Forget Melbourne: this city is fast becoming Australia's new cultural capital

I was told very soon after arriving in Brisbane that this was the city with the earliest average wake-up time anywhere in the world. It seemed like one of those stories a city tells about itself when most of the other tales - of love, emerald, light, eternity and churches - had been taken. But they were not making it up.

The sight of so many people running along the banks of the Brisbane River at 6am was almost offensive. I certainly hadn't joined them. I was staring at them in wonder, bleary eyed and only very recently awake, from my vantage point high in a hotel just back from the river's northern bank and the overlapping motorway.

Could the city that gets up the earliest really be a cultural hub worth visiting?

A city has a sense of itself in the imagination of its residents. It also develops a reputation in the minds of those who have visited, perhaps decades before, and those who have heard the stories of those visitors.

It takes a lot to change either. But getting ready to host the Olympics is a lot. And with the impending attention of the world to be directed to Australia's third-largest city in a little over half a decade, it is not just the world of sport seizing the opportunity.

Ebony Bott, the artistic director of the Brisbane Festival, says there's something in the water in the city right now.

"It's absolute momentum. It's almost like the momentum of being an Olympic city in 2032 has just brought together all the things that were already happening and amplified them," she says. "But it feels like the city is switching on and it actually feels like anything is possible and anything could happen in a really, really exciting way."

The Brisbane Festival runs from September 4 to 26, and includes everything from Riverfire, a large-scale fireworks display in the heart of the city, to theatre productions, concerts, dance productions and comedy.

Also in September, the Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) will open an exclusive exhibition, Make, Believe, Magic: The Worlds of The Jim Henson Company, bringing Muppets, sets and rare materials from the studio of Sesame Street and Kermit the Frog to Brisbane.

QAGOMA director Chris Saines isn't afraid to do things differently to other Australian state galleries. He is eager to expand the audience for the gallery, offer exhibitions for children and for others who might not think contemporary art is for them. In the past decade, the institution has presented both European Masterpieces from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and Marvel: Creating the Cinematic Universe. The twin galleries are also the home of the Asia Pacific Triennial, which was established in 1993, and this year worked with London's Victoria and Albert Museum on an exhibition of Asia-Pacific works.

When I visited Brisbane for the Jim Henson show announcement, the gallery was showing a major exhibition of work by Olafur Eliasson, one of the most significant contemporary artists working today. Archie Moore's Kith and Kin, a major work of contemporary Indigenous Australian art that won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2024, is also on display until October 18.

It's a near unmatched range from a major Australian gallery. "We're prepared to go to places that sometimes others are not as prepared to do, and I think that is one of our key points of differences in terms of our programming," Saines says.

The Jim Henson show is part of an exhibition program that brings tourism to Brisbane, Saines says. Between 28 and 32 per cent of QAGOMA's overall visitors visit from outside Queensland.

"We do things differently, we do things in a way we think works for our audience, and stimulates their appetite to visit and revisit, and it's a niche that I think the gallery feels very comfortable within," he says.

Saines also says there will be an emphasis on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art and artists, with the Olympics a unique chance to show the richness and breadth of the work to the world.

"We want to be able to answer that question, 'Where is the Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander art? I'm in Queensland, where can I see it?'," he says. "We want to make sure that we respond powerfully to that request, which frankly we receive every day from visitors, as probably many museums do."

The Brisbane I visited was not the one of my (limited) imagination. The Brisbane of Johnno, the Go-Betweens' records and The Moonlight State has given way to a bolder, brighter city.

The writer was a guest of Tourism and Events Queensland and QAGOMA