This essay reconstructs defensive/offensive mechanisms of Aboriginal communication networks and presents historical examples of their application as a means of resistance during Australia’s frontier wars. The principal focus is on smoke-signalling systems, especially in Queensland.

Counselling is not a well-understood concept. Many people who haven't undergone counselling believe a counsellor's role is to listen to a person tell their problem and then ‘help’ them by giving advice about what they should do. Children and young people struggle with the idea that a counsellor is not a human form of Google. It is not easy for them to hear that their problem is complex and that sometimes working out an action plan themselves, with guidance from a trained counsellor, offers better value to their lives in the long run. Kids Helpline is an Australian child and youth-focused telephone and online counselling service with a long-term view of what ‘helping’ looks like. The free-call 24/7 counselling line challenges young clients to see beyond the immediate gratification of receiving instantaneous ‘answers’ to problems, and to value more highly the process of learning problem-solving and decision-making skills, transferable from issue to issue over the course of a lifetime. This article seeks to highlight the early intervention and prevention role that child helplines play in young people's lives, encouraging and strengthening children and young people's early forays into exploring consequential thinking. The article describes the processes used by Kids Helpline counsellors to encourage children and young people to become action planners, and demonstrates young people's capacity to appreciate complexity and personal development.

The Brisbane Powerhouse was reopened in 2000, an election year for the Brisbane City Council, by then Lord Mayor Councillor Jim Soorley. Built in a decommissioned power station, the ‘Centre for the Arts’ was one of the culminations of Soorley's $4 billion Urban Renewal Program (‘About Urban Renewal’). It was also a major — $22 million worth, to be precise — addition to the Brisbane arts scene (Buzacott: 11). It is of particular interest, then, that one of the highest profile events of the Brisbane Powerhouse's inaugural program was the first screening of the Brisbane Queer Film and Video Weekend (now the Brisbane Queer Film Festival or ‘BQFF’). Now in its eighth year, and still screened at the Brisbane Powerhouse, the BQFF continues to be Queensland's only regular public film festival dedicated to explicitly queer films. But at a time when queer film festivals around the world are under increasing pressure to disband, given claims that ‘queer’ is supposedly such an accepted part of mainstream media that separate events are superfluous, what role — if any — does the BQFF have in Brisbane's and Queensland's queer culture (see Rich 2006)?

Political commentary is a key component of news coverage in any liberal democracy. Yet theorising the role played by political commentators in a rapidly transforming media sphere – further destabilised by voters’ increasing mistrust of expertise and of political and media institutions – is rare in the social science literature. This article adopts a mixed methodological approach to argue that political commentators today perform one or more of three functions – ‘public educator’, ‘value educator’ and ‘polemicist’ – with commentators now falling into one of seven types. Given the broadening and flattening of news media dissemination and consumption – and arguably the ‘dumbing down’ and ‘shallowing out’ of news media coverage in a postmodern social media age where truth and facts are too often subordinated by rhetoric and opinion – this article argues that the role of the academic political commentator is now more critical than ever. It also argues that academic commentators must offer not only objective descriptive analysis of political events but also potentially subjective normative analysis – in effect, narrative ‘guardrails’ – to remind voters of what is and is not acceptable political behaviour in a ‘post-truth’ anti-expert age.

This paper analyses and critiques the Queensland Government's Research and Development (R&D) strategy that undergirds the smart state policy agenda. We argue that this strategy poorly addresses: R&D opportunities deriving from the applied social and creative disciplines; and the role of the social and creative disciplines in the development and commercialisation process for all research. Furthermore, we suggest this derives from a view of ‘smart’ which is biased towards science and technology.

Queensland can no longer afford to understand the social and creative disciplines as commercially irrelevant, ‘civilising’ disciplines. Instead they must be recognised as the vanguard of economic growth. In particular, the proposed R&D strategy does nothing to position Queensland for the emerging wave of innovation needed to meet demand for content creation in entertainment, education, government, and health information, in order to exploit universal networked broadband architectures currently in development.

Not only is research in the applied social and creative disciplines required for its own commercial potential, but also because such research must be hybridised with science and technology research to realise the commercial potential of the latter. Commercialisation depends on ‘whole product value propositions’ not just basic research. We suggest that there needs to be mechanisms whereby research in the social and creative disciplines can be meaningfully hybridised with basic research in technology to create new commercial opportunities for Queensland. To this end we describe two examples of research driven commercialisation outside science/technology, namely interaction design and broadcasting.

‘Dear Mrs. Ford,’ the correspondence often begins, then follow accounts of misfortune and privation:

During the floods our home was an inch out of the water and the river four miles wide. We lost heavily in cotton but the stock are alright, though they were standing in water 3 ft. deep for a day and … 8 pigs lived on the verandah for two days.

The drought was so bad that water was scarce and baths unknown. We had to do what we could with a wet sponge. But I missed vegetables most of all. Fruit one learns to do without, but the memory of vegetables used to torture me.

