Australian and American personnel poured into Queensland and urgently required a wide range of new buildings and facilities.

General Douglas MacArthur, Commander in Chief of the Allied Forces, Southwest Pacific, was based in the AMP building at the corner of Queen Street and Edward Street in Brisbane, and General Sir Thomas Blamey, Commander in Chief of the Australian Forces, used the recently constructed University of Queensland buildings at St Lucia.

Brisbane was obviously a strategic target for bombing, and rapid action had to be taken to protect the population in the event of air raids.

[1] In the Protection of Persons and Property Order No.1, gazetted 23 December 1941, Premier William Forgan Smith, with powers conferred by Regulation 35a, National Security (General) Regulations, ordered the Brisbane City Council to construct 200 public surface shelters in the city area.

Initially, 20 of the Local Authorities were expected to construct a minimum total of 133 surface shelters, which were supposed to be able to withstand the blast of a 500-pound bomb bursting 50 feet (15 m) away.

However, after plans were amended, 23 Local Authorities outside Brisbane, excluding Thursday Island, ended up possessing a total of 129 public shelters: 123 surface and six underground.

Townsville, Toowoomba, Gladstone, and Ayr denied any liability for costs, and a Bill had to be passed in December 1942 to force their compliance.

It is listed in the Queensland Heritage Register as part of the entry for the porphyry retaining wall on William Street.

In an address delivered to the Constitutional Club in Brisbane in February 1942, Costello noted that if the emergency for their use does not arise ... (unused shelters)... remain in brick and concrete, in many cases having no further value and being a possible source of nuisance.

This movement pursued the rational use of modern materials and principles of functionalist planning and established a visual aesthetic largely inspired by the machine.

It was part of an architecture employing the language of vertical and horizontal volumes and planes, floating flat roofs, masses set against voids and monumentality.

[1] The second design was the pillbox with single-cantilevered roof slab, or "bus" type shelter, as it was called in the original Brisbane City Council list.

Two of these "colonnade" types were built- referred to in the Brisbane City Council list as "bus (stone)"- and only one survives, at King Edward Park.

The saltwater mains, slit trenches, and sirens disappeared, as did the many standard pillboxes that had stood in the middle of the streets of the Central Business District.

156 standard pillboxes were built, but none of the surviving public shelters in Brisbane City Council ownership are of that design.

However, of Costello's 58 reusable public surface shelters, 20 have survived; the removal of their blast walls, as planned, had given them a renewed purpose.

The shelter stands within a vegetated road reserve, northeast of the Morningside Railway Station, with a canopy of mature fig trees and camphor laurels.

[1] Morningside Air Raid Shelter was listed on the Queensland Heritage Register on 6 April 2005 having satisfied the following criteria.

Designed to afford protection to the civilian population of Brisbane in the event of air raid attacks or other emergencies, the air raid shelter located at the corner of Wynnum Road and Thynne Road is important in demonstrating the impact of World War Two on the civilian population of Brisbane.