THE SILENCE OF AUGUST.

There is a particular quality to August in Brisbane — a coolness that arrives without announcement, the “Ekka winds” that sweep through the city each year in the days before the show opens, as if the weather itself keeps the calendar. For nearly a century and a half, those winds have meant something specific: the Brisbane Showgrounds at Bowen Hills would fill with cattle and crowd noise, with the smell of dagwood dogs and show bags and fairy floss, with the particular minor chaos of a city and a countryside occupying the same ground for ten days each year. The Royal Queensland Show — the Ekka — has been, since its first edition in August 1876, a fixed coordinate in the civic life of Queensland.

The Ekka has been held every year, with the exception of the Spanish flu pandemic in 1919, World War II in 1942, and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, when the Ekka was cancelled. That short list carries more weight than its brevity suggests. Three categories of catastrophe — epidemic, world war, global pandemic — are the only forces that have, in nearly 150 years, been sufficient to stop the show. The COVID cancellations of 2020 and 2021 thus belong to a very particular class of historical disruption: events significant enough to interrupt something that Queensland, collectively, had come to regard as simply what happens in August. Understanding what those cancellations revealed — about ritual, about civic identity, about the fragility and the durability of annual gathering — is the subject of this essay.

THE WEIGHT OF AN UNBROKEN SEQUENCE.

To appreciate what was lost in 2020, one must first appreciate what had been accumulated. The Ekka is the annual agricultural show of Queensland, Australia, first being held in 1876. The Intercolonial Exhibition of 1876 was held at Bowen Park with an estimated 15,000–17,000 people attending, out of Brisbane’s population at the time of just 20,600. That proportion — something close to three-quarters of the city turning out for a single event — speaks to how deeply embedded the gathering was from the very beginning. It was not a novelty that later became tradition. It arrived, in some sense, already traditional, drawing on the energy of the British and international exhibitions of the era while anchoring itself specifically to the agricultural realities of a young Queensland colony.

The first ‘Royal’ Show was held in 1921, when the Association was granted the prefix under warrant from His Majesty King George V. Since then, the shortened name ‘Ekka’ has replaced ‘Exhibition’ and ‘Brisbane Exhibition’ in the Queensland vernacular. Over the following century, the show accumulated layers: the strawberry sundae introduced in 1950, the showbag pavilion as a civic institution in its own right, the Ekka public holiday that gives Brisbane its particular mid-August rhythm, the agricultural competitions that serve as the state’s principal annual forum for the beef and farming industries. Since opening for the first time in 1876, more than 34 million people have gathered at the iconic and well-loved community event which brings together country and the city.

Each year the show ran, it reinforced something about Queensland’s self-understanding: that however much the state urbanised, however far Brisbane expanded from Bowen Hills, there was a week in August when the distance between city and country collapsed. The agricultural showground in the inner suburbs of a growing city is, in itself, a civic argument — a spatial commitment to the idea that the farming districts and the capital remain in productive relationship with one another. An unbroken annual sequence is the living proof of that argument. When the sequence breaks, the argument is tested.

The significance of the first exhibition held in 1876 was described by locals as the most important event since the separation of Queensland from New South Wales in 1859. That assessment, made in the colony’s early years, suggests that even at the outset, Queenslanders understood the Ekka not merely as entertainment but as an act of civic self-definition. A state that could hold such a gathering was declaring something about its coherence, its productive capacity, its capacity to draw its dispersed population into a shared space. COVID took that declaration away, twice in succession.

THE 2020 CANCELLATION: THE FIRST BREAK.

The 2020 decision was made early enough that much of the painful preparation had not yet occurred. “Due to the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, increasing social distancing measures and public gathering restrictions being implemented, the RNA has made the decision to cancel the 2020 Royal Queensland Show in the best interests of public health.” The language was careful and institutional — the RNA, as a not-for-profit organisation responsible for the stewardship of the show, was framing the decision within the framework of public health authority. There was no ceremony in the announcement, no spectacle. The show, which draws the state together each August, was simply not going to happen.

