The best playgrounds in Brisbane that kids will love

Bradbury Park’s recent 2023 revamp includes a purpose-built 200-metre scooter loop, a 'Magic Forest' nature-play zone for littles, and a multi-level playscape that’s all ropes, nets, climbing towers and a mega-slide that dares even the bravest of tweens to test their nerve. For the smaller set, the 'Magic Forest' offers a gentler mix of logs, sand, and nature play. There’s also an outdoor fitness kit, picnic shelters and a fenced off-leash dog area – a genuine community park that multitasks as an obstacle course, photogenic picnic site and a place to offload energy.

Where: 91 Kitchener Rd, Kedron

Kids will love: Riding on the looped scooter track. 

Parents will love: The outdoor fitness equipment. 

Forget the uni library – this is where UQ’s most exciting research happens. Towers, tube slides, a sensory dome, sand pits and water play are all on offer at Recreation Precinct Playground, capped off with the pièce de résistance: a 40-metre flying fox that turns every child into a gleeful daredevil. The nods to its academic postcode are clever – hidden equations, 'knowledge' quotes scattered throughout and Easter-egg details that wink at UQ’s DNA – but the real genius is in the inclusivity. Accessible swings, musical instruments and sensory zones ensure every kid gets an A+ in play. Round out your UQ adventure with a visit to the scenic Great Lake (be sure to check the website for current access details). It’s the perfect picnic spot, and little ones will love meeting the resident ducks, turtles, lizards, and a whole cast of feathered locals.

Where: The University of Queensland, St Lucia

Kids will love: The giant sandpit and interactive water play.

Parents will love: The on-site Upbeat Café.

The main kids' playground at South Bank Parklands has an epic, custom-made Sky Walk, with four Sky Cabins and two bridges bookended by long silver slides. Older kids will love scrambling up into this thing and exploring while the skyscrapers of Brisbane City look on from across the river. There's also a wide slide, rock climb slope, swings and a Supernova wheel – but the turning thing that draws kids unstoppably is the Mouse Wheel. Eight or more munchkins can cram into it and, exactly like a hamster wheel, start running for dear life. Approach with caution: once this thing starts rolling, it's hard to stop! Riverside Green is one of the destination playgrounds of Brisbane, but keep a close watch on your little ones: it's right next to the public swimming zone, Streets Beach, a huge temptation on a sweltering day.

Where: South Bank Parklands, South Brisbane

Kids will love: The Mouse Wheel.

Parents will love: The city views.

Splash! Nothing like a great big tipping bucket to soak you to your skin on a summer's day, and Wynnum Whale Park has one – along with a pod of blue whales spouting water and a series of shallow channels with dams to play with. Wynnum Whale Park has been many a parent's saviour on hot days, and it's right next to a regular playground in a vast sandpit with a mock sail raft to climb. A large toilet block separates the Whale Park from Wynnum Wading Pool, a very large free public bathing place. See you there.

Where: 137 Wynnum Esplanade, Wynnum

Kids will love: Riding the whales like they're in Avatar.

Parents will love: Fish and chips across the road.

Frew Park seems to have sprung from the imagination of a mad genius with an endless supply of concrete, steel, rubber and chutzpah. It occupies the park next to the Roy Emerson Tennis Centre in Milton, which itself was once the Milton Tennis Centre, scene of major tournaments and rock concerts by anyone from the Rolling Stones to David Cassidy. In acknowledgement of this heritage, the playground takes the form of a sports grandstand, radically deconstructed. Kids can scramble up the structure via ropes, steel poles and handles to slide back down via super-wide, super-steep slide. Separate sections are joined by tubes of steel mesh and cargo rope. Check out the crazy hanging net next to a trompe-l'oeil mural; the dizzyingly high 'Commentary Box' overlooking the park; and the fast, twisting tube slide taking you all the way back down again. Robot-like bronze statues celebrating tennis and other sports add to the overall mood of futurism. An absolute must.

Where: Frew St, Milton

Kids will love: The super-wide, super-steep slide.

Parents will love: The architectural genius on display.

Located on a bank of the Brisbane River, this former racecourse-turned-park now attracts more than 18,000 visitors each week, all coming to pedal, play, relax and socialise. The children's playground is grouped around some enormous fig trees with a boardwalk maze. Keep an eye on your nippers as there are plenty of places to hide among the tangled roots and crowds of happy families. Grab a coffee from the kiosk and let them go wild.

