There is a particular kind of forgetting that happens after major events — not the forgetting of what occurred, but the forgetting of where. The photographs remain, the stories are told, the participants carry the memory forward in their bodies. But the civic address, the stable location at which the event existed on the web, the page that once held registration details and livestream links and community notices — that disappears. The domain lapses. The redirect loops. The search result points nowhere.

This is the quiet failure mode of community programming around the Olympic and Paralympic Games, and it is worth examining carefully as Brisbane prepares for 2032. The headline events — the opening ceremony at the new Victoria Park stadium, the swimming finals, the athletics programme — will be documented exhaustively. Institutions with deep resources will preserve them. But the community events: the school workshops in Cairns and Townsville, the cultural activations along the Gold Coast foreshore, the tree-planting mornings on the Sunshine Coast, the First Nations storytelling gatherings in regional Queensland — these are the fabric of a Games that intends to be different, and they are also the most vulnerable to digital erasure.

The question this article pursues is not whether those events will happen. They will. The preliminary evidence of community engagement is already substantial, and the ambition of the Elevate 2042 legacy strategy — a 20-year framework jointly developed by the Queensland Government, the Australian Government, and all the Games Delivery Partners — is explicit about wanting the Games to transform communities across the entire Queensland region, not just the stadium precincts of inner Brisbane. The question is whether those events will be given the permanent addresses they deserve.

THE GEOGRAPHY OF A DISTRIBUTED GAMES.

Brisbane 2032 is not a city Games in the traditional sense. Events are planned to be hosted in three main regions in Queensland: the Brisbane Zone, with twenty-one venues centred around the city; the Gold Coast, with seven venues; and the Sunshine Coast, with four venues. Beyond those zones, the Games will be held across Queensland including Brisbane, Moreton Bay, Sunshine Coast, Gold Coast and Redlands, with the regional cities of Toowoomba, Townsville, Cairns, Rockhampton and Maryborough also preparing to host events.

This is an unusual geographic footprint for a Summer Olympics — deliberately so. Sustainability and economic responsibility sit at the core of how the Games are being delivered, with the goal of primarily using existing sporting infrastructure with necessary upgrades, leaving lasting improvements that will benefit the communities in which they stand for decades to come. That ambition is admirable, and it is matched by a cultural programme of equal breadth. With events planned across Queensland, including Maryborough, Rockhampton, Gold Coast, Townsville, and the Whitsundays, there is an unparalleled opportunity to foster a state-wide cultural renaissance, ensuring that the benefits of the Games are felt throughout the province.

The implication for community events is significant. When a Games is concentrated in a single city, the community programming clusters around known precincts — parks, plazas, civic squares already well-mapped and well-addressed. When a Games extends across a state the size of Queensland, the community events must find their own locations, their own naming, their own digital homes. A school sports activation in Cairns does not share an address with a cultural ceremony in Rockhampton. A volunteer gathering in Ipswich does not automatically resolve to the same digital space as a First Nations cultural showcase in Toowoomba. Every event needs its own place to live, and that place needs to persist after the event concludes.

THE CULTURAL OLYMPIAD AND THE PROBLEM OF EPHEMERALITY.

The cultural programme that runs alongside the Games is not a new invention. The principle of holding an arts festival in parallel with sporting competitions is embedded in the foundations of the Olympic Movement. In his ambition to establish a Modern Olympic Games, Baron Pierre de Coubertin sought to revive the ancient Greek tradition of quadrennial celebrations of athletics and the arts that had been held in Olympia from 776 BC. In the Ancient Games, athletes, philosophers, scholars, poets, musicians, sculptors and high-profile leaders displayed their talents, in what Coubertin called the spirit of Olympism.

From the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, a Cultural Olympiad started being held to accompany the Games, organised during the preceding four years as well as a series of major events to coincide with the sports events. The term has been largely replaced by “Cultural Programme,” which starts about four years before the Games. Around two months before the Games, a “Culture Festival” is launched, lasting until the end of the Paralympic Games.