We certainly had a terrible experience in the cyclone. [We] lost everything but our house. The sea rose 20 feet over high tide mark and swept through our little home, destroying everything and drowning my poultry. I took the children on to a high piece of ground and put them in the flanges of a large stump while I tried to rescue my poultry. My husband stayed at the house tying down the roof.

It's easy for a bloke to be pleasant at the factory … but pretty hard when he is pulling old Strawberry out of a bog or chasing the pigs out of the sweet potato patch. And calves! Have you ever heard the raucous, nerve-splitting, bellowing of an army of desperate little demons, who begin to scream at daylight and keep it up all through the hot day?

I'm afraid I've been a bit depressed because you see we mortgaged the place to feed our dairy herd and the little drop of rain last month killed most of those left.

One might wonder what floods, drought and hungry calves have to do with books and reading in the Queensland outback. The connection becomes apparent through an examination of the records of the Queensland Bush Book Club, a Brisbane-based philanthropic organisation that operated a book- and magazine-lending service for families living in the Queensland bush in the early twentieth century. Mrs Ford served as the group's corresponding secretary for many years, and letters detailing the hardships of life in the remote countryside ended up on her desk.

I am writing this paper on 26 January 2001 in the Queensland regional city Rockhampton. This is a public holiday for most Australians, Australia Day in the year of the centenary of Federation for many Australians, and Invasion Day for some Australians. This complex variety of attitudes to a single date encapsulates some of the themes to be explored in this paper.

This article reports an exploratory study that investigated domestic labour in same-sex households, to the best of my knowledge the first in Australia to do so. In-depth semi-structured interviews with 12 couples in Southeast Queensland reveal that these lesbians and gay men do not take on heteronormative gender roles when doing domestic labour, and that their practices reflect a variety of styles of sharing, with no pattern emerging as clearly dominant. Theoretical frameworks conceptualising gender as performative, and queer theory's figuring of identity as a constellation of multiple and unstable positions, suggest how the performance of gender may vary in different domains of social and cultural space, and in relation to other actors in those spaces. I have conceptualised this process by means of an analogy with the modulation of sound such that each person adjusts the balance between treble (conventionally feminine behaviours, attitudes and attributes) and bass (conventionally masculine behaviours and attributes). Rather than being ‘the man’ or ‘the woman’, or even displaying a single form of gay masculinity or lesbian femininity, lesbians and gay men can be seen to perform varying degrees of masculinity and femininity in the private space of the home, and in relation to their intimate partners, by the way they engage with domestic labour. Finally, I reflect on how the socio-geographical specificities of being situated in Southeast Queensland may have impacted on this research.

From a business perspective, the Dot.Com debacle of the late 1990s and early 2000s reinforced the need for good business planning and strategising, a clear requirement to be flexible and capable of almost constant change, a need to focus on creating added value and sustainable competitive advantage through the use of innovative ideas, strategies and tools – and finally, it focused attention on learning to harness the opportunities and minimise the problems associated with doing business in an electronic age. The case study outlined in this paper looks at the “What”, “Why” and “How” of doing business electronically in a traditional Queensland-based agri-industry – the Peanut Industry. The investigation found that the use of internet-enabled business practices between members of the industry value chain is increasing rapidly and is gaining respect as a means of improving efficiencies and productivity. It also found that if an entity in the value chain begins to do business electronically, other companies in that chain will need to follow suit or risk being substituted. In the longer term, it is likely that the drive for electronically enabled business practices will come from the larger food processing organisations, not only on the premise of improved internal efficiencies, but also because of increasingly tough food safety and quality assurance requirements that are prompting the need for real time quality information and decision support for product tracking back to source. Finally, conclusions are drawn for Smart State initiatives and for ‘smart’ practices in agri-business.

This article examines the lived experience and recent commemorative efforts relating to the experience of displaced prsons who were sent to Queensland in the post-war period. 170,000 displaced persons — predominantly Central and Eastern Europeans — arrived in Australia between 1947 and 1952. They were sent to reception and training centres upon their arrival before commencing a two-year indentured labour contract. Memorialisation of these camps tends to present them as the founding places of the migrant experience in Australia; however, there has been very little historical work on displaced persons in Queensland, or on the Queensland migrant camps — Wacol, Enoggera, Stuart and Cairns. This article focuses on recent commemorative attempts surrounding the Stuart migrant camp in order to argue that, in relation to displaced persons, family and community memories drive commemorative activities.

Contemporary Queensland has a flourishing GLBTIQ (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer) scene which, although still suffering from discrimination in a society that is premised around a heterosexual norm, is a far cry from the years before 1990 when male homosexuality was a criminal offence. The queer generation has largely moved beyond binaries in gender and sexuality, and at dance parties there is a blending of cultures that knows few of the old boundaries. These new freedoms to express sexuality mean that relationships develop more easily with less fear of opprobrium. Classified advertisements in newspapers and on the internet, sex-on-premises venues and cybersex are all available to facilitate physical desires and as ways of meeting a possible future partner. Yet if one were to survey young gay men today, how many would know that between 1900 and 1990 a sodomy conviction could carry a prison sentence of up to 14 years with hard labour? Or that engaging in ‘gross indecency’ in public or private (usually oral sex or masturbation) could receive three years with hard labour? How many would know that the death penalty for sodomy was removed in 1865 or that between that year and 1899 the sentence for anal intercourse was 10 years to life imprisonment?