Where: 1,042 Brunswick St, New Farm

Kids will love: Getting lost among the fig trees.

Parents will love: The coffee kiosk.

The centrepiece of Calamvale District Park is a 7.5-metre-high steel-and-rope structure known as the Sky Walk. Four enclosed 'cabins' are joined by fully enclosed net bridges. You have to ascend the tube ladder to get up there, or else clamber up a scramble net. At the end of the four bridges is a gleaming 11-metre-long slide that offers an exhilarating ride back to earth. The Sky Walk is not the only kid magnet here. A twisting Möbius strip festooned with rock climbing footholds presents hours of fun, and there's also a spinning flat disk resembling a vinyl record player and pentagon swings. And what destination playground is complete these days without a flying fox? The double zipline here is at least 50m in length, the longest we've ever seen in a public playground. Wheeee!

Where: 31 Formby St, Calamvale

Kids will love: The Sky Walk.

Parents will love: Having a go on the flying fox.

This is one of Brisbane's newer playgrounds that's worth a journey just to check it out. The playground is large, fully shaded and has a seemingly unique design incorporating repurposed yellow shipping containers. A huge rubberised hill covered in hemispheres is designed for little ones to scramble up; three wide yellow tunnels penetrate the hill, and there are wide slides on either end. The shipping containers form a scrambling zone with cargo ropes and huge voice pipes, and there's a large tube slide up one end. There are swings as well, and an avenue of water sprinklers to run through on hot days. Bring a towel – your charges will find it hard to resist a cool shower after a bit of climbing and sliding.  

Where: 40 Remora Rd, Hamilton

Kids will love: The tunnels.

Parents will love: The shopping centre across the road.

The shady children's playground is the highlight of this large riverside reserve and makes Colmslie Beach Reserve a go-to for parents with antsy kids. The gigantic concrete fish poking out of the sandpit is the first thing that will catch your eye – little Jonahs can climb inside its gaping mouth and crawl out again through the gills. There's also a mock shipwreck that allows kids to make music by hitting the pedals. An extensive climbing maze combines rock climbing, monkey bars, stepping stones and slides – the floor-is-lava games will go on for hours here. Test your skills on the hilly scooter track, or get zooming on the zipline over by the big blue octopus. They also have pentagon swings. The toilet block is close by in case of, well, you know.

Where: 152 Colmslie Rd, Murarrie

Kids will love: The undulating scooter track.

Parents will love: How shady it all is.

Tennyson Power Station was opened in 1955, and for three decades it supplied coal-fired electricity to much of metropolitan Brisbane. The power station has been memorialised across the road from Pat Rafter Stadium by this stunning park and playground, named after Brisbane-born tennis champ and philanthropist Ken Fletcher. The playground mimics the form of a power station, with two towering 'smoke stacks', yellow steel piping, tangles of climbing rope that are like wiring and circuitry, and mock control panels. Steel girders from the original powerhouse have been repurposed as bridges over a creek bed, and there are bits of original brickwork nearby, together with informative plaques about the history of the site. There is a water-play sandpit and the usual swings and barbecues, as well as a spanking new accessible toilet block and on-site parking. The park is shiny, scads of fun and perfect as a playdate location with two cafés within 100 metres for flat whites and babycinos. Electrifying!

Where: 167 King Arthur Terrace, Tennyson

Kids will love: The ropes.

Parents will love: The historic displays.

This excellent playground exists virtually in the shadow of the vast Carindale Shopping Centre, but you’d swear you were out in the wilderness here. The theme here is space exploration, with the centrepiece being an elaborate rocket-ship slide modelled on the moon lander. It has bells and whistles and switches and gadgets that make noise and light up. A moon buggy sits in the middle of the sandpit, and there’s a spinning thing shaped like a satellite as well as space-themed puzzles to solve. Little ones will love making small steps and giant leaps as they go from planet to planet in the solar system of spheres sticking out of the ground. Toilets are just up the hill at the end of a pathway, and there is a large penned area nearby for canine exercise too. 

Where: Bedivere St, Carindale 

Kids will love: The planets.

Parents will love: The buttons and switches.

