Lone Pine opened in 1927 with two koalas, Jack and Jill, on a river bend that flooded regularly. It is the oldest and largest koala sanctuary in the world, and it still sits where it began, at 708 Jesmond Road, Fig Tree Pocket, QLD 4069, Australia. The founder was Claude Reid, a Brisbane resident who watched the fur trade strip Queensland of its koala populations. Between 1919 and 1927, open seasons on koalas killed animals by the hundreds of thousands. Reid built a refuge rather than an exhibit. The name came from a single hoop pine that stood over the paddock. Queensland later banned the trade outright, and the sanctuary became a template for wildlife holding elsewhere in Australia. The lone pine koala sanctuary cruise now delivers most visitors to the same landing that once served milk boats and market punts. Why it matters in 2026 is less about nostalgia than about method. The sanctuary holds more than 130 koalas across managed colonies, arranged so that individuals rotate through short public sessions and long rest. Queensland is the only Australian state where holding a koala remains permitted, and Lone Pine's protocols — limited handling minutes, mandatory recovery days, veterinary oversight — became the reference standard. Eucalyptus browse is cut daily from plantations across South East Queensland; a single adult koala eats up to 500 grams of leaf a night, and the species digests it through a caecum roughly two metres long. The grounds read as parkland rather than zoo. Eighteen hectares of open lawn, fig trees and boardwalk run down toward the Brisbane River, with a kangaroo and emu paddock where animals move freely among visitors. There are platypus enclosures, a raptor flight arena, dingo yards, wombats, Tasmanian devils and a bird aviary running the length of the eastern fence. The architecture is deliberately low: timber shelters, shade cloth, gravel paths. Nothing competes with the animals. The river approach frames all of it. Brisbane River cruise tours pass Kangaroo Point cliffs, the University of Queensland's sandstone Great Court at St Lucia, and a long stretch of jacaranda-lined bank before the sanctuary jetty appears. Brisbane koala sanctuary tour operators have run this route for decades, and it remains the way the site was designed to be entered — from the water, slowly. Lone pine koala sanctuary cruise tickets carry that geography with them: a city, a river, and a stand of eucalypts that outlasted the trade that nearly emptied them.