Beginning as early as A Descant for Gossips (1960), gay men and gay love come and go in Thea Astley’s prose oeuvre. The responses that these characters and this topic invite shift with point of view and under the impact of varied themes. Astley’s treatment refuses to be contained, either by traditional Catholic doctrines about sex or by Australia’s delay in decriminalising homosexual acts. Driven by love for her gay older brother Philip, whose death from cancer corresponded with her final allusions to gay love in The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow (1996), Astley’s only constant message on this, as on other topics, is humans’ responsibility to treat each other with kindness. This essay draws on Karen Lamb’s biography and on writings and reminiscences by Philip Astley’s family and fellow Jesuits to reveal his significance as his sister sought to resolve through her fiction the conflict between an inculcated Catholic idolisation of purity and her own hard-won understanding and acceptance of gay men.

This article sets out to explain how the relatively unremarkable 2018 by-election result in which a sitting Labor candidate held her seat with a mediocre swing towards her resulted in the panicked removal of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull from office and his immediate resignation from the parliament. The combined Queensland state Coalition party, the Liberal National Party, convinced itself that it could win the marginal outer-metropolitan seat of Longman in Queensland but when its expectations were dashed, it became spooked and set in train a chain of events that ousted Turnbull and installed Scott Morrison as prime minister. Turnbull was widely seen by the Coalition party room as having run a lack-lustre campaign in the 2016 federal election, and not having performed well in the 2018 by-election campaigns. Perhaps unwisely, Turnbull made the Longman by-election a direct leadership contest between himself and opposition leader Bill Shorten. However, Labor’s tactics in the by-election ‘outmanned, outspent and out-campaigned’ the Coalition’s faltering campaign in the seat, causing the relatively unremarkable outcome in Longman to become a catalyst for a challenge to Turnbull’s leadership. When parliament reconvened, Peter Dutton became the ‘stalking horse’ who resulted in the rise of Scott Morrison to the top office.

In 2004, the National Sea Change Taskforce (NSCT) was established in response to the way in which accelerated growth and development in sea change communities is negatively impacting on those areas' ecology, society and economy. The NSCT is a collective of more than 68 council planners from around Australia charged with working collaboratively with state and federal tiers of government to develop policies that will protect the coastal environment and establish sustainable limits to growth.

This article is an intervention in debates about the reputation of Australian writers, with specific reference to the career of Thea Astley (and, as a ‘benchmark’, Randolph Stow). It argues that the terrain in which reputations are made and books are valued is complex and uneven, particularly when viewed from regional perspectives. The aim is to shift the focus in ‘reception’ from single fields, such as book sales, literary prizes, critical attention and international recognition, to show a more complex literary ecology within which authors might simultaneously ‘rise’ and ‘fall’ in different ways. The data supporting this claim come from a variety of sources, including newspaper databases, schools and libraries, although the article is ‘preliminary’ in the sense that it does not investigate the substance of the quantitative data compiled — for example, it does not consider in depth the reviews or kinds of stories that were carried in the press. The discussion of reputation aims to keep Astley’s oeuvre and style in view, in order to consider why and how Astley might be ‘neglected’ and how this neglect might be addressed.

In January 1967 Janette Turner Hospital left Queensland for Boston. She was unpublished. 25 years of age, and very much the product of a loving but fundamentalist childhood that she understood as the ‘source of all comfort and security, but also the source of all harm’. She has called America. India. Canada and France ‘home’ and has also frequently taught in other European countries. Although she has two adult children who have made their lives in the United States and Canada, her parents and three younger brothers remain in Brisbane, so she returns regularly to sustain family ties.

With the winnowing of time and the emphasis given to particular artists in our constructed histories of art (be it international, national or regional) it is often difficult to determine why artists were considered to be innovatory in their time. The works so judged survive but not the context which enabled them to achieve this prominence. So it is with Vida Lahey. It may seem a desperate measure to consider a flower painter as a vehicle for modernist ideas, but the art environment in Brisbane was particularly conservative and Vida Lahey's vibrant flower paintings were a significant presence.

As in many other places, tourism has become a seductive industry for government and business in Queensland over the past decade. As one of the sunbelt states, Queensland has become an attractive destination for international, interstate and intrastate visitors. Tourism has become a major industry in Queensland contributing 5% to GSP (Goss 87). In 1993, the state attracted 1.4 million international visitors or 51% of the inbound market (Trends, issue 1, July 1994:4). This represents a 16% average annual increase since 1991. Although domestic tourism has experienced a slowdown, the state attracted 2.4 million intrastate and 8.5 million interstate trips in 1993. The staging of Expo 88 in Brisbane is credited with stimulating a significant increase in interstate visits to Queensland (cf. Collins 1994b).

