The First Show in 1876: An Intercolonial Agricultural Spectacle — How a 5-Day Exhibition in a Fledgling Colony of 20,600 People Launched Queensland's Most Beloved Annual Tradition

Prologue: A Colony, a Show, and a Leap of Faith

There is a peculiar magic in the story of the first Royal Queensland Show — or, as it was known in 1876, the Intercolonial Exhibition of Brisbane. It is a tale that begins not with a grand master plan, but with a handful of men who believed that a fledgling colony, barely separated from New South Wales for seventeen years, could mount an exhibition worthy of international attention. That they succeeded beyond any rational expectation is a testament to something that still animates the Ekka today: a stubborn, almost irrational faith in the power of gathering together.

To understand what the first show meant — and what it continues to mean — one must first understand what Queensland was in 1876. The colony had only been carved out of New South Wales in 1859. Brisbane was less a city than a sprawling country town, its dusty streets lined with timber buildings, its economy driven by wool, timber, and the slow spread of cattle stations inland. The total population of the city was 20,600. There was no university, no art gallery of significance, no cultural institution to speak of. What Queensland had, in abundance, was ambition.

The Genesis: Why an Exhibition?

The idea for a grand exhibition did not spring from nowhere. It was part of a global phenomenon. The Great Exhibition of 1851 at London's Crystal Palace had sparked a wave of international exhibitions across the British Empire and beyond. Sydney had staged its own Intercolonial Exhibition in 1870; Melbourne would host the massive International Exhibition in 1880. These events were part exhibition, part competition, part grand celebration of colonial progress — a fusion of agriculture, industry, and boosterism that Victorians did better than anyone.

But the Brisbane exhibition had a more local urgency. The Royal National Agricultural and Industrial Association of Queensland (RNA) had been founded just a year earlier, in 1875, with Governor Sir William Cairns as its first President. Its mission was explicitly to promote the agricultural and industrial development of the colony — to prove to the world, and to Queenslanders themselves, that this young colony had a future beyond timber-getting and sheep-grazing. A grand show, the RNA's founders reasoned, would display Queensland's produce, attract immigrants, encourage investment, and — not incidentally — give the scattered population a reason to come together.

The choice of venue was Bowen Park, a 6.8-hectare site bordered by Bowen Bridge Road, Gregory Terrace, and a winding creek. The RNA secured the land in January 1876, and the race was on. In just seven months, the Association had to erect exhibition buildings, organise competition categories, attract exhibitors from across the Australian colonies, and advertise the event to a population scattered across an area the size of Western Europe. It was, by any measure, an act of considerable audacity.

The Show Opens: Chaos and Crowds

August 22, 1876, was declared a public holiday — the first of what would become the enduring "Ekka holiday" tradition in Brisbane. The gates opened, and chaos ensued. Contemporary accounts describe scenes of near-riot: an estimated 5,000 people charged the turnstiles at once, overwhelming the attendants. Mounted troopers had to be called in to drive back the crowd and restore some semblance of order. By the end of opening day, between 15,000 and 17,000 people had passed through the gates. For context, that was roughly three-quarters of Brisbane's entire population. It would be as if a modern city of two million saw 1.5 million people descend on a single park in a single day.

The crowd was a cross-section of colonial society: graziers in wide-brimmed hats, their wives in high-collared dresses, merchants in frock coats, labourers in moleskins, children barefoot and wide-eyed. They had come from the Darling Downs, from the Lockyer Valley, from as far as Rockhampton and beyond — days of travel by coach or horseback. They came because the exhibition was the biggest thing that had ever happened in Brisbane, and no one wanted to miss it.

The RNA had prepared for 1,700 competition entries across more than 600 classes. Entries ranged from the predictable — Durham, Hereford, and Devon cattle, the only three breeds displayed — to the genuinely surprising: stained-glass windows, elaborate embroidery, artificial limbs, and dugong meat, which was offered as a tasting curiosity. There was a prize for the "best sample of five tonnes of manure, deodorised and prepared in the most economical form," a competition for the "fastest walking farm horse," and over a thousand exhibits crammed into the main timber exhibition building.

The largest prize on offer was 25 guineas. Total prize money across all categories amounted to between £500 and £600 — a substantial sum in 1876, but modest given the scale of the undertaking. Judging was carried out by more than 30 judges, assisted by 40 stewards and a nightwatchman who guarded the exhibits after dark.

The Showbag Tradition: From Coal to Cultural Icon

Perhaps the most remarkable detail of the first exhibition — and certainly the one with the most enduring legacy — is that every visitor received a free bag of coal. It was, by all accounts, the very first showbag: a practical gift from a coal merchant who saw an opportunity to advertise his wares. That bag of coal has since evolved into a multi-million-dollar industry and a cultural phenomenon unlike anything else in the world. Modern showbags contain everything from Lego sets to luxury cosmetics, from Bertie Beetle chocolates (the $2 bag that has become its own institution) to high-end fashion samples. But the principle remains unchanged: the showbag is a ritual gift, a tangible memory, a piece of the Ekka to carry home.

The transition from coal to confectionery did not happen overnight. For decades, the showbag remained a humble affair — sample bags from flour mills, seed merchants, and soap manufacturers. It was only in the mid-20th century that showbags became the consumer phenomenon they are today, with children spending weeks poring over the showbag catalogue, circling their must-haves, and budgeting their pocket money with the solemnity of treasury officials. The showbag, in its quiet way, became a rite of passage: the first taste of consumer choice, the first lesson in delayed gratification, the first independent purchase for generations of Queensland children.

