Ipswich Art Gallery

The Ipswich Art Gallery was opened in the foyer of the Town Hall in March 1951. In 1980 the Gallery was relocated to the former St Paul's Young Men's Hall (now the Ipswich Community Gallery), gaining its first professional Gallery Director in 1985. After extensive community consultation and with the support of donations made to the Ipswich Arts Foundation, the Gallery was relaunched in 1999 and once again sited in the beautifully restored old Town Hall.

The Old Town Hall and Global Arts Link (GAL)
Introduction to the story of the Old Town Hall Global Arts Link which at the time was a new visual arts and social history museum situated in the oldest town hall in Queensland.

The hall opened as a School of Arts Building in 1861 but the idea started in 1859. This was when the State of Queensland hadn’t even begun, and there was no capital city in Brisbane.

The Committee of the Ipswich School of Arts begs the public to consider how advantageous - indeed how necessary - it has become owing to the advancement of the Town to possess a Hall. 

The Government have placed 600 pounds on the Estimates for this purpose, on condition an equal amount be raised in the district...
The Committee confidently and earnestly requests the public’s cordial support and Mr. F. A. Forbes, the Treasurer of the Institution, will be happy to receive contributions.

The North Australian newspaper, October 31 1859 

When the School of Arts was completed, it contained a hall, a library, meeting rooms and offices and was considered an impressive building. Within a few years, the Council also moved in and complaints about lack of space began to be heard.

The population was growing, performers expected better stage facilities - over the years, there were repeated demands for the Hall’s immediate demolition and replacement. Fortunately, each complaint produced a compromise. The building was extended or adapted and people learned to “make do”. The more they grumbled, the more affection they seemed to hold for the familiar but frustrating old building. Today, the Town Hall is a great survivor which has once again been adapted for a new purpose in the heart of Ipswich.

GAL Renovations
There had been only a few major additions to the hall, over its 140 year life including a new fancy front with offices (1864) where the town council met for almost 100 years. As well, a new stage was built to make it easy for big stage shows and musicals. That extension was done in 1892 by George Brockwell Gill, a well known architect of his day who also created a number of other important buildings in Ipswich.

The Town Hall as the hub of everything
Above all else, the town hall was a place where people got together to have a good time.

There were big fancy receptions for important people visiting town, including the Prince of Wales in 1920 and various other VIPs including royalty from Thailand in the 1970s!
There were speech and singing competitions called eisteddfods, which little kids entered as well as older people.

There were plays and musicals as early as 1864.

And acrobats, dancers, musicians, poets singers who travelled around the country entertaining people long before the days of TV and the movies. Banjo Paterson and Dame Nellie Melba were among the famous performers.. Acrobat Lottie Angel was another.

There were also meetings and shows of other sorts. Flower shows were very big, some raising money for charity. Cat shows were often held here. During times of trouble or stress the community often met in the hall. During the wars, they met to hear from returned soldiers about how the fighting was going, during drought they met to pray for rain.

And they had dances often more than once a week, a bit like a school ball but with a real band on stage, and someone calling out the steps. There were prizes for the best dancers. Lots of girls met their boyfriends there.

There was even roller skating in the hall!

Global Arts Link was built by renovating and extending this fabulous old town hall. All its memories come flooding back for many local visitors, and for people who never knew it before, there’s lots of ways of seeing and hearing the stories.

Global Arts Link in the Old Town Hall had lots to see and do, mainly about art and history, but also about the heritage of the old building. The hall was renovated and new additions added in 1998 and 1999. GAL opened to the public in May 1999.

The new additions included a glass foyer and a new gallery for showing great artworks (the CS Energy Gallery, named after the power company which helped pay for the finishing of that gallery). A great deal of care was taken to ensure that the heritage value of the building was unaffected by the addition of the foyer.

Things to see in GAL were The CS Energy Gallery, The John Hooper Showcase, The Freeman Gallery, Lottie's Place, Kabool and 'Making Tracks', Spotlight, On State, and the First Australian Hall of Time (including The Time Machine).