographic sophistication meet in a single production — is not peripheral to the cultural life of the state. It is central to it.

The Queensland Government has provided $8 million to QPAC over four years to support First Nations programming, which helps to celebrate First Nations artists, stories and cultures. Public investment at that scale reflects an institutional understanding that First Nations arts programming cannot be sustained by box office alone, and that the state has an active interest in ensuring this strand of Queensland’s cultural life has the resources it requires.

DEVELOPING ARTISTS, NOT JUST PRESENTING THEM.

A venue that only presents finished work — however excellent — does not take full responsibility for the ecosystem that produces that work. QPAC’s approach has increasingly emphasised the development of First Nations artists and new works, not just their presentation on a mainstage.

As part of QPAC’s First Nations programming, Seedlings provides creative development opportunities to artists and creatives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage. Consisting of four strands — Sparks (writing), Footprints (dance), Blakbeats (music) and New Works — the program has brought together artists to explore, seed new ideas and challenge forms of expression.

Sparks is a PLAYLAB THEATRE and QPAC partnership program which runs for a year and is designed to facilitate pathway opportunities for First Nations artists in the performing arts. Extending the pathway established by QPAC and Playlab Theatre’s Sparks program, Ignition is the next step for First Nations playwrights to further advance their creative practice. The sequential logic here — Sparks as an entry point, Ignition as a progression — reflects a considered investment in career development rather than a single-moment intervention.

Storytellers is a partnership program between QPAC and Metro Arts designed to realise fresh ideas and foster new voices in theatre. Leveraging both organisations’ strengths in developing original work, this initiative invites First Nations playwrights and physical theatre artists to explore and shape bold new performance concepts.

In 2019, leading First Nations choreographers Marilyn Miller (Kukuyalanji and Waanyi), Jasmin Sheppard (Tagalaka and Kurtitjar) and Katina Olsen (Wakka Wakka and Kombumerri) first seeded a powerful new dance project showcasing First Nations-led responses to the environmental devastation of colonisation and climate change. Projects of this kind — emerging from community and Country, developed over years, engaging multiple Nations in conversation — represent exactly the kind of deep creative work that pathway programs are designed to support. They cannot be produced without infrastructure that sustains an artist’s practice from early development through to full production.

The Seedlings program focuses on the creative development process, enabling artists and creatives the space to explore, seed new ideas, and challenge forms of expression. Footprints explores the traditional and contemporary world of First Nations dance through the creative and cultural exchange of practising artists. The pairing of traditional and contemporary here is characteristic of how First Nations arts at QPAC are framed — not as a museum practice preserving forms from the past, but as a living creative tradition in continuous development.

CIVIC MEMORY AND THE MABO ORATION.

First Nations presence at QPAC is not confined to the performance stage. In 2005, the Anti-Discrimination Commission Queensland (ADCQ) and QPAC partnered to establish the Mabo Oration — a biennial public oration. The choice of QPAC as the venue for an oration honouring the legacy of Eddie Mabo and the 1992 High Court decision that recognised native title carries its own significance. A performing arts centre is a place of civic assembly, not merely artistic entertainment. The Mabo Oration at QPAC enacts that civic dimension with particular clarity — using the state’s primary cultural venue as a space for public reflection on the most consequential legal transformation in Australian Indigenous affairs of the twentieth century.

"The Mabo Case and the legacy of Eddie Mabo himself remind us that there are times in our nation's history where the tide turns and Australians begin to understand that the fates of Aboriginal and other Australians are tied." — Professor Larissa Behrendt, The Mabo Oration 2007, QPAC

The Mabo Oration is held on land — Kurilpa, the country of the Yuggera and Turrbal peoples — that embodies the argument being made. The continuity of custodianship, the legitimacy of prior sovereignty, the ongoing relationship between people and place: these are not abstract legal principles at QPAC. They are the lived reality of the ground on which the building stands.

Building on the success of QPAC’s Reflect Reconciliation Action Plan launched in 2022 and its Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property commitment, QPAC has taken the next step in its reconciliation journey with the launch of its Innovate RAP in September 2024. The Innovate RAP signifies a commitment to creating a future where First Nations voices are celebrated and empowered across the arts and ensuring First Nations involvement in QPAC beyond the stage and into everyday operations.

The phrase “beyond the stage and into everyday operations” is worth dwelling on. It represents the difference between a performance of commitment and the embedding of commitment into institutional structure. When First Nations perspectives shape hiring, procurement, governance, and the design of programs that are never seen by a public audience, the institution is changing in ways that no single festival or touring production can achieve on its own.

LANGUAGE, IDENTITY, AND THE FULLNESS OF CULTURE.