The Cultural Ritual: Why the Ekka Became a Pilgrimage

To call the Ekka a "show" is to undersell what it became. From its very first year, the exhibition functioned as something closer to a secular pilgrimage — a periodic gathering that reaffirmed community bonds, marked the passage of time, and connected participants to something larger than themselves. The anthropologist would recognise it as a classic example of a calendrical ritual: a fixed-point event that organises the annual cycle, provides a structure for collective memory, and reinforces social cohesion through shared experience.

There is, in fact, a quasi-religious dimension to the Ekka that is worth examining seriously. The event operates on a liturgical calendar: the arrival of the showbag catalogue (the "scripture"), the school holidays (the "season of preparation"), the public holiday (the "high feast"), the Grand Parade (the "procession"), the fireworks (the "spectacular revelation"). Each element is choreographed, repeated year after year, and invested with deep emotional significance. The strawberry sundae — first introduced in the mid-20th century and now consumed at a rate of over 140,000 per year — functions as a kind of eucharist: a shared sensory experience that binds the community together in a ritual of taste and memory.

This is not to trivialise religious practice but to recognise that large-scale public events often meet human needs that formal religion once monopolised: the need for collective celebration, for the reaffirmation of shared values, for the experience of being part of something that transcends the individual. The Ekka, in this reading, is Queensland's great secular festival — a harvest festival for a modern, urbanised population that still needs to touch the soil, smell the animals, and remember where its food comes from.

The Agricultural Heart: Why the Country Must Come to the City

One of the defining tensions of the Ekka — present from the very first exhibition in 1876 — is the relationship between the country and the city. The RNA was founded to promote agriculture, and the show was always intended to showcase rural industry to an increasingly urban audience. But even in 1876, Brisbane was growing; the very success of the colony drew people off the land and into the towns. The exhibition was, from the start, an attempt to bridge a gap that was widening by the year.

That mission has only grown more urgent. Today, over 70% of Queenslanders live in the southeast corner of the state, concentrated in Brisbane, the Gold Coast, and the Sunshine Coast. Most have no direct connection to farming. The Ekka remains one of the few occasions when urban Queenslanders come face-to-face with the reality of rural life: the weight of a prize bull, the patience of a sheepdog, the skill of a woodchopper, the beauty of a champion hen. The Animal Nursery, where children can hold a chick or pat a calf, is one of the most popular attractions — not because it is exotic, but because it is increasingly rare.

The woodchopping competition, a crowd favourite since the early days of the show, is a direct link to Queensland's bush heritage. Before chainsaws, before tractors, before anything mechanical, the axe was the tool that cleared the land, built the fences, and kept the homestead warm. The woodchop at the Ekka is not merely a sport; it is a living history performance, a reminder of the physical labour that built the colony. When a champion axeman sinks his blade into a hardwood log and the chips fly, the crowd is watching a ghost of Queensland's past.

The Royal Prefix and the Name

In 1921, the association was granted the prefix "Royal" under warrant from King George V, and the show officially became the Royal Queensland Show. By then, the event was already deeply woven into the fabric of Queensland life. The new name added dignity but changed nothing essential: the show belonged to Queenslanders, and they called it, as they always had, "the Exhibition" — soon shortened, in the affectionate way of Australian English, to "the Ekka."

The Ekka has been held annually in August ever since 1876, with only four cancellations: 1919, due to the Spanish flu pandemic; 1942, when the grounds were commandeered as a staging depot for Allied forces during the Second World War; and 2020 and 2021, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced the show to go into hiatus for the first time in eighty years. The 2022 return was emotional, the crowds larger than ever, as if Queenslanders had been reminded, by its absence, of just how much the Ekka meant to them. The 150th edition, set for 2026, will be a milestone that few annual events anywhere in the world can claim.

The Legacy: What the First Show Built

To walk through the Brisbane Showgrounds today — the sprawling 22-hectare site that still occupies the land first selected in 1876 — is to walk through 150 years of living history. The main arena, the exhibition pavilions, the cattle sheds, the sideshow alley: each has been rebuilt, renovated, or reimagined multiple times, but the essential shape of the event remains recognisable to the ghost of a visitor from 1876. There are still animals to judge, still produce to display, still crowds to thrill, and still showbags to carry home.

The first exhibition in 1876 was a gamble — a wild, improbable bet that a tiny colony on the edge of the world could stage something worth travelling for. It paid off beyond anyone's dreams. The 34,000 attendances recorded across five days represented more than one and a half times Brisbane's entire population. People came because they were hungry for connection, for spectacle, for proof that their young colony mattered. The exhibition gave them all three.

What the founders of the RNA could not have known — could not possibly have predicted — is that they had created a tradition that would outlive them, their children, and their grandchildren. They had built a ritual that would survive war, pandemic, depression, and the wholesale transformation of Queensland from a rural colony to an urban, globalised state. They had planted a seed that would grow into something as sturdy and enduring as the Queensland soil itself.

The Ekka is not merely a show. It is Queensland's story, told in annual instalments. And it began, as all great stories do, with a leap of faith, a crowd of hopeful people, and a bag of coal.

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References

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