The park is bordered by Edmonstone, Russell, and Cordelia Streets, and Brisbane State High School, and has an area of 63,225 square metres (680,550 sq ft).

[2] Musgrave Park is a remnant of the former Kurilpa (South Brisbane) Aboriginal camping ground that stretched from "Highgate Hill and on (to) the slanting slopes of Cumboomeya (Somerville House)" and additionally "sometimes they made a camp in the little scrub then situated on the river bank near the recent entrance to the Dry Dock".

[3][4] From here and Woolloongabba, Aboriginal people in the 1840s and 1850s would go into South Brisbane to work chopping wood, carrying water, and selling fish.

[12] Musgrave Park is home to the Jagera Arts Centre (formerly the lawn bowls clubhouse)[2] and is one of the few remaining green spaces left in Brisbane's inner city.

In 2020, the last day of National Reconciliation Week was marked by a candlelight vigil in Musgrave Park on 3 June 2020, with 432 candles lit for each of the Aboriginal deaths in custody since the 1991 end of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, and an extra one for George Floyd, an Afro-American man killed by a police officer.