This large playground in Brisbane’s north has something quite unusual: a (fictitious) backstory. Placques claim that the park exists over the site of a prehistoric habitat for a race of sentient marsupial mice that was discovered in 1989. The plaques contain a code that purports to be the language of these creatures, and kids (should they be so motivated) can use the code to decipher messages hidden around the playground. But it’s likely they'll be too busy gallivanting around the series of little wooden pavilions with brown corrugated iron roofs that are joined by boardwalks over a large sandpit. There are accessible swings and a wheelchair-accessible roundabout, several slides and a couple of large insect creatures with tall spines to climb on. A 360-degree tyre swing offers plenty of vertiginous fun for one or two littlies at a time. 

Where: 411 Roghan Rd, Fitzgibbon

Kids will love: The giant sandpit.

Parents will love: Decoding the plaques.

Roma Street Parkland has no competition – it is hands down the best place to head in Brisbane if you want to enjoy some outside time. The expansive park is a horticultural gem and welcoming community space, featuring spectacular flower gardens, multiple children's playgrounds, accessible facilities, lakes, cafés and even an amphitheatre. Pay a gold coin and take a ride on the Parkland Explorer, a little train that does a 20-minute loop of the Parkland. The original playground has plenty of shade and fun obstacles, while the Children's Garden Playground has slides, a rope bridge, a spinning ride and walls to climb. The old cliché "hours of fun" literally applies here.

Where: 1 Parkland Blvd, Brisbane City 

Kids will love: The train ride.

Parents will love: The vegetation.

The large fenced-off playground within Underwood Park has a strong fairytale theme. The large wooden castle at its centre has tall towers, rope bridges and lookouts. The park has a rotating scramble net and a zipline too, but perhaps the most peculiar feature here is the monorail. Yes, monorail! It's pedal-powered and goes in a large circle surrounding a bizarre airborne see-saw (also pedal-powered). Unsurprisingly, Funderwood Hollow is birthday party central: no less than seven children's parties were taking place on the Sunday when Time Out visited, but rest assured, there's room enough for everyone here.

Where: Underwood Rd, Priestdale

Kids will love: The monorail.

Parents will love: The fact that it's all fenced.

What’s better than a flying fox? How about a double flying fox, so you can have flying fox races? The dual zipline is just one of the highlights of the playground up on Whites Hill, a sprawling wonderland dotted with native trees and with a spectacular forest backdrop. The council has erected several shade sails across the playground’s various discrete zones. Scramble up the ropes to the pirate crow’s nest, then zoom down the steep slide. Run like a guinea pig on the large running wheel, or judder in the fun sway chairs. The sandpit is equipped with sand diggers, and a musical zone lets kids beat a drum or hit a xylophone. Other features include a toilet block, an accessible swing, barbecues and sign language guides.

Where: Boundary Rd, Camp Hill 

Kids will love: The running wheel.

Parents will love: The accessible features.

Located on the Brisbane River in Seventeen Mile Rocks, this park is popular with families, garden enthusiasts and locals. With more than 8,000 square metres of open grassed space and a half-sized basketball court, it’s also regularly used by local fitness trainers and boot camps. Make sure you visit the community garden. Beyond the towering papaya tree at the entrance, you find a bunch of vibrant planters that are cared for by the local community. Back outside, you’ll find lots of areas for kids to play in, with an extensive playground complete with climbing nets, a flying fox and a water play area. Industrial artefacts and sculptures are also scattered throughout the park, nodding to its history as a commercial farm and industrial area.

Where: Counihan Rd, Seventeen Mile Rocks

Kids will love: The flying fox.

Parents will love: The community garden.

In 2020, Moreton Bay Regional Council acquired the land of the old Petrie Paper Mill and built an impressive public water park, play space, cricket pitch and barbecue area. The playground is dominated by an eight-metre-tall climbing structure with two big slides. This blue, yellow, violet and grey tower sits next to a flying fox and within a beautifully landscaped space with sandstone features. On the other side of the toddler play zone is the summertime drawcard, a large water play space. Here, the looming bucket tower fills with fluid till it can't hold it any more and dumps it spectacularly over the delighted hordes below. Crabs spurt water from their backs, and a water channel with dams snakes through the space. There's a rotatable large fountain (watch out where the kids are pointing that thing). All will keep kids occupied in hot weather while parents look on from shaded sitting areas. Splashtastic! 

Where: 12 Moreton Parade, Petrie

Kids will love: The tipping bucket.

Parents will love: Having kids' birthday parties here.