Governor Sir George Bowen and his family moved in during April 1862, and the house announced itself two months later with a party Brisbane would not forget. On 16 June 1862, Sir George and Lady Diamantina Bowen threw open the doors for a ball celebrating Queen Victoria's birthday - delayed from May by mourning for the late Prince Albert. Between three and four hundred guests arrived. There were rooms set aside for dancing, for claret and sherry, for card tables and quiet conversation. At one in the morning, supper was laid out in the quadrangle beneath a canvas roof strung with candles and Chinese lanterns, and the dancing carried on until four. The Bowens themselves sat it out: Lady Diamantina was in delicate health - which is to say, heavily pregnant. Their daughter Agnes arrived weeks later, on 26 July, believed to be the first child born in the house.

Vice-regal life was not all lanterns and whist. In 1866 the young colony's finances collapsed, a bank failed, and public works ground to a halt - throwing crowds of unpaid labourers out of work. That September, demonstrators marched on the city under a banner reading 'Bread or Blood,' and the threat of the mob sacking Government House was real enough that hundreds of officials were hurriedly sworn in as special constables to back up the police. The house held. It would go on to shelter the first eleven Governors of Queensland and their families, its gardens shaped in part by Lady Diamantina, who worked with the Botanic Gardens curator Walter Hill to extend grand public events out from the grounds and into the gardens next door.

By 1909 the house was nearly fifty, and the colony had outgrown it. There was no ballroom, and what had once felt spacious now seemed cramped for the demands of vice-regal entertaining. So the government made a remarkable decision: it handed Government House over to become the seed of Queensland's first university. In December 1909 the building passed to the new University of Queensland, and the Governor decamped to a leased mansion at Paddington called Fernberg - bought outright in 1911 and still the Queensland Governor's residence today. Old Government House would later become a pioneer of heritage protection itself: placed on the National Trust's first list of significant buildings in 1969, and in March 1978, the very first building shielded by Queensland's heritage legislation.

The house holds one more claim, smaller than a constitution but dearer to many Queensland hearts. Around the turn of the century, during the term of Governor Lord Lamington, a cook at Government House named Armand Galland is credited with inventing the lamington - that humble cube of sponge cake dipped in chocolate and rolled in coconut that became a national institution. The origin story is fondly told and gently disputed, as the best food legends always are. Today the restored building belongs to Queensland University of Technology, ringed by the modern campus at Gardens Point. QUT opens it for tours, events and exhibitions, so visitors can still walk the rooms where governors governed, a riot was feared, and Australia's most beloved cake may have met its coconut.