Writing in Griffith Review 13 about ‘being political now’, Mark Bahnisch described the Museum of Brisbane's Taking to the Streets exhibition as a ‘monument to the symbolism of the '60s’. On display, he wrote, were causes and experiences that ‘symbolise a generation’. It's an interesting observation, especially in an essay concerned with debunking generational stereotypes. For it seems Bahnisch himself may have fallen for, well, a generational stereotype. Aside from apparently missing the 75 per cent of the exhibition that didn't deal with the 1960s, he also seems to have failed to notice that the people represented in the interviews, the written accounts, the grainy images, the shaky film footage and the lists of arrests were not all of one generation. Ranging from punks to pensioners, students to seafarers, communists to Christians, they were in fact an amazingly motley bunch of citizens who shared a history only because they shared a desire for a better society and a belief that protest was a legitimate and worthwhile political activity. And, despite the mythology, the issues they mobilised around — war, racism, the nuclear industry, sexism, workers' rights, civil liberties — had been around as causes well before 1965. Even that icon of late 1960s radicalism — the peace symbol — came from earlier times, as Ted D'Urso so carefully explained in his exhibition interview.

In 1990, the Queensland Government launched its now discredited Home Ownership Made Easy scheme. HOME provided financial assistance to ‘moderate’ income earners by offering fixed interest, low start loans, and was accompanied by HOME Shared and HOME Buy which targeted public housing tenants. While HOME differed from past programs in its detail, it can be seen as the most recent attempt by a State Labor Government to extend owner occupation in Queensland. Between 1915 and 1957, the Queensland Labor Party actively sought to promote home ownership through a range of programs including the Workers' Dwellings and Workers' Homes schemes. These programs were a reflection of a fundamental belief in home ownership as ‘every man's right’ and as an ‘essential’ element of the ‘Australian way of life’. Thus, Queensland Labor displayed none of the ambivalence which characterised Labor Party attitudes to home ownership elsewhere in Australia. Williams contends that the Australian Labor Party was trapped between its commitment to assisting the poor, its reluctance to play the role of landlord, and its support for home ownership. The Queensland Party experienced no such ideological quandary. While other Labor Governments tended to accept an obligation to provide public rental accommodation for those unable to buy homes of their own, Queensland Labor continued to display a distaste for ‘public landlordism’.

On 5 May 1897, just over a century ago, the Queensland International Exhibition opened in Brisbane. This, the seventh international exhibition to be held in Australia, was Queensland's contribution to the great series of world expos that followed London's famous Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851. The exhibition also marked Queensland's recovery from a disastrous depression of the early 1890s, proclaiming to the world that Queensland was now on a steady path of progress. Contemporaries viewed the exhibition with mixed feelings: to some it was a ‘dazzling display’; to others ‘a frost’ (a nineteenth-century term for ‘a fizzer’). ‘Frost’ or not, the event was soon forgotten after it closed three months later, and hardly rated a mention at the time of its recent successor, World Expo '88.

Brisbane author Nick Earls holds a position of exceptional significance for a writer in his home town. After some 10 years in the literary limelight, Earls was chosen as the face of the city in a television and print media campaign for Brisbane tourism (the ‘It's happening’ campaign), suggesting that he and his work would be widely recognised, and his opinions respected — key reasons for choosing a celebrity to promote any product. Earls represents a new type of public role for writers, who often must cross boundaries of intellectual respectability and popular cultural or ‘celebrity’ appeal to succeed in the current media climate. Leading up to the Brisbane promotional campaign, Earls had a long association with the local press, which enabled him to work simultaneously as a serious author, comedian, boy-next-door and social commentator. His decision, in his early published novels, to make maximal, unapologetic use of Brisbane as a setting earned him the title of ‘Brisbane's favourite son’ (MacColl 1998). At times he has used this title to his advantage; at other times the press has made him work in an ambassadorial role for Brisbane even as the themes and scenes of his writing were changing. Earls has also had considerable international success, particularly with his first novel for adults, Zigzag Street. Using theories about the production of celebrities and close analysis of Earls' press coverage, this article examines the author as a text, looking at the interaction between Earls, his novels and the broader condition of the contemporary publishing and media industries for clues as to how Earls, over other Brisbane writers, found himself with the keys to the city.

Parades and processions were a major feature of life in Brisbane during World War I. Parades typically passed through the central business district turning the entire city into an urban backdrop for a public perfonnance. Recruitment was a major issue for Australia during World War I and military parades featured prominently in the life of the city. The Brisbane Courier described the recruiting marches as ‘long columns of robust, khaki-clad manhood’ which ‘have swung down the street, with soldierly gait, setting a bright, sturdy example to shirkers to “go and get their dungarees on”’. By positioning the soldiers as heroic, well-built, and positive, processions helped to generate public enthusiasm for the war and to convince prospective recruits to join up. The message to the community is clear: if our soldiers are fit and spirited, then the Allies will win the war. But the marches were not only a way to rally new recruits, they also acted as public displays of civic solidarity. Parades gave citizens the opportunity to demonstrate their patriotic feelings. ‘Patriotism’, whether for King, country, or for ‘our boys’, was the dominant performative concept. In this way, governments, community organisations, theatrical managements, and the residents themselves contributed to the establishment of certain war-time traditions for the representation of civic patriotism on the streets in Australia.