Four days in Brisbane: the city Australians move to for the weather

Brisbane hosted a world expo in 1988 on the south bank of the river, and rather than let the site rot it turned the whole thing into parkland. That is where to start, because it explains the city faster than anything else will: a kilometre of riverfront with a lagoon, a sand beach, lifeguards, free entry, and office workers swimming in their lunch hour.

The cultural buildings sit along the back of it in a row. The Gallery of Modern Art is the one to give an afternoon to. It opened in 2006, it is the largest gallery of its kind in the country, and it takes contemporary Asian and Pacific art seriously in a way no other Australian institution does.

Then eat outside on Grey Street and watch the light go off the towers across the water.

Cross back to the north bank and go up the clock tower. Brisbane City Hall opened in 1930 with a 92 metre tower and the largest analogue clock face in Australia, and the way up is a pair of hand-operated cage lifts that have never been replaced. The tours are free, they run through the museum on the ground floor, and they need booking because the lift holds about a dozen people.

The museum itself is the best short introduction to the city there is, and it is worth an hour before you go up.

In the afternoon, walk down to the City Botanic Gardens on the river bend. This was the colony's first farm, then its botanic garden from the 1850s, and it is now the quietest twenty hectares in the centre, full of bunya pines and enormous figs.

Finish across the river at Kangaroo Point, where a wall of volcanic cliff rises straight out of the water. Climbers are on it most evenings, the whole face is floodlit after dark, and the view back at the skyline from the bottom is the picture postcard nobody takes.

Take the boat. There is a bus that gets to Lone Pine in half an hour, but the launch that leaves South Bank mid morning runs upstream for the best part of ninety minutes through the river's bends, past cliffs and mansions and mangroves, and the journey is a good part of the day.

Lone Pine opened in 1927 and was the first koala sanctuary anywhere. It now keeps around 130 of them, along with a paddock of kangaroos you walk into with a bag of feed. This is also one of the few states left where you may hold one, which costs extra, takes about thirty seconds, and is capped by law at a short daily shift per animal.

Afterwards go west and up. The botanic gardens at the foot of Mount Coot-tha run to fifty hectares, take subtropical planting seriously, and cost nothing.

Then drive or bus to the summit for sunset. Mount Coot-tha is only 287 metres, which sounds like nothing until you see that the entire city is flat and the view runs from the Glass House Mountains to Moreton Bay.

Give the last morning to the Queensland Museum, back at South Bank, which is free and covers the state's natural history: a megafauna hall, the fossils, and the little biplane a Bundaberg man flew solo from England to Australia in 1928.

Then walk north across the bridge to Roma Street, where a disused railway yard was turned into what the city claims is the largest subtropical garden in any city centre. It sits directly above the station your train or bus leaves from, which makes it a genuinely useful last hour rather than a detour.