Queensland had a problem that this building was designed to solve. With almost no manufacturing of its own, the young colony lived and died by what it could import, and the duties levied on those imports paid the government's bills. Brisbane had been declared a port in 1846, and as trade swelled, the colony needed a customs house worthy of the revenue passing through it. Charles McLay of the Colonial Architect's Office drew the plans; the contractor John Petrie and Son raised the walls of brick on a stone foundation, with columns and balusters cut from Murphy's Creek sandstone. The whole thing cost 38,346 pounds and took three years. The site, at the downstream end of the city, was chosen deliberately to pull wharf development toward Petrie Bight. Architecture, here, was economic policy made visible.

Look closely at the facade and you find the confidence of the late Victorian age. A shield sits between an emu and a kangaroo, an antipodean coat of arms improvised at a time when no government in the country actually held one. An iron balustrade, shipped all the way from England, carries the royal cypher VR, for Victoria Regina, a small bow to the distant queen whose empire this port served. Inside, the dome covers the Long Room, the great public hall where merchants once queued to pay their dues. Fluted Corinthian pilasters rise to a coffered ceiling with a glazed eye at its centre, letting daylight pour down onto black and white marble and cedar joinery. It was a temple, and the god was commerce.

Buildings outlive their purposes. As ships grew larger they could no longer reach this stretch of river, and the working port crept downstream toward the mouth, leaving the Customs House stranded as a monument to a Brisbane that had moved on. The Australian Customs Service occupied it for nearly a hundred years before finally leaving. The building stood empty from 1988 until the University of Queensland took it on, restoring it between 1991 and 1994 and reopening it as a heritage and function venue. The old bonded warehouse became an art gallery; the Long Room became a place for receptions beneath the dome. Today it survives as one of the few visible reminders of the port that gave the city its first reason to exist.

Heritage is never entirely safe. In the 2010s a proposal to build a high-rise tower beside the Customs House set off a public fight, with residents and the university warning that the structure would crowd the historic building, throw it into shadow, and threaten a mature fig tree on the grounds. The university argued the tower would stand only 2.6 metres from the boundary, against a council policy calling for a far greater setback, and it took the dispute to court. It lost the case in July 2016. Yet a few months later a compromise was reached: the tower's profile was reshaped to protect sightlines to the dome, and protections were agreed for the fig. The copper dome, focal point of two centuries of approaches by river and by road, kept its place against the sky.