Editor’s view: Sydney and Melbourne just don’t get us, but that’s okay

People who live in Sydney and Melbourne still do not understand Queensland. But that’s totally fine, our moment is coming, writes The Editor.

The 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games will see Brisbane take its place as a genuine new world city.

People who live in Sydney and Melbourne still do not understand Queensland – and they certainly don’t get Brisbane. These days they do like to visit – “I stayed at the Calile darl, I had no idea!” – but in the way they speak about us you can hear the sneer. And you know what? That’s totally fine.

In many ways it is exactly how the rest of the world still viewed Australia in the lead-up to the Sydney 2000 Olympic and Paralympic Games. We were little more to the world then than Paul Hogan and kangaroos, and we did ourselves no favours by always asking visiting film stars as they literally stepped off the plane: “So what do you think of Australia?”

Kathy Freeman lights the Olympic flame at the Sydney Games during the “nation-defining” opening ceremony.

But that all went away at the moment of that first whip crack at the start of what is still the nation-defining ceremony at the Sydney Olympic Stadium. It was when we grew up as a nation. The braces came off and we stopped worrying about what others thought about us – and focused instead on how truly wonderful and unique we are.

It allowed us to shed our cultural cringe; to shrug off that inferiority complex that what we do here is somehow less valuable.

And the way the world viewed us also changed. We went from being the equivalent of a kitschy soft koala toy to being understood as a proud and complex nation – that’s also home to koalas. We took our rightful place on the world stage.

So it will be with Brisbane and our Games in 2032. And so it will be in the lead-up, too. There will be those who continue to refer to us as a grown-up “hillbilly town”. And we will likely be as embarrassed by the handover segment at the end of the 2028 Los Angeles Games as the whole of Australia was by the blow-up kangaroos riding in circles on the back of kids on BMX bikes at the same ceremony in the closing ceremony of Atlanta 1996.

A render of the new Olympic Stadium at Victoria Park. Picture: Queensland Government.

But when our moment arrives in the late evening of July 23 2032 at the new stadium in Victoria Park – with all its glory and significance – that will all be behind us, as it was with Sydney’s hosting of Australia’s coming-of-age celebration.

As we did as a nation back in September 2000, so Brisbane will emerge from its own awkward teenage years to take its rightful place as a genuine new world city.

And afterwards, there will never again be a need for anybody to even contemplate using Sydney icons to market our city on the world stage. We will have arrived. But until then – as it was with Australia in the 1990s – we are simply going to have to accept we are not quite there yet.

Brisbane Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner was spot on last week when he told the Financial Review – in a magazine piece about our lead-in to the Games that was predicably titled Brisneyland (eye-roll) – that: “This is a global brand launch in a way that we’ve never done before.”

It will be a chance for us to tell the world we are proudly Queensland. We are not Texas Down Under.

We are, as the President of Brisbane 2032 Andrew Liveris correctly said last week: “A lifestyle superpower … the greatest story never told.”

A final thought, though: often your greatest strength is also your greatest weakness. And so it is with the southeast not considering itself the one city that it actually should.

The Gold and Sunshine Coasts have their own proud identity, but from the global perspective they are both part of Greater Brisbane. As we count down until Brisbane 2032 – an Olympic and Paralympic Games that will both be contested across, and that will showcase, our now almost-seamlessly linked region, it is perhaps time for all of us to lean into that reality. We are now a global city, of five million people.

Originally published as Editor’s view: Sydney and Melbourne just don’t get us, but that’s okay