For Brisbane 2032, the Cultural Olympiad programme provides an ideal vehicle to bolster cohesion and see Australian arts, culture, creativity and sport on the world stage, with the programme starting in 2028. Arts Queensland has signalled the stakes clearly: the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games is a once-in-a-generation event and a global platform for Queensland’s creativity and vibrancy, with the associated cultural programming being transformational for Queensland — activating communities with new and enhanced infrastructure and events that draw visitors and build its cultural reputation. Arts, culture and creativity will underpin the Games experience, with rich and engaging statewide arts experiences set to elevate and enhance Brisbane 2032 legacy outcomes.

The runway to 2032 presents a significant opportunity to celebrate Queensland’s extraordinary artistic and creative talent and ensure the state’s stories, cultures and creativity are embedded in the fabric of Games delivery. That runway is now measured not in years but in specific program decisions. And the Paris 2024 experience offers a useful recent precedent: throughout Paris, more than 500 Cultural Olympiad projects brought artistic engagement into unexpected venues, with 24 new, permanent artworks commissioned in gyms and swimming pools, transforming routine environments into creative encounters and repositioning municipal sports facilities as key cultural sites within neighbourhoods. Far from a one-time festival, the Parisian Cultural Olympiad was designed with legacy in mind, with the City of Paris committed to sustaining its most impactful projects, now integrated into long-term strategies for arts education, creative funding, and public engagement.

The critical lesson from Paris — and from London before it — is that events without structural legacy planning become memories without addresses. The Cultural Olympiad should not be judged by the number of auxiliary events, the fireworks, drone shows, or ticket sales. It should be judged by what remains: healthy parks restored for community use, communities empowered to actively engage in creative spaces, art created by local talent, sustainable practices normalised across businesses, and cultural identities being preserved. For those things to be judged, they must first be found.

WHAT COMMUNITY EVENTS ARE ALREADY HAPPENING.

The countdown has begun in earnest, and community events are already embedded in the fabric of the lead-up. The seven-years-to-go milestone, marked in 2025, produced activations across the state. The Green and Gold Runway rolled out cultural performances, sports demonstrations, and appearances from Australian athletes as Queenslanders of all ages had a go at a range of Olympic and Paralympic sports. On the Sunshine Coast, local councillors hosted twenty free tree events as part of a “7 Years to Grow” initiative, celebrating the countdown by giving away 2,032 trees to be planted in backyards, schools, and clubs, creating a greener, healthier region intended to flourish over the following years and beyond.

On the Gold Coast, the community was invited to join Paralympic celebrations at Pizzey Park, meeting athletes and participating in para sport activities including climbing, archery, wheelchair basketball, and boccia. These were real events, attached to real places, involving real communities. They were the early expressions of what the Elevate 2042 strategy articulates as its deeper purpose.

The Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games Legacy Strategy, Elevate 2042, represents a shared 20-year vision for a lasting Games legacy and a brighter future for all. The four key areas of focus are: sport, health and inclusion; connecting people and places; a better future for the environment; and economy of the future — all developed through two foundations: advancing accessibility and empowering people with disability, and respecting, advancing and celebrating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

It follows a year of community consultation resulting in more than 14,000 suggestions. The Brisbane 2032 Legacy Forum welcomed 500 Queenslanders and Australians from diverse regions and backgrounds to contribute ideas that would benefit the community, economy and environment. Those suggestions, those forum conversations, those ideas submitted by name from postcodes across Queensland — they existed at addresses. They were gathered through platforms. They will need to be preserved.

FIRST NATIONS CULTURE AND THE PERMANENCE OF MEANING.

No discussion of community events around Brisbane 2032 can proceed without sustained attention to First Nations cultural programming, because it is not peripheral to the Games — it is foundational. Embracing First Nations culture and participation is at the core of the Games, with Brisbane 2032 committing to engage with Traditional Custodians in Host and Co-Host Cities, and throughout procurement and recruitment processes, to provide meaningful opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander athletes, young people, and their communities.

The Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games Organising Committee is the first in Olympic and Paralympic history to deliver a Reconciliation Action Plan. A four-year program of cultural showcasing, events and activities for Brisbane 2032 will be developed to foster celebration and learning from the world’s oldest continuous cultures. That program is not simply ceremonial. It involves communities across Queensland — from the Torres Strait in the far north to the Scenic Rim in the south-east — and it will generate events, gatherings, exhibitions, and cultural expressions that will need stable homes online if they are to be found and honoured by future generations.

