Shells are beautiful! They are really ingenious in the way that they are made and the animals they house. The shells grow with the animal, from tiny little shells to a great big shell. An animal wasn’t born that big, so the large shells have been there for years.

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.

The script of Louis XI used as the basis for this edition is the only known surviving version, a typescript on lined foolscap held in the National Archives of Australia, Canberra, in the Copyright Applications Series CRS A1336/1 item 14,222. It appears to have been typed from an earlier script that has not survived — probably a much-amended manuscript given numerous transcription errors, and was not subsequently corrected. As a consequence, it retains traces of that earlier version. Its title, typed in caps at the top of each page, is ‘SHELL SHOCK’, but on the first page this has been crossed through and ‘Louis XI’ written in heavy black ink, followed by ‘written and produced by GP Hanna at Cremorne Theatre Brisbane/1924’.

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.

Entering Brisbane's South Bank from the Victoria Bridge, we walk past the concrete 1980s Queensland Performing Arts Complex, the brick Queensland Conservatorium and the modern, glass-fronted ABC Broadcasting buildings, then past assorted cafes and pseudo-beaches until reaching the Ship Inn. Here, we enter an enclave of mid- to late-nineteenth-century architectural gems, surrounding and focusing on the small but tranquil South Brisbane Memorial Park (1923). Opposite the Ship Inn (1865), Cumbooquepa (1891) and South Brisbane Town Hall (1891–92), and adjoining the Maritime Museum (1881), at the eastern edge of South Bank Parklands stands a magnificent old building now known as the Griffith Film School. This building has been the cultural hub of South Brisbane for 130 years, and provides a stylish, heritage ‘bookend’ to today's South Bank Cultural and Educational Precinct.

During the year 1888 — the centenary of white settlement — Australia celebrated the jubilee of Queen Victoria together with the advent of electricity to light Tamworth, the first town in the Southern Hemisphere to receive that boon. In the north-eastern colony of Queensland, serious debates involving local administrators included membership of the Federal Council, the annexation of British New Guinea and the merits of a separation movement in the north. In this distant colony, events in Ireland — such as Belfast attaining city status or Oscar Wilde publishing The happy prince and other tales — had little immediate global impact. Nevertheless, minds were focused on Irish matters in October, when the scion of a well-established west Ireland family — a select member of the traditional Tribes of Galway, no less — was named as the new governor of Queensland. The administrators of the developing colony roundly challenged the imperial nominators, invoking a storm that incited strong opinions from responsible governments throughout Australia and around the world.

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?’

In recounting the history of Cherbourg as an Aboriginal settlement, the Ration Shed Museum presents some traumatic narratives. It paints a picture of violent geographic and cultural dislocation, crude living conditions, forced labour and administrative oppression by infusing historical artefacts with the personal recollections of Cherbourg residents. The intent behind the Ration Shed Museum itself, however, is something quite different: its curators want to tell a story that speaks of hope for this community’s future, and to work towards some form of reconciliation. They do this by actively engaging with the ‘terrible gift’ of the past in the present, and by providing spaces for encounters that can lead to open discussions of difficult social issues and celebrations of contemporary Cherbourg life. This article draws on ethnographic interviews and observational data alongside the theoretical work of Roger I. Simon and Andrea Witcomb to describe how the Ration Shed Museum engages its community and visitors in a dual process of both understanding Cherbourg’s history and reframing traumatic narratives to enact a pedagogy of hope.

Cultural narratives also function as lifelines in the work of another Queensland Indigenous woman writer, Vivienne Cleven. Cleven's novel, Bitin’ Back (2001), begins when Mavis Dooley's son, Nevil, announces that he is no longer Nevil, but the writer Jean Rhys. Although Nevil eventually reveals that he has simply been acting as a woman in order to understand the protagonist of the novel he is writing, his choice of Rhys in particular is significant. Nevil selected Jean Rhys as a signifier of his female role because, he explains:

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.

In 1934, the editor of the Courier-Mail’s women's page, Winifred Moore, reflected on the growth and importance of women's clubs in Queensland in the early decades of the twentieth century. Moore herself had been involved in community organisations since she took up her career in journalism during World War I. She was a foundation member of the National Parks Association, a member of the Press Association, the Queensland Women's Electoral league (QWEL) and the Lyceum Club. Many of her contemporaries shared what she called ‘the club habit’, a habit that had enabled women to ‘find their tongues in public assemblies’ in the decades after they achieved the vote (Courier-Mail, 8 February 1934, 16). As she wrote her column, Moore may have been thinking of a particular woman: her friend Irene Longman (1877–1964), who had been elected to the Queensland Legislative Assembly in 1929, only to lose her seat at the next election.

Europeans living in the northern half of the Australian continent during the nineteenth century were united, and spurred on by, a dominant ideology of material progress, combined with a strong fear of being engulfed, both numerically and culturally, by foreign invaders. These bulwarks of Eurocentricism gave voice to strongly pro-natalist policies, coupled with intense immigration drives. The image of vast, uninhabited stretches of country waiting to be tamed by resolute, hard-working Britons added to the momentum for increased population. Progress, conceived in the masculinist framework of aggressive expansion, ruthless destruction of the Aboriginal people, economic development and environmental exploitation, needed not only capital, brawn and sheer determination to succeed but, also, healthy young citizens. Demographers graphs, however, fuelled anxiety that this dream might be undermined - for infant and maternal mortality rates in the tropics and sub-tropics were high compared with the rest of Australia and Britain. Masculinist attributes alone could not build the new society. Childbirth was potentially a hazardous and lethal undertaking which threatened to deprive the nascent colony of many fertile women and, in their demise, future generations.

