The Gabba
The Gabba
The traditional home of Australian Football in Queensland, the Gabba is one of the great sporting venues of the world, with a rich modern tradition headed by football and cricket and a proud history involving many other sports.
First used for an Australian Football premiership fixture on 10 June 1905, it hosted a series of big matches from 1905-10, including the 1905-07 and 1909-10 Grand Finals and the first interstate clash of the 20th Century against NSW in 1905. An auspicious carnival involving teams from all over Australia was played there in 1914, and featured such clashes as Collingwood v South Adelaide, Collingwood v. Cananore (Tasmania) and Perth vs. Cananore.
The ground was hardly used in the 1920s, with a gymkhana match was played between teams from North and South Brisbane in 1922 and a War Memorial Cup match between Valley and Brisbane in 1923 the only noted football events until 1930.
The dry times continued through the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, when Perry Park became the focus of local administrators, and many pundits of that era believe the shift of matches to the Gabba in the early ‘60s was a turning point for the code. Double header matches and Sunday football were hugely popular and Grand Finals of the ‘60s, ‘70s and early ‘80s regularly saw 10,000 plus spectators at the ground.
The Gabba-based 1961 National Carnival was among many important interstate matches played there, including Queensland’s 1975 victory over Tasmania and the 1991 win over Victoria ‘B’. Other Grand Finals have been staged in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, with a cameo return in 2005 when the Southport Sharks got over the top of Morningside.
The ground, a pear-shaped surface surrounded by a greyhound track through until 1992, first hosted AFL premiership football in 1982, when Hawthorn played Essendon. In the same year Queensland played ACT in a demonstration match as part of the Commonwealth Games. It returned in 1991 when the Gold Coast-based Brisbane. 23 Bears played three premiership matches in Brisbane as a trial ahead of a full-time move to the Gabba in ’93.
February 1993 saw the start of a massive State Government redevelopment of the ground which, by 2004, would see the entire stadium developed. The first AFL night match was played at the Gabba on 26 August 1995, when the Bears beat Essendon by 32 points in front of a sell-out crowd of 12,657. The first AFL finals match was played at the Gabba on 6 September 1996, when the Bears beat Essendon by one point. And the biggest AFL crowd recorded at the Gabba is 37,224 on 9 July 2005, when the Bears beat Collingwood by 78 points.