The cultural festival will be participatory, iterative, and deeply rooted in First Nations knowledge, starting early, embracing artist residencies, and evolving through constant refinement. The Hassell studio analysis of Brisbane’s cultural vision identifies the Brisbane River itself as a connective tissue for this cultural programme — celebrating Brisbane’s subtropical identity, right down to the river as a connector, a metaphor and physical space for cultural exchange.

When a First Nations community in North Queensland prepares and delivers a cultural event in connection with Brisbane 2032, that event carries meaning that extends well beyond the date it occurs. It carries ancestral weight, community identity, and forward-facing hope. It deserves a permanent address — not a temporary event page on a borrowed platform that will be archived or deleted when the event concludes. It deserves a place in the civic fabric of Queensland’s online identity that will still be navigable in 2042.

THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN EVENTS AND ADDRESSES.

There is a distinction worth drawing carefully: between an event and its address. An event is bounded in time. A community sports morning at Pizzey Park on the Gold Coast lasted a few hours. A cultural programme in Maryborough will run for days or weeks. A First Nations storytelling project along the Sunshine Coast may evolve over years. All of these are events. But the question of their addresses is a separate matter.

An address, in the digital sense, is what makes an event locatable after it has occurred. It is what allows a child who participated in the 7 Years to Grow tree-planting to find their memory of it years later. It is what allows a researcher in 2035 to trace the scope of community engagement that surrounded Brisbane 2032. It is what allows the organisers of Brisbane 2042 — whoever they are — to understand what was done, how it was received, and by whom.

The London 2012 Games grappled with this directly. The Cultural Olympiad signalled to the world that London is a cultural powerhouse, with over 5,000 free cultural events stretching across all 33 boroughs and across all genres of music, dance, visual arts, theatre and fashion. But as EarthCheck’s analysis of Brisbane’s own preparedness notes, the Cultural Olympiad should not be judged by the number of auxiliary events. It should be judged by what remains: healthy parks restored for community use, communities empowered to actively engage in creative spaces, art created by local talent, sustainable practices normalised across businesses, and cultural identities being preserved.

For respective host cities, important legacies have been the contribution to positioning places previously seen as secondary from a cultural tourism point of view into leading cultural and creative centres — as was the case in Barcelona 1992, Sydney 2000, or Torino 2006, which benefited from ambitious public art programmes. That repositioning does not happen by accident. It happens through the deliberate cultivation of cultural infrastructure, of which the digital address is an indispensable part.

The Brisbane 2032 context raises this challenge acutely because the Games are, by design and by geography, so dispersed. The Games and associated cultural programming will be transformational for Queensland, activating communities with new and enhanced infrastructure and events that draw visitors and build cultural reputation, as highlighted in the 2032 Delivery Plan. Activating communities across a state that spans from the Torres Strait to Coolangatta requires that each community have its own digital presence — not merely a listing on a central database, but a persistent, authoritative address that belongs to that community’s engagement with the Games.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF PERMANENT ADDRESSES FOR TRANSIENT EVENTS.

The challenge for community events is structural. They are, by nature, organised by volunteer committees, community groups, local councils, school associations, arts collectives, First Nations cultural bodies, regional sporting clubs. These organisations often lack the digital infrastructure of major institutions. Their websites are built quickly on shared platforms. Their domain names are registered for a year or two and forgotten. Their social media pages are abandoned when the event concludes. The result is that the rich community life that surrounds a major Games — which is arguably the most important legacy-generating layer of the whole enterprise — is the least durably documented.

The namespace available through Queensland’s onchain identity layer offers a different model. Rather than asking community event organisers to build and maintain their own infrastructure, the infrastructure can be made available to them in a form that is permanent by design. A community sports carnival hosted in Rockhampton in connection with Brisbane 2032 does not need a complex website — it needs a name. rockhampton2032.brisbane2032 · fitzroyculture.brisbane2032 · sunshinecoast7years.brisbane2032 — names like these, registered in a namespace that does not expire, become the stable address at which that event’s record can be found by anyone who searches for it in 2032, in 2042, or in 2052.