Since 1876, four annual Royal Queensland Shows on this site have been cancelled: the 1919 Exhibition due to the influenza epidemic, in 1942 during World War II when the grounds were occupied by military personnel, and the 2020 and 2021 shows due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 1919 cancellation, now distant enough to be the province of historical research, had its own civic weight: the grounds were employed as temporary hospital wards for the sick. The grounds that normally housed prize cattle and carnival rides became, instead, a site of mass illness. In 1942, the grounds served as a staging depot for military personnel. Each cancellation, in other words, was not merely an absence — it was a conversion of the showgrounds to a different civic purpose, one imposed by emergency.

The 2020 COVID cancellation differed in character. The grounds did not become a field hospital or a military depot. They sat, largely unused, through the August that would have been the show’s 145th edition. The buildings were there. The Main Arena was there. The Exhibition railway station at Bowen Hills was there. But the event that gives that infrastructure its meaning did not occur. This was perhaps the more unsettling kind of absence — not repurposement but emptiness.

The Queensland Government responded to the cancellation by addressing one of the show’s most tangible downstream effects: the public holiday. Rather than allow the Ekka holiday to stand disconnected from any event, the government moved it, creating a “people’s long weekend” to replace the Ekka holiday so Queenslanders could enjoy it properly and better support local businesses. This administrative adjustment speaks, quietly, to how deeply the Ekka holiday had become embedded in the Brisbane working calendar. A public holiday attached to a show that was not happening needed to find new civic justification. The government provided it — but the substitution, however practical, underscored what was missing.

THE 2021 CANCELLATION: THE SECOND, HARDER BREAK.

If the 2020 cancellation could be absorbed as a singular pandemic disruption — something unprecedented, something that would presumably resolve before August 2021 — the second cancellation shook Queensland’s civic confidence more deeply. “It is devastating to have to cancel this year’s historic comeback Ekka but the current outbreak of COVID in Queensland means we cannot bring the country and city together safely,” chief executive Brendan Christou said. Due to the extension of the current South East Queensland lockdown and worsening local COVID-19 outbreak, the 2021 Royal Queensland Show was cancelled in the best interests of public health. It was the second year in a row that the Ekka had been cancelled due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic.

The phrase “historic comeback Ekka” reveals something important about how the 2021 show had been framed. The RNA and the broader Ekka community had anticipated 2021 as a return — a restoration of sequence, a reassertion that the pandemic would not permanently disrupt what August in Queensland meant. The 2021 Ekka was due to open to the public on Saturday 7 August, with stud beef judging commencing the day before. Preparation had advanced to the point where cattle were already being assembled on the grounds when the cancellation was announced. Last year some cattle were already on the grounds when the Ekka was cancelled for a second year in a row, incurring significant costs and major headaches for exhibitors and organisers alike.

This detail — cattle already on the Bowen Hills grounds, farmers who had spent months preparing animals for competition, exhibitors who had invested in the logistics of transport and accommodation — captures something the administrative language of public health announcements tends to obscure. The Ekka is not merely an event. It is the culmination of a year-long agricultural cycle in which Queensland’s farming communities orient their work, their breeding programs, their competitions, and their social calendar around a single August week. Thousands of exhibitors who had spent months preparing their entries for competition would be extremely disappointed they could not showcase their efforts at the 2021 show. That disappointment was not incidental. It was the loss of something for which there is no straightforward substitute.

The ride operators, the food vendors and the many small businesses who showcase their products at Queensland’s largest marketplace were facing another financial blow in the wake of the show’s cancellation. The last-minute cancellation had broad-ranging financial impacts for the not-for-profit RNA organisation, because it relies on the Ekka to provide a major part of its annual revenue. The RNA attempted, where possible, to salvage some of the competitive program: the RNA endeavoured to see if some of the 2021 Royal Queensland Show competitions could continue in a COVID-safe environment without the general public. Certain cattle competitions were moved offsite, some competitions were postponed rather than cancelled outright. But the show, as a civic gathering — as the thing that draws the city and the country into the same space — did not happen.

WHAT RITUAL DOES — AND WHAT ABSENCE TEACHES.

The cancellations invite a question that civic life rarely poses so starkly: what, precisely, does a recurring annual event do for a community that cannot be replicated by any other means?

Part of the answer is economic. The Ekka generates more than $200 million in the economy and supports more than 3,500 short-term jobs, our growing Queensland regions and backs small business. Two consecutive years without that economic contribution is a material loss for the agricultural supply chain, for Brisbane’s hospitality and retail sectors, and for the many rural exhibitors whose commercial relationships — with buyers, with breeders, with distributors — are partly maintained through the annual show ring. The Ekka is one of Queensland’s principal occasions for agricultural commerce, and the COVID cancellations severed those connections for two full cycles.

But the more difficult loss is civic, not economic. The Ekka is a rite of passage for many Queenslanders, who attend as children and eventually take their grandchildren. A rite of passage, in anthropological terms, is a structured event that marks transitions and affirms membership in a community. The Ekka operates as a rite in this sense not because it involves formal ceremony but because of its regularity and its multigenerational character. The same showground, the same August timing, the same cultural markers — the strawberry sundae, the showbags, the People’s Day holiday, the Grand Parade — create a framework within which individual Queenslanders locate themselves across time. The child who ate a dagwood dog at the Ekka becomes the adult who brings their own child. The memory is continuous and cumulative.

Two consecutive absences interrupted that accumulation. Children who would have attended the Ekka for the first time in 2020 or 2021 experienced instead an August without the show. The particular knowledge that passing years should bring — of the showgrounds, of the rhythm of the event, of the specific Queensland vernacular that the Ekka sustains — was not transmitted. This is not catastrophic in any immediate sense, but it is a kind of cultural debt that recovery must address.

In 2009, as part of the Q150 celebrations, the Ekka was announced as one of the Q150 Icons of Queensland for its role as an “event and festival.” That formal recognition — as a state icon, alongside other enduring markers of Queensland identity — reflects what the community had long understood: the Ekka is not just a commercial event or an agricultural showcase but a piece of Queensland’s civic infrastructure, as real in its own way as a road or a rail line. Infrastructure, when disrupted, reveals its importance precisely through the disruption.

THE RETURN AND WHAT IT CONFIRMED.

The 2022 return of the Ekka was understood, across Queensland, as something more than the resumption of an annual event. More than 345,000 people came together over nine days, as the country and city were reunited. That number — slightly below the pre-pandemic average of around 400,000 — was nevertheless read as affirmation. The RNA had described the 2022 show as the “historic comeback Ekka,” a phrase that carries an implicit acknowledgment: the show’s return was itself a civic act, a reassertion of Queensland’s annual ritual against the interruption of the pandemic.

The federal Agriculture Minister, attending the 2022 show, noted that it was “particularly significant” — “it’s been more than 1,000 days since we’ve all been able to celebrate this.” One thousand days. The arithmetic of absence has a way of making visible something that continuity renders invisible. In years when the Ekka runs uninterrupted, nobody counts the days between shows. The 2022 return forced a count, and the count confirmed that the two-year gap had been experienced, across the Ekka community, as a genuine absence rather than merely an administrative interruption.

In 2023, the return to pre-pandemic crowds saw more than 400,000 people attend the Ekka. By 2023, the sequence had been reasserted. The Ekka was, again, what August means in Queensland. But the COVID interruption had left a mark on how the event understood itself — as something that could be taken away, and whose return was therefore worth noting, even celebrating.

A PATTERN ACROSS CATASTROPHES.

Viewed across the full span of the Ekka’s history, the COVID cancellations take their place in a pattern of disruption that tells a compressed history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The 1919 influenza cancellation, the 1942 wartime cancellation, the 2020 and 2021 COVID cancellations: each reflects the particular character of its emergency.

The State Library of Queensland’s Ekka research fellowship has acknowledged how pivotal events — including drought, the Spanish Influenza, the Great Depression, World Wars I and II, and recent challenges like COVID-19 — have shaped the Ekka and its agricultural, urban, and show communities. That framing — the show as something shaped by the crises it has survived — is instructive. Each disruption has left its mark not by destroying the institution but by demonstrating its resilience, its capacity to return, and its continued claim on Queensland’s civic life.

