The demolition alone took more than a year. To clear the site, crews brought down the Executive Building, the tallest structure ever demolished in Queensland, along with the old Neville Bonner Building. Then the digging began. The Star Entertainment Group led the Destination Brisbane Consortium that won the tender in 2015, and Multiplex did the building, on a project that swelled past three billion dollars and slipped from 2022 to 2023 to 2024 as bad weather and the pandemic took their toll. The signature engineering moment came in September 2022, when a 175-tonne span of steel was raised overnight into the gap between the two curved towers. That span anchors the Sky Deck, which wraps 250 metres around the towers' upper reaches. Brisbane woke to find it floating there, a hundred metres up, where the day before there had been only air.

The most demanding part of the project was not the towers but the past. The 12-hectare site holds nine heritage-listed buildings, including the former Government Printing Office, where federal soldiers seized the parliamentary Hansard in a notorious 1917 raid. Conservators describe it as the largest heritage project underway anywhere in Queensland, an effort to restore and reopen sandstone offices that illustrate generations of the old government precinct. That ambition drew sharp criticism too. Planting a casino resort on the historical heart of the city, steps from the seat of state power, struck many as the wrong use for such loaded ground. The development answers, in part, by handing seven and a half of its twelve hectares back to the public, threading a new mangrove walk along the river and opening the heritage buildings to anyone who wants to wander in.

Reaching across the river to South Bank is the Neville Bonner Bridge, a 320-metre pedestrian span of mast, arch, and cable that opened in late August 2024. Its name carries weight. Neville Bonner, an elder of the Jagera people whose country includes this stretch of the Brisbane River, became in 1971 the first Aboriginal Australian to sit in the federal Parliament, and the following year the first elected to it by popular vote. To carry his name across the water at the very place his people have always known is a deliberate act of memory. Pedestrians crossing it move between the casino towers and the cultural precinct on the far bank, walking a line that the river's first custodians walked long before any wharf bore a queen's name.

The Star Brisbane opened to the public on 29 August 2024, the old Treasury Casino having closed its doors just days before. The five-star Star Grand hotel filled the two curved towers with 340 rooms and a facade studded with 350 lighting pillars that turn the building into a screen after dark. But the gamble cut both ways. Star Entertainment, squeezed by mounting debts and regulatory trouble, spent the following year fighting to stay solvent, and in August 2025 sold its entire stake in the development to its partners Chow Tai Fook and Far East Consortium. The precinct that took nearly a decade to build outlasted the company that built it, a reminder that on this riverbend, governments and fortunes have always come and gone while the water keeps its slow bend toward the sea.