Agricultural shows are important events in rural and regional Australia. For over a century, they have often been the main annual festival on any given town's calendar. This importance makes the lack of scholarly attention to rural and regional shows puzzling. Recently, Australian exhibitions and agricultural shows have come in for some very welcome scholarly attention, although very little has been written about rural and regional events. Scholars such as Kate Darian-Smith and Sara Wills, Joanne Scott and Ross Laurie, Judith McKay, and Kay Anderson have all written on exhibitions and shows – although, of this group, only Darian-Smith and Wills have written on rural shows, the rest focusing more on inter-colonial and metropolitan Australian shows. Even Richard Waterhouse's groundbreaking study of rural Australian cultural history, The Vision Splendid, provides little detail on agricultural shows and their role in rural cultural life, although the show's importance is recognised.

In the 1830s and 40s, in the absence of any real law enforcement body, uncontained conflict between settlers and Aborigines in what was to become southern Queensland resulted in a spiral of violence that was at times gratuitous. Some whites killed blacks out-of-hand. For their part, Aborigines retaliated when and how they could. One settler, for example, told how in a little over two years fifteen of his shepherds had been murdered and whole herds of his animals had been butchered simply for the fat their kidneys contained.

The dangerous uncertainties and complications of George Speight's coup in Fiji have been partly formed by his association with white-collar crime in Queensland. Speight's involvement in at least one fraudulent financial scheme in Brisbane helped to shape the events leading up to his seizure of parliament and kidnapping of the elected government of Fiji on 19 May 2000. This parody ofa coup, led by Speight (a failed businessman with no military experience) and a small contingent of ascetic SAS-styled soldiers, soon to be joined by a gaggle of rustics and Suva's lumpenproletariat, was a spectacle of the unexpected. Speight's adventurism today imposes immense costs on the people of Fiji. His financial schemes when he was living in Brisbane left a number of victims in Queensland.

The terms of reference for the SEQ 2001 Project were to come up with policies and processes for managing the region. The author's assignment as Director of the SEQ 2001 Project was completed in July 1993 with the release for comment of a set of policy reports including a report on institutional arrangements.

Australia is a nation of suburbs. The vast majority of Australians live in the subregions of our principal metropolitan areas. Even those of us moving to so-called ‘sea change’ regions outside the big cities want to live in transplanted suburban estates. For most of us, an oil change is a more pressing prospect than a sea change.

This paper examines the ‘Malay’ community in pre-war Darwin, focusing on those men who were brought to Australia to work in the pearling industry. It considers their status within the community, and questions the degree to which the White Australia policy impinged upon their lives. The tenn ‘Malay’ in this context does not refer to the ‘Malays’ of present-day Malaysia, but rather to the ambiguous colonial construction which was loosely based on notions of ‘racial’ grouping. Adrian Vickers’ study of South-East Asian ‘Malay’ identity points to its multiple forms: the colonial constructions of the British and the Dutch; the existence of non-Muslim Malays; and the many ethnic groups whose identities cut across the national boundaries which form present-day Malaysia and Indonesia and the southern Philippines. In the Australian context, the works of John Mulvaney and Campbell Macknight have examined Macassan contact with northern Aboriginal groups, particularly in the Gulf of Carpentaria. According to Mulvaney, the term ‘Macassan’ was used to refer to the Bugis and Macassan seafarers who came to Australia from southern Sulawesi. He notes, however, that nineteenth-century Europeans, such as French commander Baudin and Matthew Flinders referred to them as ‘Malays’.

Imagine the following scenario: your six-year-old daughter has come home sick from primary school with stomach cramps, diarrhoea and vomiting. You envisage a touch of gastro-enteritis – after all, it is common in kids – and expect it to blow over quickly. She's off her food and will only eat a few things, including peanut butter on toast. After a few days, her condition has worsened to the point that your family GP is considering hospitalising her. Later, you hear on the radio that Kraft, which initially only recalled eight brands of peanut butter, is recalling its entire peanut butter range due to possible contamination with salmonella bacteria from mouse droppings found in batches of roasted peanuts from a Kingaroy supplier (BRW 2.9.96). If this were you, chances are that you would feel angry because it is your daughter who has been affected. You are involved.

In 1824, a group of London businessmen established the Australian Agricultural Company (AAC), Australia's oldest chartered company. Their prospectus listed amongst their objectives, after the raising of sheep and cattle, the production ‘at a more distant time, of Wine, Olive-Oil, Hemp, Flax, Silk, Opium, &c. as articles of export to Great Britain’. In 1828, a local manager reported that he thought that ‘if the labour of the Blacks can be procured for the operative part the culture [of opium] would likely prove profitable to the Company.’ And in 1833, the Australian manager of the company sent the London Board a sample of the first opium grown on company lands in the Hunter River area. The board had it evaluated by a pharmacist, who reported that it was ‘of fair, merchantable quality, about equal to Egyptian Opium. — It contains two thirds of the quantity of Morphia usually found in the best Turkey Opium. In this market, when Turkey Opium is worth 15s./ p lb., we have no doubt that such Opium as your Sample would sell for 14s/ p Ib. On the basis of this disappointing assessment, the Australian Agricultural Company abandoned opium growing — and opium growing was abandoned in Australia for another hundred and fifty years.

