There was no government cheque behind the Shrine of Remembrance. The funds came by public subscription, ordinary Queenslanders giving what they could toward a memorial for the soldiers killed in the First World War. In 1928 a design competition was held, and the Sydney firm of Buchanan and Cowper won it with a Greek Classic Revival temple. The Shrine took two years to build. On Armistice Day, 11 November 1930, at eleven in the morning, Governor John Goodwin dedicated it. The hour and the date were chosen with care: it was at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, in 1918, that the war had at last ended.

The eighteen columns are cut from Helidon sandstone, quarried west of Brisbane, warm and honey-toned in the Queensland sun. The steps climbing from Anzac Square are Queensland granite, harder and cooler underfoot. At the centre of the temple, the Eternal Flame rests in its brass urn, a small constant fire in the open air. The form is deliberately classical, a Doric temple of the kind raised over the dead in the ancient Mediterranean, borrowed here to give shape to a grief that had no precedent in the young state's history. Restraint is the point. There is no triumph in the design, only a circle, a flame, and a number that means the day the dying ended.

Beneath the temple lies a crypt, the Memorial Galleries, long known as the Shrine of Memories. Here the names and badges of Australian regiments are set into the walls, units that fought through the campaigns of two world wars. A large mosaic mural by the artist Don Ross spreads across the space, and on the external wall stands a sculpture raised in memory of the First World War dead, given by the women of Queensland. The lower galleries were built to hold not spectacle but record, a place to find a particular regiment, a particular war, and to stand with it for a while in the cool and the quiet.

Each year before dawn on 25 April, Anzac Day, people gather at the Shrine while it is still dark, and wreaths are laid around the Eternal Flame. They return on 11 November, Remembrance Day, the anniversary of the dedication and of the Armistice itself. A third service is held near 15 February, marking the Fall of Singapore in 1942 and the men of the 8th Division lost or taken prisoner there. The Anzacs were the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, and the name has come to carry an entire national idea of endurance and mateship. At this flame, though, the meaning stays close to the ground: these were sons and brothers, and the city has not stopped keeping the light for them.