The new Exhibition Building and Concert Hall rose with remarkable speed. The foundation stone went down on 25 April 1891, laid by the acting Governor Sir Arthur Hunter Palmer, who sealed beneath it a bottle containing copies of each of Brisbane's leading newspapers - a time capsule still waiting under the stone. More than three hundred workers laboured over the building, and by August 1891, just twelve months later, it was complete. It had been built for the Queensland National Agricultural and Industrial Association, the body behind the colony's great annual show. The site already carried history: the Queensland Acclimatisation Society had worked the grounds through the 1860s and 70s, trialling which foreign plants and animals might thrive in the subtropics.

For decades the great hall was where Brisbane came to hear music. From the 1890s into the 1930s, the Exhibition Concert Hall was the city's principal venue, and the voices that filled it belonged to some of the most celebrated performers of the age. Dame Nellie Melba - the Australian soprano whose name still attaches to a peach dessert and a slice of toast - sang here. So did Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the Polish pianist who would later become prime minister of his country. To sit in that brick auditorium and hear a Melba aria rise into the arches was, for a young colonial city, a brush with the wider cultural world. Generations later, the building still hums with music as home to the Queensland Youth Orchestras.

The grand show association did not last. The economic depression of the 1890s forced it into liquidation, and in 1897 the Queensland Government took over the building and grounds. Two years later, in 1899, the Queensland Museum moved in - and stayed. For eighty-six years the collections filled these halls, from natural-history specimens to relics of the colony's past, while other parts of the building carried on as concert hall and art gallery. The museum's tenancy ran so long, and so defined the place, that when it finally departed for the new Queensland Cultural Centre across the river in 1986, the name had already stuck. The Exhibition Building had become, permanently, the Old Museum.

Few buildings of its kind remain. The Old Museum is one of only two nineteenth-century exhibition buildings still standing in Australia - the other being Melbourne's Royal Exhibition Building - which makes Addison's brick palace genuinely rare. Its later life has been varied and slightly improbable: in the 1980s it served as a filming location for an Australian-made revival of the television series Mission: Impossible, and since 2016 its halls have hosted the flower and garden displays of the Ekka, Brisbane's beloved annual exhibition. Listed on the Queensland Heritage Register in 1992 and named one of the state's Q150 Icons in 2009 for its engineering, the building endures - a reminder of the night a skating rink burned and a city decided to build something extraordinary in its place.