Johnstone Gallery

Johnstone Gallery then moved to the basement of the Brisbane Arcade, into what had been an air-raid shelter, from 1952 to 1957 before it was permanently sited at 6 Cintra Road, Bowen Hills in 1958 in a purpose built space in a sub-tropical rainforest setting.

[3] There, owners Brian and Marjorie Johnstone showed most major Australian artists of the period,[1] including Sir Sidney Nolan, Robert Dickerson, Lawrence Daws, Margaret Olley (whose 1962 exhibition sold out at the opening for £3000, then a record for an Australia woman artist),[4] Charles Blackman, Ray Crooke, John Coburn, Arthur Boyd, Donald Friend, Laurence Hope[5] and others in post-war Brisbane which had few visual art offerings beyond Queensland Art Gallery.

Construction began in 1969 and the theatre opened in February 1971 under the direction of Joan Whalley, with two productions, A Flea in Her Ear by Georges Feydeau and The Rose and the Ring a musical based on the fireside pantomime written by William Makepeace Thackeray.

The collection[7] features 26 bound volumes of scrapbooks, gallery files, printed exhibition catalogues, correspondence, photographs, and is a major resource for provenance research of Australian artworks and artists.

[8] The State Library has also produced a series of digital stories and oral histories with many of the artists and gallery owners who were associated with the Johnstone Gallery - John White, Philip Bacon, Victor Mace and artists Nevil Matthews, Margaret Olley, Laurence Daws, Ray Crooke, Roy Churcher, Betty Churcher, Robert Dickerson and Max Hurley.