Debates over water and related issues have become prominent in twenty-first century Australia, where global warming is combining with climatic extremes to produce a volatile public and politics. The specific context of the Gold Coast Desalination Project, to be analysed here, was a prolonged drought earlier in the decade that reduced dams in densely populated South-East Queensland to unprecedented levels. This situation in turn triggered water rationing and uncertainty about the capacity of existing infrastructure to supply one of the fastest-growing areas of Australia. During the crisis, the Queensland state government was criticised in the press for mismanagement of water resources before the drought, and for the inadequate water situation, which ultimately led to the construction of a desalination plant. The period of this study covers the plant's construction and implementation. Capable of providing up to 125 million litres of clean, fresh drinking water to the South-East Queensland region every day, the desalination plant — which remains politically contentious — began in 2006 and was operational in early 2009.

The likelihood that climate change may destroy the Great Barrier Reef has been a central motif in Australia’s climate change politics for more than a decade as political ideologies and corporate and environmental activism draw or refute connections between the coal industry and climate change. The media fuel this debate because in this contest, as ever, the news media always do more than simply report the news. Given that the Reef has also been central to the evolution of Australia’s environmental laws since the 1960s, it is not surprising that the Reef is now a leading actor in efforts to test the capacity of our environmental laws to support action on climate change. In this contribution, we examine the news coverage of the Australian Conservation Foundation’s (ACF) 2015 challenge to Adani’s Carmichael coal mine to observe the discursive struggle between the supporters and opponents of the mine. Our analysis of the case shows that while the courts are arenas of material and symbolic contest in the politics of climate change in Australia, public interest environmental litigants struggle both inside and outside the courts to challenge the privileging of mining interests over the public interest.

Gold Coast beaches oscillate in the cultural imagination between everyday reality and a tourist's paradise of ‘sun, surf and sex’ (Winchester and Everett 2000: 59). While these narratives of selfhood and becoming, egalitarianism and sexual liberation punctuate the media, Gold Coast literary fictions instead reveal the beach as a site of danger, wholly personifying the unknown. Within Amy Barker's Omega Park, Melissa Lucashenko's Steam Pigs, Georgia Savage's The House Tibet and Matthew Condon's Usher and A Night at the Pink Poodle, the beach is a ‘masculine’ space for testing the limit of the coastline and one's own capacity for survival. This article undertakes a close textual analysis of these novels and surveys other Gold Coast fictions alongside spatial analysis of the Gold Coast coastline. These fictions suggest that the Gold Coast is not simply a holiday world or ‘Crime Capital’ in the cultural imagination, but a mythic space with violent memories, opening out onto an infinite horizon of conflict and estrangement.

When analysed in context, prison graffiti can provide valuable insight into the lived experiences of incarcerated individuals. This study uses Brisbane's Boggo Road Gaol as a case study site to evaluate the importance of historical, social and political context in the interpretation of prison graffiti. Visual ethnographic methodology was employed to allow the triangulation of various contextualising resources: newspaper articles, government reports, biographies and institutional records, and the graffiti. We discuss the theme of resistance as an example to demonstrate the value of the contextual analysis of images. By locating the graffiti within the historical, social and political context that it was produced, the significance of the graffiti is identified, and the ambiguity associated with the interpretation of images potentially is reduced. A contextualised analysis of prison graffiti provides a narrative of prison life, allowing the independent expression of prisoners to be ‘heard’.

Thea Astley is a figure who is strongly associated with music, both in her life interests and in her writing rhythms and allusions; this article investigates the uses of music in her 1972 novel The Acolyte. Drawing on a recent genre of critical musicology that understands music to be a social practice, The Acolyte is read in relation to mid-twentieth-century cultural debates around the development of a distinctive Australian classical music. Centring on the blind pianist turned composer Jack Holberg, The Acolyte is grounded in the Gold Coast hinterland as an inspiring and generative landscape, in contrast with the desolate outback favoured in national mythologies. Holberg’s ‘Gold Coast Symphony’, arguably the turning point of the novel, imaginatively writes this coastal fringe of urban debauchery into the vernacular of classical music through its performance in conservative 1960s Brisbane. In this article, I read The Acolyte as a novel positioned within an Australian musicological history that intersects with the poetics of place, the politics of gender and sexuality, and ongoing national formations through cultural production.

In 1989, corruption inquiry commissioner Tony Fitzgerald, QC gave a qualified tick to the use of government media units and press secretaries in his landmark report, which ushered Queensland into an age of accountability.

After an inquiry that included 238 public sitting days and 339 witnesses, his view was that it was both ‘legitimate and necessary’ for ministers, departments and public instrumentalities to employ staff to help keep the public informed. He warned, however, against control and manipulation of information and counselled there was no legitimate justification for politically motivated propaganda funded by taxpayers: