The Queensland government is expected to announce that a significant preserved site of Indigenous heritage in central Brisbane, a massacre site on a songline, will host the main stadium of the 2032 Olympics.
Premier David Crisafulli repeatedly promised not to build a new stadium to host the athletics during last year’s election, and also specifically ruled out building one in Victoria Park.
But the government is today expected to adopt a reported recommendation from its Games Independent Infrastructure and Coordination Authority to break the promise.
Opponents have already held protests against the plans, before they have even been announced. The Save Victoria Park group has reportedly briefed lawyers in a potential court challenge against the stadium build, arguing the project will destroy valuable green space and must be stopped due to the site’s significance to First Nations communities.
Victoria Park was converted into a golf course in 1931, but Brisbane city council developed plans in 2020 to convert the 64 hectare site back into park.
“Victoria Park has a really rich Indigenous history and one of the centrepieces of the park will be the lake – Lake Barrambin – and that has a wide Indigenous history as well,” the lord mayor, Adrian Schrinner, said in 2020.
Brisbane historian Ray Kerkhove conducted multiple heritages assessments of Victoria Park, also known as Barrambin, for different levels of government.
He said if Crisafulli announced plans to turn it into a stadium, his response would be “horror and despair”.
Kerkhove said Victoria Park, which is heritage listed, is probably the most significant site of Indigenous heritage in central Brisbane.
The park served as the town camp for up to 1,500 Indigenous people throughout the 19th century, before they were forced on to missions, and Aboriginal people returned to live there when allowed to leave the missions in the 20th century, he said.
“That’s a continuity of nearly 200 years. I’ve walked around there and found stone tools and oyster shells on the ground,” he said.
It served as a meeting place long before that, and is part of a songline, he said. Kerkhove said the heritage would be destroyed by a new stadium.
“There’s this long history of Aboriginal people having that place as a special place …” he said.
“Of course it is (on a songline). Most base camps are on songlines”.
Both the organisation’s recommendations and the government response will be released later today.
The former Labor government rejected a similar recommendation by a previous inquiry on costs grounds.
Brisbane was awarded the Games in July 2021, under the former premier Annastacia Palaszczuk. It was the first city selected under the Olympics’ “new norm” approach, which is designed to reduce infrastructure costs by reusing existing venues as much as possible.
Palaszczuk’s successor, Steven Miles, cancelled the Gabba rebuild in March last year, announcing his own venues plan.
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The government is now expected to announce a third radical overhaul of the Games’ $7.1bn infrastructure budget.
On Monday, Crisafulli, who became premier in November, said the government had a plan to “get the show back on the road” after four years of indecision under Labor.
“It’s a plan to make sure that we do host great Games when the eyes of the world are on us,” he said.
The government is also reportedly considering axing funding for the Brisbane Live Arena, which had been slated to hold swimming.
Yuggera woman Aunty Deb Sandy said she had grown up with people who lived in Victoria Park when they were children.
She said the reason Indigenous people kept returning to Victoria Park was simple: “It’s home.”
“I don’t think anybody would like to have a stadium built on top of their house,” Sandy said. “The country is home. We need to take care of it, and to build on top of it, it just wouldn’t be nice.
“It’s almost like our history doesn’t matter.”
Kerkhove said there were at least two documented massacres at the park in the 1840s. Both times the entire town camp was burned to the ground.
“That was a scuffle in the middle of the night. We don’t really know how many people. Certainly some were killed,” he said.
Organisers have claimed the Games’ benefits First Nations people, with Brisbane 2032 being touted as the first Olympics with its own reconciliation action plan.