The arrival of Queensland's first Governor on 10 December 1859 was an occasion for celebration; in the words of Brisbane's newspaper, ‘never was welcome given with heartier zest’. As Sir George Bowen stepped ashore at a temporary landing stage in the Botanic Gardens, he was greeted with an ornamental arch, a semicircular frame covered in flowers and greenery, bearing words of welcome. This ‘triumphal arch’, as it was called, was the creation of Andrew Petrie, a pioneer settler and building contractor, and Walter Hill, the Curator of the Gardens. It was to be the first of hundreds of similar arches erected throughout Queensland for almost a century. They were a regular feature of public celebrations until relatively recent times, marking the arrivals and travels of Governors, occasional visits by royalty, the opening of major roads, railways and bridges, and, to a lesser extent, historical milestones. They ranged from grand, highly decorated structures – often the work of professional designers – erected in the metropolis for royal visits to simple arches of greenery, put up by even the smallest regional communities for special occasions, such as welcoming visiting Governors. This paper takes a closer look at these curious structures and the symbolism behind them for, as Stephen Alomes observes, public rituals provide valuable insights into Australian life, revealing contradictions between imperial loyalties and burgeoning nationalism, indigenous and derivative, traditional and modern.

‘Royalty’ and ‘Empire’ were, throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. of supreme significance to all the Australian colonies. While each colony was well integrated within the Imperial framework, they remained largely reliant on the economic and geopolitical management of the British Empire. Though different colonial/national identities developed in Australia, the colonies' economic, military and diplomatic dependence on Britain strongly orientated them towards the Queen and ‘home’. Colonial Governors served as the vital link between the colonies and both the Imperial government and the Queen of the British Empire. Appointed by Britain and entrusted with the same rights, powers and privileges as the Queen, the role of Governor was one of great influence and authority.

Agricultural shows are important events in rural and regional Australia. For over a century, they have often been the main annual festival on any given town's calendar. This importance makes the lack of scholarly attention to rural and regional shows puzzling. Recently, Australian exhibitions and agricultural shows have come in for some very welcome scholarly attention, although very little has been written about rural and regional events. Scholars such as Kate Darian-Smith and Sara Wills, Joanne Scott and Ross Laurie, Judith McKay, and Kay Anderson have all written on exhibitions and shows – although, of this group, only Darian-Smith and Wills have written on rural shows, the rest focusing more on inter-colonial and metropolitan Australian shows. Even Richard Waterhouse's groundbreaking study of rural Australian cultural history, The Vision Splendid, provides little detail on agricultural shows and their role in rural cultural life, although the show's importance is recognised.

Queensland's Jubilee Carnival of 1909 was, according to Australia's Governor-General, Lord Dudley, ‘the principal and most prominent feature in the series of festivities by which the people of Queensland are seeking to celebrate the jubilee of their existence’. Indeed, with the exception of the Carnival, the ‘series of festivities’ was rather lack-lustre, offering relatively little of substance to excite the attention of contemporaries or of later commentators. Offering a distraction from the political instability of the era – between 1907 and 1909, voters had gone to the state polls three times – the Jubilee Carnival reaffirmed and reinvigorated a story that had been told and retold each year at Brisbane's showgrounds for more than three decades. The particular power of the Carnival did not, therefore, derive from its status as a unique event that commemorated a defining moment in Queensland's development: the separation from New South Wales and the beginning of self-government in 1859. Instead, the significance of the Jubilee Carnival as the centrepiece of the 1909 celebrations depended on its effective alignment with Queensland's largest annual event, the Brisbane Exhibition, and on the resulting connections between the Carnival, the Exhibition and a narrative of successful colonisation that had been celebrated each year since the inaugural Brisbane Exhibition of 1876. For many non-Indigenous Queenslanders, it was a compelling story that resolutely ignored the unsavoury aspects of the state's past and present in favour of an uplifting account of a society in which perseverance, applied to nature's bounty in the interests of the British Empire, was rewarded. It was, above all, a story of progress – that most powerful of talismans for settler societies. The Jubilee Carnival thus reiterated a familiar story; in so doing, it confirmed the iconic status of the capital city's annual agricultural show and positioned the show's host, the National Agricultural and Industrial Association of Queensland (NAIAQ), as one of the state's most important organisations.

The 1959 celebration of the Centenary of self-government in Queensland presented organisers with an opportunity to showcase the state at large, together with its character and potential. Public works – a supremely tangible stamp of governmental achievement – were foremost in two new facilities for approved culture and recreation: the new library on William Street and the Brisbane City Council's Centenary Pool on Gregory Terrace. Abiding links with Britain were evoked by the royal visit of Princess Alexandra, a service in Westminster Abbey and the ‘Centenary voyage’ of a British immigrant ship. Other aspects of the program celebrated Queenslanders simply being Queenslanders. Day-to-day events from local carnivals and festivals to sporting competitions were embraced by the Centennial organisers. The resulting celebrations revealed a state in transition, its abiding affection for royalty and the ties of Empire happily coexisting with a new relish for American leisure culture. They reveal more than that when we consider the execution of Centenary activities in more detail, and particularly those that sought to present an account of how and why the state had come to be as it was. The 1959 celebrations provided a moment when, in the full light of public interest and attention, a ‘sense of the past’ was mobilised in both formal and informal terms in an attempt to account definitively for the Queensland historical experience.

World Expo ‘88, also widely known as ‘Expo '88’ and locally simply as ‘Expo’, was held in Brisbane from April to October 1988, as a key event of the national Bicentennial celebrations commemorating the 200 years of European settlement of Australia. Other major components of the Bicentennial year – such as the symbolic re-enactment of the voyage of the First Fleet that culminated in the Parade of Tall Ships sailing into Sydney Harbour on Australia Day – together with other significant national events such as the 1956 and 2000 Olympic Games, have generated historically focused interest, which has been manifested and disseminated in the usual way in articles, books and museum exhibitions. Brisbane's World Expo '88, however, appears to be one of the few Australian so-called ‘signature’ events that has also generated its own long-lived series of commemorative memorials and festivals.