A Brisbane worker recently commented in an interview, ‘I think there's a lot of difficulty just in cultural diversity.’ The worker, a member of a racial minority group, said:

The statement that ‘Queensland is different’ is entrenched within the folklore of Australian political and social commentary. The case is not persuasive, certainly no more so than the case that Tasmania or South Australia or any other state is ‘different’. Those who have pursued the argument have focused selectively on the modicum of differences reasonably to be expected among the peoples, institutions and socio-political processes and preoccupations of six ‘sovereign’ states.

This paper aims at providing some understanding of emerging elements of the knowledge economy and the policy frameworks that might be developed to foster regional entities that will prosper by meeting the challenges of engagement in the global knowledge economy. Through a review of extant and emerging literatures a novel conceptual framework is developed to assist in policy evaluation and development. This framework is then applied to Queensland's Smart State suite of policies. The paper concludes that Queensland has in place many elements of the policy framework required to foster a knowledge economy. It is argued however that several tensions within the policy framework are evident, and as this is an emergent area of policy development, further in-depth evaluation of both the policy settings and the effectiveness of policy is warranted.

Australia's entrenched liberal democratic traditions of a free media, fair and frequent elections and robust public debate might encourage outside observers to assume Australia is subject to frequent changes in government. The reality is very different: Australian politics have instead been ‘largely unchanged’ since the beginning of our bipolar party system in 1910 (Aitkin 1977, p. 1), with Australians re-electing incumbents on numerous occasions for decades on end. The obvious federal example is the 23-year dominance of the Liberal-Country Party Coalition, first elected in 1949 and re-endorsed at the following eight House of Representatives elections. Even more protracted electoral hegemonies have been found at state level, including Labor's control of Tasmania (1934–82, except for 1969–72) and New South Wales (1941–65), and the Liberals' hold on Victoria (1952–82) and South Australia (1938–65, most unusually under one Premier, Thomas Playford). It is therefore not a question of whether parties can enjoy excessively long hegemonies in Australia; it is instead one of how they achieve it.

In Australia, the role of police unions has assumed a prominence in contemporary debates surrounding the legitimate role of police in today's society. There is a perception that police unions in particular exercise undue influence over the political process, management practice and law reform. These perceptions are invariably grounded in “orthodox” accounts of policing that are based in part on the assumption that the police force, as an institution, is part of the “natural order of things”, that is, that the role of police is simply to “enforce the law as laid down by Parliament and the courts on behalf of the community”. Contemporary studies of policing have begun to challenge these views. Their observations suggest that the police are not merely passive instruments of the state but are actively engaged in influencing the processes of police administration and law reform. This body of work however does not specifically address the issue of police organisation and its impact on these processes. If we are to resolve contemporary concerns regarding police participation in the political sphere, a more adequate account of police practices and the institutions within which these practices have evolved is required.

The idea of ‘Queensland Literature’ has a history, but a rather discontinuous one. During the present century, it has emerged sporadically at particular historical moments, rather than as a constant preoccupation, which is how the idea of an Australian literature has figured during this period. An explanation of the different profiles of national and state literary histories in the post-Federation era might begin by asking what is at stake in each case? The cultural beneficiaries of one ‘construction’ of Australian literature are different from those of other, competing constructions of Australian literature. Nationally, there are social and political identities at stake. But at the state level, for most of this century, literature seems to have been much less involved in identity politics of that kind, considerably less than one might have expected, given the ferocity of interstate rivalry in sporting and other areas.

The 1989 Fitzgerald Report into police and governmental corruption in Queensland has been a model for public sector reform in Australia. It is especially timely to consider the impact of those reforms in light of the current overhaul of the largest police agency in Australia, the New South Wales Police Service, and of continuing problems with public sector probity in other states. Queensland made significant advances in improving electoral and administrative processes, and creating external independent oversight of the police. Nonetheless, unforeseen gaps in the Fitzgerald agenda allowed reactionary forces to dilute the reform process. Three primary areas remain ‘unreconstructed’. Reform has not been firmly established from the top down, beginning with progressing the system of representative democracy and opening up cabinet. Additionally, the Police Service appears to have successfully resisted the prescribed re-orientation away from law enforcement to community policing. Detection and control of misconduct also remain weak. A more interventionist Criminal Justice Commission is needed, with more proactive strategies for developing compliance with ethical standards.

