Commonwealth Government Offices, Brisbane, Heritage-listed office building in Brisbane City, Queensland, Australia

The Commonwealth Government Offices is a seven-storey masonry building at 232 Adelaide Street, beside Anzac Square. It has a concrete-encased steel frame, a polished granite base, sandstone cladding with banded rusticated coursing up to the second floor, and upper levels of rendered brick imitating stonework. The top storey is set off by balconies and a projecting cornice with dentil blocks and antifixae. A recess facing the square drops to the third floor, where an arched opening and flat roof sit below a lift tower that rises above the parapet and ends in a keystone arch.

The Commonwealth Government acquired the land between Ann and Adelaide Streets in the 1910s. In 1923 John Smith Murdoch, Chief Architect of the Department of Home Affairs, designed the precinct around the proposed Anzac Square. Construction began only in 1933, when the State Government requested work for the unemployed; financial stringency reduced the plan to two wings, completed in 1936 at a cost of £90,000 and providing 35,000 square feet of office space.

The building's name comes from its role as the first offices owned by the Commonwealth Government in Brisbane. Its facade carries a timber Commonwealth crest between the doors of two refurbished lifts in the ground-floor lobby, and the lobby itself is lined with imported marble and black-and-white mosaic tiles.

The main public entrance is on Adelaide Street, at the base of the right-hand window bay, reached by granite steps through bronze-sheeted doors. The building sits beside Anzac Square, so the two can be visited together. Look for the recessed section facing the square, which drops to the third floor and carries the lift tower above the parapet.

The 1927 plan called for a seven-storey building covering the whole Commonwealth site, but the 1933 financial stringency meant only two wings of Murdoch's design were built, for £90,000, giving 35,000 square feet of office space. The lift tower behind the recess facing Anzac Square rises above the parapet and ends in an archway with a keystone.