Australian Greens leader Richard Di Natale stood on a high park lawn with a sweeping view over Brisbane city and its inner suburbs and declared "we are going to make history at the weekend".
It was the sort of thing party leaders tend to say in the days before an election, and it seemed particularly bold.
Apart from Labor defector Ronan Lee in 2008, who switched parties mid-term, the Greens have not had a representative in the Queensland Parliament.
But suddenly, buoyed by their party's decisive victory over Labor in Melbourne's recent Northcote byelection and a surge of enrolments by young first-time voters following the same-sex marriage survey, no less than three Greens are staking claims on adjoining inner-city Brisbane seats.
Di Natale admits he was bitterly opposed to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's decision to run a postal vote on same-sex marriage, but finds wry satisfaction in the knowledge that one of the spin-offs for The Greens was the massive rise in voter enrolments, mainly among young people who had become politically engaged. Just the sort of people who might be persuaded to vote Green in the electorates sought by his party on Saturday; and just the sort of people who gave the party victory in Northcote.
So successful was the marriage survey enrolment drive in Brisbane that there is a reported 50 per cent increase in newly enrolled electors in the seat of South Brisbane since the last state election, and it's thought to be a similar story in the neighbouring seats.
You could see each of the three electorates sought by The Greens from the airy spot in Highgate Hill Park chosen by Di Natale for his expansive prediction on Wednesday.
Highgate Hill is a rare swatch of green in the prized Labor seat of South Brisbane.
North across the river is McConnel???, currently held by an estimated margin of 3.1 per cent by Labor Minister Grace Grace and under siege by The Greens' Kirsten Lovejoy, a climate policy analyst.
To the west sprawls Maiwar, a new seat with an estimated margin of just 3 per cent to the Liberal National Party's Scott Emerson. A lawyer with a record of representing community groups against coal mines, Michael Berkman, hopes to take Maiwar.
With the Queensland state election half a week away, campaign strategists for another of those Greens candidates, Amy MacMahon, believe she is within no more than 10 or 15 votes of winning South Brisbane.
It sounds at first blush far-fetched, and Labor campaigners publicly scoff at the idea.
McMahon - a 31-year-old who has recently completed a PhD in climate change issues in Bangladesh - is trying to take the seat from one of the Queensland Labor government's most high-profile MPs, Deputy Premier Jackie Trad, who holds it by a solid margin of 13.8 per cent.
It is Queensland's oldest state electorate, and traditionally Labor territory. Since 1915 it has been out of Labor hands only three times. The member for South Brisbane before Trad was former Labor premier Anna Bligh.
Yet a couple of weeks ago a Galaxy poll had MacMahon ahead of Trad 51-49 on the two-party preferred vote. It sent a shock through Queensland Labor - the sort of dread felt by Victorian Labor at the loss of Northcote after 90 years.
Amy MacMahon (right) doorknocking in her electorate. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
MacMahon works out of a cramped office upstairs from a busy shopping street where young volunteers operate their phones and laptops elbow-to-elbow. Volunteers, a small army of them, hold the keys to the seat, MacMahon believes. The party doesn't take corporate donations, but it has no shortage of engaged young people, many of them freshly enrolled.
They have doorknocked virtually every house and apartment in the electorate in recent months, building a profile of voters that has the volunteers returning, again and again, to those thought capable of having their voting intention swayed.
Last weekend alone, eight teams of 10 to 15 volunteers doorknocked every street in the electorate - some of them twice. When they say there is nothing but 10 or 15 votes in it, they are speaking from ground level.
"There is a clear sense that people have had enough of the big parties - our conversations show they feel they're not being listened to and they're not being properly represented," MacMahon says.