Eleanor Dark's years in Montville represent an unusual moment in the history of Queensland literature: it was one of the rare instances, until recent times, of an established professional writer moving to Queensland and pursuing her career in a small rural community. Since the 1980s, the Sunshine Coast and its hinterland have become something of a mecca for writers. None of the later arrivals, however, has pursued Dark's project of viewing the wider world from the hinterland. In Lantana Lane she intertwines meticulous observation of local life, in which she participated as a farmer, with wider cultural and political concerns. She transforms the apparently inauspicious location of the hinterland into a vantage point from which to reflect on modes of production, from the agricultural to the literary.

History will record the 2017 Queensland state election not only for its series of firsts — Annastacia Palaszczuk is the first woman state premier to win two successive elections — but also because it defied expectations. Despite its own lack-lustre campaign, an inauspicious economic climate and the revival of Pauline Hanson's One Nation (PHON), Palaszczuk's Labor Government enjoyed a small after-preference swing to it (despite a small primary swing against it) to win four additional seats and, with it, its first majority in the Legislative Assembly. Conversely, the Liberal-National Party (LNP) lost three seats in a significant primary swing against it, while PHON, after a chaotic campaign, won a just single seat in a statewide primary vote that fell well below expectations. This article argues that these unexpected results can be attributed to a number of factors, ranging from Palaszczuk's relative popularity to voters’ desire for stable government to their disdain for an opposition (and opposition leader) many conflated with both PHON and former LNP Premier Campbell Newman. The article also suggests the election of the first majority government since 2012 could mark the stabilising of a hitherto volatile Queensland electorate as Palaszczuk appears to extend Labor's second electoral hegemony.

The Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games presented the host city with a number of opportunities to improve its infrastructure and sporting facilities in line with its long-term strategic vision to transition to being a more mature and sustainable Australian city. However, major events such as the Commonwealth Games have a chequered history of bestowing lasting benefits and a positive legacy on the host city. This article examines the ways in which infrastructure planning for the 2018 Games was used to underpin the success experienced by the Gold Coast in harnessing the event to achieve broader city building objectives. It also reflects critically on how major event-led development can be used to support existing strategic city plans.

A generation ago, Queensland's economy relied heavily — as did the standing of the state government — upon a booming resources sector, a bountiful agricultural sector and a still-growing tourist market. ‘Rocks and crops’ (to use a favourite phrase of Peter Beattie's) were mainstays of the state's economic activity, and had long underpinned the government's investment, development and budgetary planning. While to a large extent the same might be said today, critical changes have taken place in the local economy in the intervening period, cultivated by successive state administrations with the express aim of diversifying an economy that was overwhelmingly geared towards primary production. Now it can be argued that Queensland's economy has metamorphosed into a modern, knowledge-based economy that demands greater emphasis on technology, expertise and innovation — what Premier Peter Beattie liked to promote with his catch-all phrase ‘Smart State’. But how effective was this push for diversification in renewing the state's economic foundations? Since the advent of the Goss Labor government in late 1989, has Queensland really moved from a ‘farm and quarry’ to a ‘smart’ economy?

It has been observed elsewhere that Queensland, as a self-governing colony, did not ‘arise like the sun at an appointed time’ within an Empire on which the sun never set. Rather, to paraphrase British historian E.P. Thompson in another context, ‘It was present at its own making.’ December 1859 was only a moment of disjuncture according to certain political, administrative and fiscal effects. As a society, as a culture, Queensland was already in full and exuberant existence, having carved out a sense of its own intrusive perpetuity over a preceding period of some 35 years from both the lands of others and the labours of mostly convict, emancipated and indentured men and women. And these in turn marked the Antipodean sequel to ‘blue water’ Imperialism – trans-oceanic nomads drawn by the hazy promise of land on foreign shores or projected unwillingly there by the logic of their metropolitan transgressions. People of many nations, of ‘interacting, sometimes colluding, sometimes colliding cultures’, from its generative convicts, soldiers, penal commandants and manifold Aboriginal peoples to its waged workers, squatters, selectors, merchants and administrators, were in effect this colonial society in embryo, both formed and in process of formation. Only a name for the place was now lacking. Although small, isolated and stunted, this was nevertheless a multi-faceted, diverse and unequally graded social order, cloaked only one-dimensionally in the mantle of Britishness and Christianity. What follows are some observations about this conceptually unstable sense of consonance and divergence and the coincident business of simultaneously being and becoming.

