What can you do with an old windmill?  Let me count the ways.

The Old Windmill is the oldest building in Brisbane, which is now the capital of the Australian state of Queensland, but began as the Moreton Bay Penal Settlement, a remote and inaccessible convict punishment facility akin to Port Arthur (1833) in Tasmania.  The town and its river were named after the governor of New South Wales, Sir Thomas Brisbane (1773-1860).

The tower was constructed in 1828, when after three years’ development the settlement was growing more wheat than could be ground by hand.  The first proposal was to use a treadmill to drive the millstones, enforcing prisoners to work either as a routine task or a punishment for indiscipline.  Supplementing man-power with wind-power provided greater capacity and flexibility.

Brisbane was opened to free settlers in 1839 and the convict settlement closed down three years later.  The Windmill continued in use until 1845, and in the following years the grinding machinery and the treadmill were dismantled.

However, a 52-foot brick and stone tower on the top of Spring Hill overlooking the town was useful for all manner of purposes, some of them unimaginable in the middle of the nineteenth century.

• As a prominent landmark it had already been utilised for surveying and allocating land to incoming settlers since 1839.

• In 1841 it was used as a gallows for the execution of two Indigenous men accused of murdering a surveyor.

• Its picturesque views made it a popular informal resort after it became disused.

• As the port of Brisbane developed it proved invaluable as a semaphore signalling station connected to the electric telegraph, and was fitted out as a public observatory with a time-ball in 1861.  In 1866 the time-ball was replaced by a time-gun to serve locations outside line-of-sight.

• The following year the Windmill became the first location of the Queensland Museum.

• Experimental radio transmissions were carried out at the Windmill from 1921 onwards.

• The first television broadcast in Queensland was a demonstration from the Windmill in 1934.

• From the end of the Second World War to the present-day Brisbane City Council has developed the Old Windmill and its surroundings as a tourist site.

Counting its original use to grind corn, that’s nine different applications of a redundant historic building to useful purposes.