Brisbane Scavenger Hunt and Self-Guided Tour

Brisbane is Queensland’s riverside capital, a subtropical city where the Brisbane River loops past glass towers, jacaranda shade and open-air pools. You get the sandstone grandeur of Brisbane City Hall with its 92 metre clock tower, the Gothic Revival lines of St John’s Cathedral, and the parklands of South Bank with the Wheel of Brisbane turning above them.

The Brisbane Scavenger Hunt and Self-Guided Tour is a city game you play on your phone, walking 4.4 kilometres in about 64 minutes. At every stop a riddle or a story waits for you, and you set the pace, start whenever you like and pause for coffee. Available in English, German, French and Chinese.

About Brisbane Scavenger Hunt and Self Guided Tour

Highlights of Brisbane Scavenger Hunt and Self Guided Tour

Team Building in Brisbane: A City Game for Your Group

Locations and Route (Show Map)

In the map you can check the optimised route. You can change the order and adjust it according to your needs.

Download the World City Trail app from the store and after the purchase you will receive a booking reference. Fill in your details and you are ready to go!

A Brisbane scavenger hunt is a city game you play on your phone while you walk: no guide to wait for, no fixed departure time, just you, your group and a riddle at every stop. Start whenever you like, pause for a coffee, take a photo, then pick up where you left off. The Brisbane Scavenger Hunt and Self-Guided Tour covers 4.4 km, about 64 minutes of walking plus solving time, and works for couples, families, friends and colleagues. It is available in English, German, French and Chinese, so everyone plays in their own language.

You begin at the Wheel of Brisbane in South Bank Parklands, a 60 metre Ferris wheel that first turned in 2008 and never left, with 42 enclosed gondolas looking out over the Brisbane River and the city towers. From there the route takes in the colourful Brisbane Sign, the sandstone Victoria Bridge Abutment left from the 1897 crossing, and Brisbane City Hall, opened in 1930 with its 92 metre clock tower that locals call Big Ben. Anzac Square and its Shrine of Remembrance, plus St. Johns Cathedral, follow close behind.

The trail links South Bank with the CBD and the riverside Gardens Point precinct, so you pass buskers, Queen Street Mall shopping and plenty of cafes, bakeries and lunch spots for a flat white or a pie along the way. After St. Stephens Cathedral, with its 1850 Pugin chapel, and the mature fig trees of Queens Gardens, you reach the French Renaissance Queensland Parliament of 1865 to 1889. The finish is the City Botanical Gardens, cultivated since 1828 and shaped from 1855 by first curator Walter Hill, a perfect place to sit down.

Important information about Brisbane Scavenger Hunt

Explore the attractions of Brisbane Scavenger Hunt and Self Guided Tour

The Wheel of Brisbane, starting point of the Brisbane Scavenger Hunt

Sixty metres of steel and glass above South Bank Parklands, this Ferris wheel first turned in 2008 for the Southbank Corporation’s twentieth anniversary. Meant to be temporary, it proved so popular it stayed. Forty-two enclosed gondolas loop slowly for ten to fifteen minutes, with views of the river, the CBD towers and, on clear days, distant hills.

Brisbane Sign

Big block letters spelling out the city’s name, right in South Bank Parklands near the Wheel of Brisbane. It belongs to the wave of giant city signs that appeared worldwide through the 2010s, built as instant photo ops. Painted in bright, cheerful colours, it pops against the green parklands and the skyline across the water. Climb on, sit inside the B.

Victoria Bridge Abutment

This weathered sandstone remnant recalls the old Victoria Bridge, Brisbane’s first permanent crossing of the Brisbane River to South Brisbane. The original opened in 1874, a bold effort for a young colony, until the great flood of 1893 wrecked it. A sturdier bridge followed in 1897, and this abutment is believed to survive from it.

Brisbane City Hall

Ten years in the making, City Hall opened in 1930 as the tallest building in Brisbane. Thomas Hall and George Prentice won the design competition, delivering grand sandstone, a huge dome and a 92 metre clock tower locals nickname Big Ben. For decades it was the highest point you could stand on, and the observation platform still rewards you.

Anzac Square and Memorial Gallery

Brisbane’s official war memorial isn’t one monument but a whole square, laid out between 1928 and 1930 by architects Buchanan and Cowper on ground sloping from Ann Street toward the river. At its heart the Shrine of Remembrance, a Greek style sandstone colonnade, shelters an eternal flame that has burned since the square opened.

St. Johns Cathedral

Almost a century passed between the first stone in 1906 and the last in 2009, making St John’s one of the world’s last cathedrals built entirely the old way, block by block, with no steel reinforcing. English architect John Loughborough Pearson designed it in soaring Gothic Revival style, yet never saw it: he died before work began.

St. Stephens Cathedral

Look for the small sandstone building beside the cathedral: that’s St Stephen’s Chapel, finished in 1850 to a design by Augustus Pugin, who shaped the interiors of London’s Houses of Parliament. It’s the oldest surviving church in Brisbane, while the Gothic Revival cathedral next door rose in stages later in the 1800s.

Queens Gardens

Set aside as Brisbane’s botanic reserve in 1855, Queens Gardens is one of the city’s oldest public gardens, sitting right beside Old Government House, once home to Queensland’s governors. Huge old fig trees, native and exotic plantings, shaded paths and open lawns: a properly Victorian idea of a place to stroll.

Queensland Parliament

Charles Tiffin, Queensland’s first Colonial Architect, won the 1864 design competition, and building ran from 1865 to 1889 in two stages as colonial money allowed. The French Renaissance style glows in golden sandstone from Albert Street and Murphy’s Creek, with a slender clock tower over the George and Alice Streets corner. The roof? Painted iron imitating slate.

City Botanical Gardens, ending point of the Brisbane Scavenger Hunt

In 1828 convicts from the Moreton Bay penal settlement dug here, growing vegetables and grain to feed the colony, making this one of Queensland’s oldest cultivated patches of land. From 1855 first curator Walter Hill turned the riverside paddock into a real botanic collection, testing world plants in the subtropical climate and planting ambitious bunya pines.

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