This paper produces the first mapping of ostensibly ‘lesbian’ spaces in Brisbane, focusing on lesbian bars and/or clubs. While cultural geographers have long noted the increased presence of ‘queerness’ within urban built environments, including how articulations of queerness within the built environment impact on the usage of those spaces both by queers and non-queers, few have applied this work to Queensland's capital. This paper addresses the gap. To do so, I begin contextually by ‘overviewing’ how queer space has tended to be ‘mapped’ in existing scholarship. I then consider how lesbian space, in particular, is mediated through interpersonal networks, queer media and, increasingly, virtual spaces. The point of this is to consider how lesbians go about the process of finding each other, and of finding community, through and in the spaces of Brisbane's built environment. Finally, and with these contexts in place, I move on to a brief case study of the three incarnations of one lesbian bar in Brisbane: namely, Mint cocktail bar. This case study raises a series of questions, including what, if any, are the aesthetic characteristics of these spaces? How are they contextualised within, and how do they interact with, the broader built environment? And what, ultimately, might these spatial interactions reveal about ideologies of sexuality within the built environment of Brisbane?

On 31 March 1965, Ro Bogner and I went into the public bar of the Regatta Hotel in Brisbane's Coronation Drive and tried to order a lemonade each. Because we were women, we were refused and ordered out, but we did not leave. We chained ourselves to the bar rail instead. The barman, then the publican, then police — first uniformed then plain-clothes — tried hard to get us to leave without force. When they failed, they unexpectedly left us to it. At once there followed a storm of publicity, even extending overseas, and public response ranging from passionate support to hostile opposition right through to threats of violence and even death.

Forty-one years later, in the Museum of Brisbane in the City Hall, I saw photos, press clippings and texts about this first, and subsequent, demonstrations in the campaign to admit women to public bars in Queensland. The context was the recent Taking to the Streets Exhibition, an extensive and well-researched showing of the radical movements in Brisbane in 1965–85. Looking back, how do I now view the Regatta demonstration and the subsequent campaigns for change for women in which I was involved? Where do they stand in relation to changes since? Do they still have relevance to goals for women now?

We know about the first day at Wolston Park from a report in the Brisbane Courier of 1865. On 12 January of that year, seven prison warders (two of them women) and ten police constables escorted 57 male and twelve female lunatics from Brisbane Gaol ‘to the new Asylum at Woogaroo’. Since 1859, Queensland's insane had no longer been sent to Sydney, but were lodged instead at the Brisbane Gaol. Now the asylum was ready, its residents were loaded into cabs and taken down to the river. There they boarded a steamer named Settler and were conveyed down the river to the landing point near Woogaroo Creek. The name of the asylum hinted at the reality that this was Aboriginal land: the word Woogaroo, so it was remembered in the 1930s, being a corruption of an Aboriginal word meaning ‘to step over a person lying down’. Aboriginal people would be among the earliest inhabitants of the asylum, but not in great numbers. Instead, the institution was rapidly filled from its earliest days with the immigrant settlers who made up most of the colony's growing population.

Southeast Queensland — the region encompassing Coolangatta and the McPherson Range to the south, Cooloola and the Blackall Range to the north, and the Great Dividing Range to the west — represents one of Queensland's most significant literary landscapes. For millennia, this area — defined by mountains and waterways — contained important gathering places for ceremonies and trade, and its inhabitants elaborated the meaning of the landscape in a rich complex of stories and other cultural practices such as the bunya festivals. Colonisation disrupted but did not obliterate these cultural associations, which remain alive in the oral traditions of local Aboriginal people and, in more recent times, have surfaced in the work of writers like Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Sam Watson.

There is a growing international emphasis on the use of research-based evidence to inform youth program policy, practice and funding priorities, and on involving young people as subjects and actors in gathering this evidence. Youth development organisations and programs increasingly are expected to engage in research that informs their program development and illustrates their effectiveness. Research partnerships that provide community access to external research expertise are one way by which youth organisations and programs can strengthen their internal research capacity. This article explores the youth-inclusive community–university partnership underpinning the Queensland Youth Development Research Project, and examines some of the multifaceted methodological and ethical dimensions of this approach across three dimensions of research: planning, doing and finishing. Successful youth-inclusive research requires paying attention to the diversity of challenges characteristic of youth research. These challenges, influenced by the complexity of child, young adult and older adult relationships, highlight the fundamental importance of understanding how power is expressed and mediated in youth research. Overall, the article argues that youth-inclusive research can be shaped to bring broader benefits to research, scholars, young people and the wider community beyond the aim of simply improving the research process itself.

What conservation could possibly become commensurate with the rates of human-induced biophysical change unfolding at the advent to the Sixth Extinction Event? Any such conservation would require time-critical interventions into both ecosystems and evolution itself, for these interventions would also require domains of risk and ethics that shatter normative understandings of conservation. Yet a line appears to have been drawn in the sand against such experimental conservation. Holding the line will retain conservation practices that are null and void against the extinction debt facing multitudes of species. Crossing the line would invoke scales of bioengineering that appear abhorrent to normative morality. This article explores the question of whether this line in the sand could, and should, be crossed through a detailed case study of current and proposed conservation for endangered Chelonia mydas sea turtles on Raine Island, a small coral cay on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Chelonia mydas and Raine Island are presented as synecdoche for conservation across diverse species across the world because turtles are among the most endangered of all reptiles and Raine Island is the largest and most important rookery in the world for this species. With such lines disappearing under the rising seas, the article contemplates the unthinkable questions that our current situation demands we ask, and perhaps even try to answer.

In April 2015, The Pool emerged as the winning proposal for Australia's exhibition at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale.1 Creative directors Aileen Sage and Michelle Tabet explained that the pool was ‘a lens through which to explore Australian cultural identity’ and ‘aptly represents a distinctively Australian democratic and social space’.2 In Australia, the public pool was popularised in the post-war period, particularly in Queensland where it offered relief from the long, hot and humid summers. Although Brisbane already had several floating baths along the Brisbane River from the mid-nineteenth century, large-scale, in-ground pool construction in the state did not start in earnest until the mid-1950s, when the personal and social benefits of recreational time with family and friends became well established. In Queensland, as elsewhere in the country, the government encouraged the construction of swimming pools, and many became memorial pools, dedicated to those who had fought to defend an Australian ‘way of life’. Their design was to reflect the civic and social foundations of the initiative, and in Queensland architects took delight in all the opportunities it afforded. The result was a widely diverging collection of predominantly humble and economical structures that were rarely ordinary or dull. Analysing three key pools that were constructed in regional Queensland between 1955 and 1965 — in Rockhampton, Mackay and Miles — this article draws out some of the defining features of Queensland's modern memorial pools, and highlights how this typology became the quintessential ‘Australian democratic and social space’.3

Since the 1970s, there has been a strong and active gay and lesbian press in the southern parts of Australia. This press emerged later in Queensland than in the southern states but today it reaches many queer Queenslanders and performs a vital and multifaceted role. While this press provides essential representation and visibility for the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (GLBTIQ) population of Queensland, it also embodies a number of tensions inherent in this community. This article charts the development and history of the print media run by and for the queer community of Queensland, particularly focusing on the two major GLBTIQ periodicals currently available in Queensland. These are Queensland Pride, published monthly, and Q News, published fortnightly. The article explores the conflicts that exist in that queer print media, arguing that Queensland's queer press has struggled to adequately represent what has become an increasingly multifarious and diverse GLBTIQ ‘community’.