In 1992, the Climbing World Finals event in Birmingham attracted around 5,000 spectators to watch 24 males and 16 females compete in two separate competitions for prize money. In this entertainment spectacular, super-fit young athletes climbed walls using artificial hand and footholds, racing against the clock to determine who would claim the title of the world's ‘best’ climber. In the same year, climbing appeared as a demonstration sport at the Albertville Winter Olympics. And also in the same year, the first indoor climbing gymnasium in Australia opened its climbing wall. There are now around 80 operating around the country under the auspices of the Australian Indoor Climbing Gyms Association Incorporated.

The most popular painting in the Queensland Art Gallery Collection is R. Godfrey Rivers Under the jacaranda 1903. The blaze of the tree's mauve so dominates the canvas that the figures of Rivers and his fiancée taking tea under its shade appear quite secondary. It is, in essence, a portrait of the tree. The scale of this painting is quite exceptional but during the twentieth century the striking colour of the jacaranda inspired a number of artists, Charles Lancaster in particular. The striking cone-shaped canopy of the bunya pine is as commanding in its formality as the jacaranda is in its colour, yet where are the equivalent paintings of this tree? They are scarce indeed.

Dropsy is a puff. It is not the first time he has done it. I can bring a witness who will swear that he got ten bob from a black fellow that stuffed him. I knew what he wanted when he went up the stairs so I followed him … there are plenty of others in Brisbane who do it besides us mob, so I am not the first.

— Conversation between Albert McNamara and Police Constable Lipp, Brisbane, 1905

Like those in other sectors, managers in community-based organisations face an uncertain and challenging future. Research and writing about the community sector (non-government, not-for-profit, or third sector) has canvassed a wide range of issues. A selective review of the recent literature reveals the breadth of research interest in the challenges facing community sector managers. While some reflection on the implications for managers of current economic and social policy contexts is crucial for this sector, research effort needs to be focused on understanding how third sector managers construe their current strategic challenges and the strategies they use to address them. A small sample of managers working in a regional area in South East Queensland was asked to identify current strategic concerns related to the future viability of their organisations. The key issues raised by managers are compared with the issues raised in the research literature. Results to date indicate that managers' concerns are reflected in the research literature, but that managers are also concerned about the current trends in social policy towards collaboration, amalgamation, and partnership. Implications of these findings for managers operating in this sector are discussed.

This paper provides a comparative perspective on the development of tourism in Queensland through analysing the history of tourism in Hawaii. Both Queensland and Hawaii are heavily dependent on tourism, with the future of tourism being a constant focus of public debate in each case. Since Hawaii embarked on tourism development decades before Queensland, the history of Hawaiian tourism may present some important lessons for tourism in Queensland. Also, Hawaii is Queensland's most important competitor for the Japanese and emerging Asian markets (such as South Korea, Taiwan and mainland China) in sun-and-surf tourism.

Queensland's 2017 state election resulted in Annastacia Palaszczuk's Labor government being returned with a slim majority. While not a resounding victory, the result seemingly vindicated the premier's decision to head to an early election, and reinforced her standing in a succession of opinion polls as ‘preferred premier’ for most voters. The result also halted the short sequence of Queensland governments being voted out of office in no uncertain terms by a supposedly volatile electorate. The extent to which Labor's recent electoral success in Queensland — and the quelling of that volatility — can be attributed to Palaszczuk's leadership is still open to debate. It is instructive, though, to note the differences in leadership and campaigning styles between Palaszczuk and her opponents, which saw her drag a decimated Labor Party back to office after a single term in opposition, then saw it returned with a working parliamentary majority. This article highlights those differences over the last term of government, contrasting the performance of the two major parties in Queensland in terms of their leadership and election campaign approaches. The analysis helps to explain some of the reasons for the respective parties’ recent electoral showings.

Soon after Johannes Bjelke-Petersen became Premier of Queensland in 1968, companies in which he held shares were given six-year leases to explore for oil on the Great Barrier Reef. The following year, ministers in his government accepted parcels of Comalco shares. So did senior bureaucrats and the Premier's wife. Criticism at the time was muted because Labor politicians and some journalists had also taken shares (Whitton 1989, p. 19). Bjelke-Petersen was adamant that he had done nothing wrong — a feeling that presumably was shared by other beneficiaries of Comalco's largesse (Wear 2002, p. 93). Because it is inconceivable that a saga of such blatant conflict of interest would be played out in today's Queensland, there is a temptation to tell a simple ‘before and after Fitzgerald’ story of public accountability and administrative reform. Considered analysis suggests, however, that the reality is much more complex. There was progress, but there was also backsliding. Some reforms — such as those to the electoral system — were significant and enduring. Others — such as whistleblower and FOI legislation — were fairly quickly watered down. There was a lack of long-term interest in public administration, parliament retained its usual place on the margins of Queensland's political institutions and executive power remained relatively unconstrained. Cases of corruption continued to emerge.