This is not promotional speculation. It is the logic of permanent civic infrastructure applied to the digital layer. Following the Games, the venues will be returned to the community and managed by the ongoing venue operators to serve long-lasting benefits. The same principle should apply to the digital venues — the addresses at which community events existed and can be remembered.

The festival must leave an intergenerational impact, embedding culture into Brisbane’s fabric for decades to come. Embedding culture into fabric requires that the fabric be durable. Digital fabric that is hosted on expiring domains and platform-dependent social media pages is not durable. A civic namespace rooted in permanent onchain identity is.

WHAT THE ELEVATE 2042 HORIZON DEMANDS.

The Elevate 2042 strategy is, among other things, a commitment to accountability across a twenty-year horizon. Elevate 2042 is the shared 20-year vision for a lasting Games legacy, developed through contributions from thousands of people representing diverse backgrounds. The strategy sets out the joint commitment of the Games Delivery Partners to deliver a new kind of Games legacy, fitting Games into the host city and region, and ensuring that their impact in the 10 years before and decade after aligns with its future direction.

Feedback from the International Olympic Committee and International Paralympic Committee is that this strategy set a new global benchmark for legacy thinking for all future Games. That is a significant claim, and one worth taking seriously. A new global benchmark for legacy thinking ought to include a new approach to the digital permanence of the community events that constitute its living proof.

Elevate 2042 is designed as a living document, intended to evolve as the region grows and changes, recognising that current priorities may shift and new challenges or opportunities may arise, with the next stage focusing on progressing the vision through comprehensive implementation planning, ensuring the effective delivery of legacy initiatives. A living document requires living infrastructure — digital infrastructure that does not require constant renewal fees, platform migrations, or institutional memory to remain accessible. The community groups, school associations, and First Nations cultural organisations that will deliver the human content of Brisbane 2032’s legacy are not in a position to maintain that infrastructure themselves. It needs to be given to them in a form they can rely on.

Cultural and creative activities help build community, belonging and trust while enhancing empathy and inclusion, combat loneliness and isolation, support recovery from disasters and trauma, and make cities, suburbs and regions more liveable — all conditions that foster both participation and excellence in sport. Those benefits are real. They are produced by events that occur in real places, involving real people, documented at real addresses. The work of Queensland’s permanent digital identity layer is to ensure that those addresses remain real — and findable — long after the closing ceremony.

THE ADDRESS AS CIVIC ACT.

There is something worth naming plainly: in the context of Brisbane 2032, giving a community event a permanent address is a civic act. It says that this event mattered enough to be remembered. It says that the community who created it deserves to find their work when they go looking for it — in 2035, when a volunteer wants to show their grandchildren what they participated in; in 2042, when a cultural organisation is applying for funding and needs to document its history; in 2050, when Queensland is asked what its community engagement looked like in the years that led up to and followed its Games.

The runway to 2032 presents a significant opportunity to celebrate Queensland’s extraordinary artistic and creative talent and ensure the state’s stories, cultures and creativity are embedded in the fabric of Games delivery. The word “embedded” is doing considerable work here. Embedding implies depth, not surface. A social media post is a surface. A permanent civic address is an embedding.

The Elevate 2042 strategy, the Cultural Olympiad programme beginning in 2028, the First Nations reconciliation framework, the statewide sports activations from Cairns to Coolangatta — all of these are generating, and will continue to generate, events that deserve permanence. The ambition is for 2032 to be the starting line — not the finish — for new investment, new industries, new opportunities, and a new golden era for Queensland. Starting lines need to be marked. They need to be findable by those who come to the sport later, who want to know where the race began.

The community events around Brisbane 2032 are not footnotes to the Games. They are the Games, experienced at the human scale — in school halls and on riverbanks, in community centres and on playing fields, across a state whose identity is being inscribed, in real time, into the global record. That inscription needs a permanent layer. The events are already happening. The question is whether the addresses will still be there when Queensland looks back.