‘Forget Policy — I've Got Great Legs!’ That newspaper headline was one of the most interesting if not anomalous banners to appear during the 1998 federal election campaign. It was run in the Daily Telegraph as the header to an article about Pauline Hanson, who was busy campaigning for the Queensland seat of Blair in the state elections. As one might expect from the headline, the story dismissed any consideration of Hanson's political agenda in favour of blatant and highly sexualised comment about her very feminine physical attributes. Whilst this sort of media attention openly negated Hanson as a serious political force, it was indicative of the way the media had come to portray her since she arrived on the political scene two years earlier. Moreover, it was symptomatic of the media's widespread concern with portraying female politicians of all parties in accordance with worn-out assumptions and clichés, which rarely — if ever — were applied to their male counterparts.

‘Royalty’ and ‘Empire’ were, throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. of supreme significance to all the Australian colonies. While each colony was well integrated within the Imperial framework, they remained largely reliant on the economic and geopolitical management of the British Empire. Though different colonial/national identities developed in Australia, the colonies' economic, military and diplomatic dependence on Britain strongly orientated them towards the Queen and ‘home’. Colonial Governors served as the vital link between the colonies and both the Imperial government and the Queen of the British Empire. Appointed by Britain and entrusted with the same rights, powers and privileges as the Queen, the role of Governor was one of great influence and authority.

Election campaigns see a travelling press pack assembled to follow the party leader for the duration of the campaign, often to mystery locations. This ensures the press pack is conveniently ushered around to many picture opportunities where politicians can be observed in an organised and risk-free environment. Over time, reporting on major political events such as elections has changed as political parties stack their communications teams with professional ‘spinners’. This article looks at the campaigns of Labor, the LNP, Pauline Hanson's One Nation and The Greens during the lead-up to the 2017 Queensland election, as well as assessing the impact of social media on the campaign.

Although she is often perceived as a writer of the local, the rural or the regional, Thea Astley herself notes writing by American modernists as her primary literary influence, and emphasises the ethical value of transnational reading and writing. Similarly, she draws parallels between writing of the American ‘Deep South’ and her own writing of the ‘Deep North’, with a particular focus on the struggles of the racial or cultural outsider. In this article, I pursue Astley’s peculiar blend of these literary genres — modernism, the Gothic and the transnational — as a means of understanding her conceptualisation of kindness and community. Although Astley rejects the necessity of literary community, her writing emphasises instead the value of interpersonal engagement and social responsibility. With a focus on her first novel, Girl with a Monkey (1958), this article considers Astley’s representation of the distinction between community and kindness, particularly for young Catholic women in Queensland in the early twentieth century. In its simultaneous critique of the expectations placed on women and its upholding of the values of kindness and charity, Astley considers our responsibilities in our relations with the Other and with community.

In bumper-to-bumper traffic along the Pacific Motorway at dusk, I edge south past the Logan Road exit towards the Gold Coast. Vehicles moving easily north have already put their headlights on. Flying foxes are massing against the darkening sky. These native megabats will find their way to food using their sharp eyes and sense of smell. As I watch, I am reminded of the microbats of another hemisphere. Those blind bats had prompted Thomas Nagel's famous paper, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’

Ten years ago, a colleague and I co-wrote an article about the Bunya pine tree in Queensland's literary history. In the course of our joint research, we made an interesting and surprising discovery: that there appeared to be two separate and distinct ways of seeing or imagining the Bunya in early Queensland literature – there were, in effect, two different Bunyas. One was the Romantic Bunya, a dark, gloomy, threatening tree, overwhelming in size, and sublime in its capacity to elicit awe and even terror from those nervous European explorers who found themselves surrounded by them. This is the Bunya described in Leichhardt's letters and in the novels of Rosa Praed, for whom it evoked anxieties about cannibalism among the Aboriginal tribes who gathered at the triennial feast.

Mt Lindesay lies in the McPherson Range on the border between New South Wales and Queensland. Described by one early twentieth century writer as resembling ‘a crown pumpkin or a huge pudding mould’, its remarkable tiered upper section has long captured the imagination of those who care to gaze upon its vertical cliffs and dramatic lines.

Paris, London, Milan, Tokyo, New York, the Gold Coast — the Gold Coast? The Gold Coast may not rank as an international focal point for high fashion, but it can claim the distinction of hosting the world's first major hotel named after, or more accurately branded by, one of the big names of the international fashion industry — Versace.

Brisbane under the Country/National Party governments from 1957 to 1989 is often portrayed as a cultural desert. While there were certainly many ‘Queensland refugees’ who went to the southern states and overseas to realise their creativity, this paper's review of alternative media in Brisbane between 1965 and 1985 substantiates previous claims that the political repression also encouraged others with radical views to stay to contribute to the extra-parliamentary opposition. The radical movement is revealed as adept at using the products of technological change (including new printing processes, FM radio and lightweight Super 8 and video camera equipment) to create new audiences interested not only in alternative politics but also contemporary creativity. In particular, this paper argues that, by countering Premier Bjelke-Petersen's skilful management of the mainstream media, alternative media workers were producing the basis of the thriving creative industry scene that exists in Brisbane today, as well as non-doctrinaire ideas that may have a wider application.