The square exists because of a wound that ran through the whole country. Australia entered the First World War with a population of barely five million; it sent its young men across the world, and 60,000 of them never came back. Another 152,000 were wounded. The casualty rate - around 65 percent - was among the highest of any of the Allied forces. There was scarcely a town or street in Queensland that did not lose someone. When the war ended, the impulse to build something equal to that loss took hold across the state, and in Brisbane it took the form of a memorial square at the heart of the city, where the names of distant battlefields could be inscribed close to home.

In 1928 a design competition was won by the Sydney architects Buchanan and Cowper, who proposed a Greek Revival shrine: a circular colonnade ten metres across, eighteen Doric columns of Helidon sandstone rising from a three-tiered base of Queensland granite. Around the entablature ran the names of the places where Australians had fought. Construction took two years. On Armistice Day, 11 November 1930, the Governor of Queensland, Sir John Goodwin, dedicated the shrine and the square, and lit the Eternal Flame - the first memorial flame of its kind in Australia. It has been kept burning ever since, a small constant fire at the centre of a busy city, tended as a symbol of faithful remembrance for the dead who have no grave their families could visit.

Almost nothing in the square is accidental. The bottle trees were planted to honour the Queensland Light Horse, who served in the Boer War; the date palms, a biblical symbol of victory, recall Australia's campaigns in the Middle East across both World Wars. Three paths climb from the foot of the stairs, one each for the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force. Twin stone staircases wrap around the shrine, and between them lie shallow tiled pools - reflecting water as a symbol of tranquillity and renewed life. The sculptor Daphne Mayo carved the Queensland Women's War Memorial into the memorial wall, a relief that makes this one of the few Australian war monuments to depict servicewomen. Nearby stands Brisbane's only memorial to the Queenslanders who died in the South African War.

The grief of the square does not end at ground level. Beneath the shrine lies a crypt and a series of memorial galleries, deepened and renamed in a major restoration completed in 2019. There is now a World War I Memorial Crypt, a World War II Gallery, and a Post-World War II gallery, holding digitised records curated by the State Library of Queensland alongside touchscreens and timelines that let visitors trace individual lives and battles. Later memorials honour the conflicts in Korea, Malaya, and Borneo, and a dedicated memorial recognises Queensland's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander servicemen and women, whose contribution went long unmarked. The undercroft turns the square from a monument into a place of learning - and of names.

On one morning each year, the square fills in the dark. On 25 April - Anzac Day - thousands gather at the Shrine of Remembrance before first light for the Dawn Service, the hour chosen to echo the time the original ANZACs landed at Gallipoli in 1915. The eternal flame burns as it always does; the city is quiet; and for a while the columns and the carved battlefield names are not architecture but the focus of a living act of memory. Listed on the Queensland Heritage Register in 1992, ANZAC Square is more than a rare and unified piece of urban design. It is the place where Brisbane comes, year after year, to stand together and remember its dead.