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‘Brisbane will Never be the Same’: Tasting Change at World Expo '88

Brisbane will never be the same after Expo — shopping hours, outdoor eating, the greening of the city, our attitudes to hospitality … all these things will permanently transform our city. (Edwards, quoted in Robson 1988: 54) While food historians have begun to focus attention on world's fairs, Vaccaro's detailed study of food at the 1904 World Fair in St Louis (2004) is at the vanguard of publishing in this area. Similarly, although the intense interest in culinary matters that is now identified as ‘foodie’ culture was developing in Australia in the 1980s, little attention has concentrated on this aspect of Brisbane's World Expo '88 (also widely known simply as ‘Expo '88’), which was staged from April to October 1988 as part of the national Bicentennial celebrations. Expo '88 dominated local headlines and became a part of the national imagination during the bicentennial year but, although commentators at the time predicted that it would ‘doubtless be a focus of research for a long time to come’ (Day 1988: iv), other matters have since dominated reflection about this period of recent Australian history. Yet food was specified in the ‘Cultural and Entertainment’ category of one of the three exposition's official sub-themes of ‘Leisure: The Universal Pastime’, and did play a number of important roles in and at Expo '88. Moreover, Robinson has identified Expo '88 as one of the ‘plethora of social, economic, cultural and political determinants’ that explains the diversity of cuisines available in Brisbane today (2007: 71).