The COVID interruption also brought an unexpected dimension: the digital. During the 2020 and 2021 absences, there were tentative efforts to maintain some form of the Ekka’s competitive and community functions in modified formats. These adaptations — limited, imperfect, clearly not equivalent to the event itself — revealed something about the irreducibly physical nature of what the show does. An agricultural show cannot be rendered digital in any meaningful sense. The show ring requires the animal and the judge in the same space. The showbag pavilion requires the crowd and the vendor in the same building. The Ekka’s community-forming function depends on co-presence, on the shared occupation of 22 hectares of Bowen Hills for ten days in August. There is no substitute.

THE HORIZON: ANOTHER PLANNED ABSENCE, A DIFFERENT KIND.

The COVID cancellations are not the last disruption the Ekka will face. During the COVID-19 pandemic, shows were cancelled in 2020 due to health concerns and again in 2021 as South East Queensland was then in lockdown. It is also planned to be cancelled in 2032 due to the Brisbane Olympics.

This future cancellation differs fundamentally in character from those caused by pandemic or war. The 2032 absence is not an emergency imposition but a planned and consensual interruption — the consequence of the Brisbane Showgrounds’ selection as the site for the Brisbane Athletes Village. The Bowen Hills showgrounds will be the site of the Brisbane Athletes Village, which will be the Games’ largest, accommodating more than 10,000 athletes and officials during the Olympic Games and over 5,000 during the Paralympic Games. The showgrounds will be transformed and returned — and the Queensland Government has committed that the Brisbane Showgrounds would continue to be the permanent home for the Ekka.

The COVID cancellations, then, are part of a larger story about what happens to a civic institution when it is forced to pause. Each pause — 1919, 1942, 2020, 2021, and now the anticipated 2032 absence — tests the institution’s hold on Queensland’s civic identity. Each return confirms that the hold is real. The institution does not disappear during its absences. It waits, and the community waits with it.

PERMANENCE BEYOND THE CALENDAR.

The question the COVID cancellations posed — what remains of a civic ritual when the ritual cannot be performed? — has no simple answer. What remains is memory, expectation, and identity. Queenslanders who could not attend the Ekka in 2020 and 2021 knew what the Ekka was, knew when it should have happened, knew what its absence meant. The institution persisted in civic consciousness even when it could not persist on the grounds.

This is precisely the kind of permanence that civic infrastructure, in its broadest sense, is designed to create. The Queensland Foundation project of anchoring Queensland’s institutions and places onto a permanent onchain identity layer reflects a related understanding: that civic significance outlasts any particular year’s event, any particular disruption, any particular gathering or its absence. The namespace ekka.queensland represents this principle — a permanent civic address for the Royal Queensland Show that does not depend on any single year’s edition, that persists through cancellation as through continuity, that names the institution rather than any particular instance of it.

The distinction matters. What COVID revealed is that the Ekka, as an institution, is not identical with any single running of the show. The 2020 and 2021 shows did not happen, but the Ekka — as an entity with a history stretching back to 1876, as a set of relationships between city and country, as a marker in the Queensland civic calendar — continued to exist. It had an identity that the pandemic could interrupt but not extinguish. That identity is what persists, and it is that identity which civic infrastructure — physical, institutional, or onchain — is called upon to hold.

The Ekka, officially known as the Royal Queensland Show, is a Queensland icon and the state’s largest annual event, held at the Brisbane Showgrounds. Since its inception in 1876, the Ekka has been a cherished tradition, bringing together regional and urban Queenslanders to celebrate the state’s agricultural industries. That tradition, as the COVID years demonstrated, is not contingent on any single August. It is deeper than the calendar. The institution’s ability to return — to fill the Bowen Hills grounds again, to resume the agricultural competitions and the showbag pavilion and the People’s Day holiday — confirmed what the cancellations had only appeared to challenge. Ritual interrupted is not ritual destroyed. Queensland’s gathering endures, and the civic record of its identity — including, now, its onchain address at ekka.queensland — is built to endure with it.