Thomas Brisbane was a Scottish soldier and a serious astronomer, and the colonists never quite forgave him for caring more about the second than the first. His observatory at Parramatta, raised in 1822, produced a catalogue of more than seven thousand southern stars, real scientific work done at the far edge of the British world. The river, the city and eventually this planetarium all took his name. It is a fitting inheritance. A man remembered by his contemporaries as a distracted administrator is honoured now for exactly the distraction, the long nights spent measuring a sky most people never bothered to look at.

The planetarium opened on 24 May 1978 in the Brisbane Botanic Gardens at Mount Coot-tha, about five kilometres from the city centre. Its heart is the Cosmic Skydome, a hemispherical theatre twelve and a half metres across, seating up to 130 beneath a dome that becomes, when the lights die, the entire night sky. The projection technology has been replaced more than once. The original German-made Zeiss star projector gave way to a Japanese instrument in 2013, and a digital system arrived in 2019. The machinery changes; the experience holds. Lean back, the dome darkens, and the southern constellations bloom overhead with a clarity the light-soaked real city can no longer offer.

Beyond the dome, the foyer and gallery double as a small museum of the space age. A replica of Neil Armstrong's spacesuit stands near a Saturn V rocket built to one forty-eighth scale, and cases hold meteorites and models of the spacecraft that carried people off the planet. Outside, a statue honours Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the self-taught Russian schoolteacher whose equations laid the theoretical groundwork for spaceflight decades before any rocket flew. A second statue celebrates Abigail Allwood, the Australian geologist who searches other worlds for signs of ancient life. A sundial keeps the oldest kind of astronomical time in its own courtyard, tracking the same sun the visitors inside have come to leave behind.

In 2018 the gallery added Skylore, the first permanent Australian exhibit dedicated to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander astronomy. Curated with the astronomer Duane Hamacher and developed in close partnership with Indigenous communities, it gathered leading Elders to share star knowledge, much of it set down publicly for the first time. This is sky-watching far older than any telescope, the accumulated observation of peoples who read the seasons, the tides and the right time to travel in the movements of stars and the dark spaces between them. Beneath a dome named for a nineteenth-century governor, the planetarium makes room for the astronomers who were charting these same southern heavens for tens of thousands of years before he arrived.