New Year’s Eve in Brisbane, Australia

Date: December 31, 2018
Location: Brisbane, Australia

We enjoyed Brisbane, Australia at Christmas time and the Christmas fireworks show. We heard from other people who saw the Christmas fireworks that the new year’s eve ones were even better.

We assumed that new year’s eve would be very crowded and we were unsure how early we would need to arrive to scope out a place to stand. So we decided to buy tickets to a new year’s eve party.

We purchased tickets for Southbank Beer Garden. We choose it because we love German food and it was very close to the river, so there would be a good view of the fireworks. The tickets included all you can eat and drink from 7:30 pm – midnight. We were able to walk to a train stop from our house-sit and take the train to Brisbane. We arrived at Southbank Beer Garden just before 7:30.

As in a typical German beer garden, the tables are long and have communal seating. We met a couple, Stacy and Ruben, who are from Germany and Belgium but living in Brisbane for a few months on a work visa. They are able to travel and work for a set amount of months in Australia.

There were fireworks at 8:00 pm that we watched from Southbank Beer Garden.

This was the crowd for the 8:00 fireworks.

Brian has been to New York City for new year’s eve before and purchased a ticket with unlimited drinks, but the bar was so packed that he only had one drink the entire night. We were hoping that was not going to be the case at Southbank Beer Garden.

It ended up being great! We were able to walk right up to the bar and get drinks so we had as much as we wanted, and waiters walked to each table with platters of food so we also had as much to eat as we wanted.

Our view of the midnight fireworks.

The Christmas fireworks were launched from two barges in the river, and I read that for new year’s eve five barges were used.

From where we were standing we could only see two so while there were tons of fireworks that went off we didn’t even see half of them.

We enjoyed having a place to sit on new year’s eve and get food and drinks, but our view of the fireworks could have been better, as I think it would be better to see more of the barges going off.

Starting at around 8:00 pm public transportation was free till the next morning. After the midnight fireworks it was a lot easier to get a train than we expected. There were plenty of signs directing people to if they wanted to go north or south of the city. Our train home was not as crowded as I expected and we were able to have seats the whole way.

Experiencing a warm new year’s eve was nice.