Doomben does not stand alone. Barely half a kilometre west, across a single road, lies Eagle Farm Racecourse, the older and grander of the pair. For decades the two tracks were bitter commercial rivals, run by competing clubs and fighting over the same Brisbane racing crowd, and the road dividing them, Nudgee Road, earned a wry local nickname: the Gaza Strip, after one of the world's most contested borders. The rivalry eventually proved ruinous. Splitting the audience between two venues bled both clubs of profit, and in 2008 the Brisbane Turf Club, which ran Doomben, lost more than a million dollars in a single year. In 2009 the warring clubs finally merged into the Brisbane Racing Club, and the two courses that had spent a century glaring across the Gaza Strip became neighbours under one owner.

Doomben opened on 20 May 1933 with seven races, the first straight six-furlong sprint ever run in Queensland, won by a horse named Wollun over the favourite, Closing Time. That sprint would become the course's signature. After the war ended and the soldiers left, the race was relaunched on 1 June 1946 as the Ahern Memorial Handicap, with prize money lifted to ten thousand pounds, an enormous purse that made it the richest sprint in Australia. The following year it was renamed for that prize money and given the name it still carries: the Doomben 10,000. A week after that very first 1933 meeting, the inaugural Doomben Cup was run too, won by Pentheus. Both races endure. Today the Doomben 10,000 and the Doomben Cup remain Group 1 fixtures on the Australian calendar, their prize money now counted in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 changed everything for this quiet corner of Ascot. American forces poured into Brisbane, and the two racecourses, flat, open, and close to the river and the airfield, were perfect for an army that arrived faster than barracks could be built. Eagle Farm became Camp Ascot; Doomben became Camp Doomben; and when even two camps could not hold the troops massing in the suburb, a third, Camp Raceview, spread north over Raceview Avenue. The infield disappeared beneath tents. The members' stand was converted into an Australian Army Signals office. A corner of the track was even paved into an aircraft apron feeding the hangars next door at Eagle Farm aerodrome. With the courses occupied, Saturday racing simply moved across town to Albion Park until peace returned the turf to the horses.

Strip away the history and Doomben is, at heart, a finely tuned machine for racing. Its last major rebuild, completed in December 1996 for 3.3 million dollars, replaced the turf, the rails, and the irrigation, leaving a track 1,715 metres around and 27 metres wide, surfaced in hardy kikuyu grass and run clockwise in the Australian fashion. The straights carry a gentle two per cent camber; the turns bank more steeply at five. Three training tracks nest inside the main circuit. Even the water tells a story of cooperation: a 2019 system draws from storage in Doomben's infield, fed in turn from a larger dam over at Eagle Farm, the two old rivals now quite literally sharing the same supply. The grandstand, first raised in 1932 before the course even opened, still presides over it all.