First Nations Art & Cultural Gathering Meanjin

Towards 2032: Culture, Country, Visibility & Legacy Brisbane, Queensland
Date: Friday 14 August 2026
Time: 9am-11.30am
Venue: Queensland Theatre Company
Address: 78 Montague Road, South Brisbane
 

Join the conversation for a Queensland First Nations Artistic and Cultural Vision for the 2032 Olympics...

We are pleased to invite you to participate in a conversation, the Queensland First Nations Arts, Culture & Creative Industries Gathering in Brisbane.
The Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games represent much more than a major sporting event.
They provide a once-in-a-generation opportunity to consider how the world’s oldest continuing living cultures can be visible, valued and embedded throughout Queensland - not simply during the Games, but throughout the journey towards 2032 and as an enduring legacy beyond them.

The Gathering will initiate a First Nations-led conversation about:

• What are we already doing?
• What do we want Queensland to look, sound and feel like by 2032?
• How should First Nations culture be experienced across Olympic and Paralympic sites, cities, towns, regions and communities?
• What cultural, creative and economic legacy should remain after the Games have finished?
• How can Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples shape the cultural story Queensland tells the world in 2032?

PURPOSE OF THE GATHERING: The purpose of the Gathering is to bring together First Nations people working across arts, culture, heritage, language, creative industries and tourism to begin developing a shared Queensland First Nations cultural vision towards 2032.

The Gathering will create a space for First Nations people to identify existing work, opportunities, priorities and aspirations and to consider how cultural wealth can be embedded throughout Queensland’s preparations for Brisbane 2032.

Rather than beginning with the Games themselves, the conversation will begin with Country, culture, community and the regions.

The aim is to explore how the Games can become a platform through which Queensland’s extraordinary diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures can be experienced locally, nationally and internationally.

THE BIGGER QUESTION: Brisbane 2032 will bring extraordinary international attention to Queensland. The opportunity is not simply to ensure that First Nations people are seen. The opportunity is to ensure that First Nations people are leading, creating, commissioning, producing, designing, interpreting, hosting, owning and benefiting.
From the Torres Strait to Cape York, from the Wet Tropics to the Gulf, from Western Queensland to the coast and from regional communities to Brisbane’s Olympic and Paralympic precincts, Queensland holds extraordinary cultural wealth.

The next six years provide an opportunity to connect that cultural wealth into a statewide movement.
A movement that asks:

• What do we want the world to understand about Queensland’s First Peoples when it arrives here in 2032?

And equally:

• What do we want to have built for our communities when the world leaves?

We invite you to join this first conversation and help shape that future. Guided by Legacy. Grounded in Country.

*Some light refreshments provided

We honour and respect the Traditional Owners and Custodians on the Lands we gather, live and work.

We acknowledge we are on the Lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal.