Lone Pine opened in 1927 with two koalas, Jack and Jill, and a fenced paddock beside the Brisbane River, and it remains the oldest and largest koala sanctuary in the world. Its founder, Claude Reid, built it as a refuge at a time when koala pelts were still a Queensland export. The site at Fig Tree Pocket now holds well over a hundred animals, and the river that once carried timber and produce carries visitors instead, on Brisbane River Cruise and Koala Sanctuary Admission tours. The river is the older story. It bends through the city in long brown loops, past the Story Bridge, the cliffs at Kangaroo Point and the fig canopy of Coronation Drive, before narrowing and quietening upstream of the central business district. Mangroves hold the banks. Bull sharks patrol below them. The nineteen-kilometre reach between the South Bank pontoon and Fig Tree Pocket has been worked since 1934 by the MV Mirimar, a timber-hulled ferry that outlasted every rival on the water and gave the modern Brisbane River wildlife cruise tour its shape. At the sanctuary end the ground rises from a small jetty into open eucalypt lawns. The collection extends well past its headline marsupial. Kangaroos and emus share a walk-through paddock. Platypus turn in a darkened tank. Tasmanian devils, wombats, dingoes and echidnas occupy enclosures along the loop, and lorikeets descend twice a day in a green riot. Queensland is one of the few jurisdictions where a visitor may hold a koala, and the animals are rostered in short shifts under strict welfare rules. Conservation is the quieter half of the work: the sanctuary funds disease research into chlamydia, habitat surveys and the rehabilitation of animals struck on suburban roads, a programme that matters as Southeast Queensland's koala numbers keep falling. The pairing endures because it makes geographic sense. A city that grew along its river still reaches its most famous animals by water, and the approach is half the point: brown current, cormorants on the channel markers, jacaranda and poinciana on the banks. Brisbane River Cruise and Koala Sanctuary Admission tickets buy both halves of that logic, the passage and the arrival, and set a wildlife encounter inside the wider run of Brisbane River landmarks rather than apart from it.