Among the programming strands at QPAC, the choral and music dimensions of First Nations work carry particular resonance. Barragga Yangga is presented as a moving choral celebration of First Nations language, story and song. The restoration of First Nations languages to the stage — to an acoustically designed concert hall, amplified and formally presented — is not a minor cultural courtesy. It is the reversal of a historical suppression. Language is not a vessel for culture; it is constitutive of it. To hear a First Nations language fill the Concert Hall at QPAC is to understand, viscerally, that the culture carried in that language did not end.

Guided by First Nations musicians, students explore how song becomes a voice for truth and transformation — investigating stories of colonialism, the Stolen Generations, and resilience. The educational programming at QPAC connects this work to the next generation of audiences and practitioners. When children encounter First Nations music not as an exhibit but as a living contemporary practice shaped by real artists navigating real contemporary concerns — colonialism, resilience, identity — they are being given a more complete picture of the culture they inhabit.

The debut performance by the Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir at QPAC was a resounding success with audiences treated to extraordinary choral singing from the outback. That moment — women from Central Australia, carrying songs from country far removed from the Brisbane River, performing at Queensland’s peak performing arts venue — condenses something important about what a national First Nations arts program at a state institution can accomplish. It is not only about local connection to Country, though that matters deeply. It is also about the breadth of First Nations Australia, and the obligation of a state venue to serve as a platform for that breadth.

Ya’Djin Spirit Women weaves dance, theatre and film to traverse storytelling, sisterhood and speaking out. Work of this kind — multidisciplinary, assertively contemporary, made by and for First Nations women — represents the frontier of what QPAC’s programming can hold. The range is what matters: from ancient skylore mediated through choreography, to contemporary spoken word, to children’s circus, to choral language revival, to political theatre drawn from the youth justice system. A collection of hilarious and heartbreaking stories born from workshops with young people experiencing the youth justice system is First Nations performance at QPAC, too. Not ceremonial. Not safely distant from the difficult present. Directly engaged with the material conditions of First Nations lives in Queensland today.

THE PERMANENT CIVIC ADDRESS OF A LIVING TRADITION.

Queensland Performing Arts Centre occupies a specific, documented, publicly accountable position in Queensland’s civic architecture. QPAC is governed by a Board of Trustees appointed by the Queensland Government and managed by an Executive Group responsible for the operations and the achievement of the Centre’s strategic priorities. That governance structure is the mechanism by which public values — values about whose culture matters, whose stories deserve resourcing, whose presence in the state’s most prominent performing arts venue is treated as essential rather than exceptional — are translated into institutional practice.

The onchain civic infrastructure project that identifies this institution as qpac.queensland participates in a parallel logic of permanence. Just as QPAC holds a specific, irrevocable address in the physical fabric of South Bank, the namespace anchors the institution to Queensland’s emerging digital civic layer — a record of its identity that is neither provisional nor dependent on any single platform’s continued existence. The argument for permanent civic addresses in digital infrastructure mirrors the argument for permanent institutional presence of First Nations arts in Queensland’s peak venue: both resist the temporariness that marginalises what should be central.

At QPAC, the organisation greatly values its role in supporting and promoting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts, artists, arts workers and organisations throughout its programming. That valuation, stated publicly and backed by documented programs, structural governance commitments, and consistent public investment, is the accumulation of choices made over time. No single decision makes an institution into this. A decade of Clancestry, twenty-plus years of Bangarra seasons, a biennial oration bearing Mabo’s name, pathway programs developing playwrights and choreographers and musicians from Country — these are the building blocks of something that can reasonably be called a structural commitment rather than a policy position.

Queensland is a place shaped, more than most Australian states, by the geographic and cultural diversity of First Nations peoples. From the Yuggera and Turrbal of the Brisbane River to the communities of Cape York, the Torres Strait, the Gulf Country, and the Channel Country, the breadth of distinct cultures, languages, and artistic traditions within the state’s borders is extraordinary. A performing arts centre that takes seriously its responsibility to this breadth cannot operate as a single-city venue with occasional regional gestures. QPAC’s First Nations program is bold, resilient, and features fierce black work from local, regional and national First Nations artists. Local, regional, and national: three distinct scales of obligation, each requiring different relationships, different logistics, different investments of trust and time.

The question that follows from everything QPAC’s First Nations programming has built is one of permanence and depth. Festivals can be cancelled. Pathway programs can lose funding. Reconciliation Action Plans can become compliance exercises rather than living commitments. The institutional memory required to sustain what has been constructed — the relationships with communities, the pipeline of developing artists, the civic trust of audiences who have learned to regard this programming as genuinely theirs — is fragile in ways that the physical building is not.

This is where the logic of civic address matters beyond its technical function. qpac.queensland as a permanent namespace for this institution is a small but real act of anchoring: an assertion that what QPAC is, what it has committed to, what it holds in trust for the people of Queensland and for the First Nations cultures whose country it stands upon, is not provisional. The gathering that happens here — the singing, the dancing, the orations, the children’s workshops, the development of new work by artists from dozens of nations across this vast state — is a continuation of what Kurilpa has always been: a place to meet, to share, and to make culture together.