The name is literal. A single hoop pine, planted by the Clarkson family who first owned the riverside site, stood watch over the early sanctuary and lent it a name that has outlasted nearly everything else here. When Reid opened the gates in 1927, the koala was in genuine peril. The fur trade had carved through populations across eastern Australia, and there was little public will to stop it. Reid built his refuge on a different premise: that this slow, eucalyptus-drunk marsupial was worth saving for its own sake, and that a place where people could meet one face to face might change how a nation felt about it.

From two koalas, the sanctuary expanded into the 18-hectare park it is today, home to around 80 species of Australian animals. The Koala Forest holds more than thirty koalas in a single open enclosure, fed mid-morning and mid-afternoon, the animals dozing in the forks of their trees as visitors pass below. In a five-hectare reserve, eastern grey kangaroos roam free, and visitors can walk among them, feeding and stroking animals that choose to come close. Rainbow lorikeets arrive in shrieking, jewel-bright flocks for prepared nectar. Once a day, raptors take the air in a bird-of-prey show, demonstrating the speed and eyesight that make them hunters. The place has drawn its share of distinguished guests over the decades; Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the American president, visited in 1943 during the war years, and Jean MacArthur, wife of General Douglas MacArthur, came to see the native animals for herself. It is a zoo, but one built around encounter rather than display.

For most of its life, Lone Pine offered something few places on Earth could: the chance to hold a koala. On 1 July 2024, the sanctuary ended the practice. The decision drew real backlash from visitors who had treasured the experience, but it followed a current running through modern conservation toward up-close-but-not-personal encounters. The picture is genuinely complicated. Research from Griffith University found that koalas long accustomed to being held showed signs of stress during the COVID lockdowns, when the visitors simply stopped coming. These are animals shaped by a century of human contact, and there are no easy answers about what they now need. Visitors can still get close; they just no longer cradle a koala in their arms.

Lone Pine is no longer only a place to meet animals. In 2018, working with the Brisbane City Council, the sanctuary opened the Brisbane Koala Science Institute, a research facility with a laboratory, full-time scientists, and a koala biobank, a genetic depository safeguarding the species' future. The public can view the institute through a window, watching conservation happen in real time. It is a fitting evolution for a place founded as an act of protection. In 2009, as part of Queensland's 150th-anniversary celebrations, Lone Pine was named one of the state's Q150 Icons, recognition that this riverside refuge had become part of Queensland's identity.