This issue marks the twentieth anniversary of Queensland Review. It therefore seems appropriate to spend a few moments looking back over our two decades of continuous existence — something of a rarity among Australian scholarly journals. We do this not in a spirit of nostalgia (well, perhaps a little of that!), still less in a spirit of self-congratulation, but in a spirit of sober stocktaking and realistic appraisal.

At the end of his working life as a medical bureaucrat, Raphael Cilento twice tried his hand at Australian federal politics. After an initial joust at a Senate seat, he was encouraged by the fledgling Australian Democratic Union to try the House of Representatives. His choice of electorate was heroic. The seat of McPherson (Qld) was held by Arthur Fadden, one time prime minister and perennial member for this Darling Downs electorate. Standing as an ‘Independent Democrat’, Cilento targeted the Italian community in Stanthorpe, a district where he picked up half the vote in his otherwise unsuccessful campaign. His candidature attracted some notice. Brisbane's Truth described Sir Raphael as ‘the most distinguished Queenslander to ever enter the Federal political arena’. This might seem a little hyperbolic, but seen in the larger context of Cilento's national and international work, it was a defensible proposition. Seen literally, it is slightly less defensible since Cilento was not Queensland born. Rather, he came to adopt Queensland — and to seek to advance its standing as an example of successful white settlement of the tropics.

The Pioneer Valley at Mackay is the centre of a thriving sugar industry that supports 120,000 people and brings millions of dollars into the Australian economy through milling sugar cane. The valley presents a vista of kilometre after kilometre of flat green and brown symmetrical patterns. In the growing season, rectangles striped with furrows carry on as far as the eye can see, blending into green blocks as the cane grows, with the pattern broken only by natural topographic features such as creeks, the Pioneer River, occasional hills and small towns. Cane totally dominates the flat land, but at the edges of the valley it is gradually overshadowed by the brown and grey of the higher untamed areas. Within this green, brown and grey picture is another pattern, the imposed logistics of roads, railways, and glistening galvanised roofs on the houses and sheds, softened by the dark green of mango and other fruit trees, stately hoop pines, fig and shade trees. On the edges of the valley floor, the hills become more numerous, feeding into the surrounding mountain ranges. The visual pattern partly relates to topography, but includes elements dating back to the shapes of the first land selections and subsequent surveying from the 1860s onwards, as well as the need for road and rail links between early settlements, and more recently by the needs of modern mechanical farming.

On 26 April 1937, German bombers attacked the civilian population in the Basque market town of Guernica. The event has become synonymous with the brutality of the Spanish Civil War, but its impact on the Basque diaspora has not been the subject of detailed investigation. Large numbers of Basques emigrated to live in north Queensland, and the overwhelming majority can be traced to the hills surrounding Guernica. Those living in Australia only became aware of the atrocity over time, but the symbolic importance of Guernica increased over the subsequent decades as hundreds more Basques arrived in Queensland's north. The bombing itself was traumatic, but it was understood in the context of an emigration and historical injustice wrought by Spain's Nationalist dictatorship.

Environmental issues have been politically salient in Queensland throughout recent decades of Labor dominance. While in general Labor has benefited politically from being regarded as the ‘greener’ of the major parties, state Labor governments have also sometimes found environmental policy difficult to deal with. This is partly a reflection of the political passions that environmental and resource use conflicts can generate and is partly due to the pressures on environmental assets from population and economic growth in Queensland; primarily, however, it reflects the difficulty of reconciling environmental and sustainability policy goals with the historically dominant model of development in Queensland.

The concept of sustainability is often connected with environmental and socio-economic debates, but it is just as central to cultural developments. Historical studies of music-making within a local context often reveal that any ‘good idea’ needs both initiators and supporters, and also patrons and advocates. For example, the story of chamber music in early Queensland is bound up with contextual factors such as organisational and physical infrastructure and, more importantly, the contributions of leaders whose long-term vision encouraged audiences to participate. While important beginnings appeared during the colonial decades, changing circumstances required new approaches to sustaining chamber music traditions in the post-Federation era.

Regional Queensland and social media are not standard bedfellows in studies of Australian media use. Yet regional community responses to recent natural disasters on Facebook in particular warrant further investigation. Indeed, while the increasing use of social media by government organisations during disasters and other crises is by now well documented, the comparative surge in community uses — and particularly regional community uses — has received considerably less attention. This article is broadly interested in regional Queensland uses of Facebook during the 2011 Queensland floods, specifically the ‘Toowoomba & Darling Downs Flood Photos & Info Page’ (https://www.facebook.com/TmbaLockyerFloods?fref=ts 10 January 2011). Drawing on an interview with the page's creator, I consider both the speed and apparent efficacy of the page as a tool of grassroots (or unofficial) crisis communication, partly compared with its most obvious official counterpart, the Toowoomba Regional Council's Facebook page. Ultimately, I argue that the ‘Toowoomba & Darling Downs Flood Photos & Info Page’ offers an emphatically more useful model of social media-based crisis communication from which others might draw.

Mt Isa's story is an Australian foundation epic. Only heroic struggle could have dug the mine and built the city a thousand kilometres from the nearest deepwater port, in a scorched red landscape sparsely dotted with spinifex and eucalypts. In Mines in the spinifex (1970), Geoffrey Blainey celebrates the fortitude of the prospectors and entrepreneurs who overcame these obstacles to found what he calls ‘the greatest Australian mine of the [twentieth] century’ (1970: 64).

The themes of cultural dislocation and the struggle to feel ‘at home’ in a new land figure prominently in Australian literature, and considerable critical attention has been devoted to the distinctive articulations of these preoccupations by well-known writers of Irish birth or descent, such as Victor Daley, Bernard O'Dowd and John O'Brien. Queensland's Irish writers, however, have been largely forgotten or overlooked — both individually and as a group.