The rise of ethnic nationalism (as expressed by the political ascent of Pauline Hanson and her One Nation Party) has created divisions within the Right of Australian politics and impediments to a privatisation program which had been proceeding under the aegis of the Labor Party and the Liberal-National Party Coalition over the last fifteen years. This paper focuses on how Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party has opposed privatisation of government assets on the basis that privatisation offers opportunities for subversive foreign capital to weaken national solidarity, which is conceived in ethnic and racial terms. The One Nation Party, this new anti-privatisation movement, is interpreted on two levels:

1. 1 as one of a growing number of ethnic nationalist movements across the globe which are recurrent outcomes of hegemonic decline and increasing multipolarity in the world-system (e.g., the current situation of declining American hegemony being similar to the crisis of British hegemony in the interwar period of the early twentieth century)

2. 2 as the outcome of neo-liberal policies (including privatisation) which have failed to produce full employment or to arrest the decline of the petite bourgeoisie, which forms the primary basis of the support for Hanson and her One Nation party.

In the 29 novels by Arthur Upfield in which he is the protagonist, Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte (Bony) is often referred to as a product of Queensland. We are reminded repeatedly of his origins, first in North Queensland (where he was born and raised on a mission) and then Brisbane (where he was educated, and where he and his wife live in the suburb of Banyo – though this city location is never described). But my main purpose here is to explore Upfield's representation of ‘place’, specifically in the three Queensland-focused Bony novels, and the related, recurrent discourses and tropes commonly associated with environmental writing and eco-criticism: wilderness, toxicity, pastoral, dwelling and particularly environmental crisis, eruption and catastrophe.

This article explores the changes in how Nepalese female students living in Brisbane, Australia, experience shifting expectations and perceptions of gender roles. It reviews a range of literature from migration studies, geography and humanities to investigate the interrelation between gender and migration, and the ways in which transforming gender relations among the Nepalese migrants in Australia might eventuate. Specifically, the article looks at how traditional gender roles are continued or discontinued by disclosing the lived experiences of a small cohort of Nepalese female students. A summary of qualitative interviews and ethnographic observations are used to highlight how their changing perspectives on traditional gender relations result from living in the changed socio-cultural settings of the host country, and the inherent challenges of implementing the changes in conventional interpretations of gender-based roles after returning to their home country.

In 1949, Clive Turnbull remarked that Australian Life (1892), a collection of short stories by Francis Adams, ‘is a book that deserves to be resurrected’. While two of the radical English writer's novels have been republished over the last three decades, Australian Life — which Turnbull regarded as ‘perhaps the most noteworthy’ of Adams' works of fiction — has not been resurrected either in print or online, and is accessible only in rare book libraries. Republication here in Queensland Review of the original version of Adams' short story ‘The Red Snake’, which appeared first in the Boomerang in 1888 and was later revised for Australian Life, may help to renew interest in Francis Adams' carefully crafted but disturbing narratives of life in the Australian colonies in the 1880s.

This article reads Thea Astley’s final novel in the context of rhetoric about the death of Australian literature that has been a mainstay of our national culture almost since its inception. In the early 2000s, a new round of obituarists argued that the global publishing industry, critical trends and changing educational pedagogies were eroding Australia’s literary identity. Drylands, published in 1999, can be considered a slightly prescient participant in this conversation: it is subtitled A Book for the World’s Last Reader, seemingly framing the novel in a polemics of decline. My reading, however, sees the book as the product of two correlated yet combative literary projects: the attempt by its primary narrator, Janet Deakin, to write a book after what she sees as the likely death of reading and writing; and Astley’s more nuanced exploration of the role of literature in settler colonial modernity. Reading across the seven narratives that constitute the book, I argue that Drylands performs the fraught relationship between ethics and aesthetics in the context of writing about the systemic violence of the settler colonial state, questioning literary privilege, exclusivity and complicity in ways that remain relevant to debates regarding Australian literature today.

In late 1907, Charles Fraser, the Victorian government entomologist, travelled to North Queensland. His observations of the flora and fauna in this part of Australia were later published in the Victorian Naturalist. However, this journey was not motivated entirely by his desire to study natural history. As a sufferer of ‘rhematic [sic] troubles’, he spent a few days soaking in the mineral-impregnated waters at Innot Hot Springs, a small inland village approximately 150 kilometres south-east of Cairns. First established in the late 1880s, the tiny settlement is still visited during the winter months by many ‘grey nomads’ en route to Karumba, where the fishing is promoted as being excellent. They break their journey at Innot Hot Springs to soak in the indoor or outdoor swimming pools filled with mineralised water of varying temperatures sourced from the nearby Nettle Creek. Some view it simply as a place to relax after the long journey from southern Australia, having perhaps already tried the artesian bore water baths at Moree and Mitchell en route. Others may consider the mineral waters to have healing qualities; like Charles Fraser, they are literally ‘taking the waters’.

During the inter-war period, parts of Queensland were subjected to continued deforestation as successive state governments encouraged more intensive use of the state's vast land reserves. Yet running parallel to this process was the deliberate planting of mainly exotic tree species — although it was on a small scale and located mostly throughout the streets of the state's urban centres. This activity can be considered part of the earliest town planning efforts to improve the quality of the urban landscape in Queensland's settlements, through the provision of shade and attractive surroundings. However, the public demands for street trees can also be seen as part of a wider community movement that was concerned about the type of environment being created in Queensland, particularly as so much of the state's native forests were being destroyed and parts of the state during the 1910s and 1920s were overrun with prickly pear.

The twentieth century was a time of massive upheaval in the intellectual, theological and architectural spheres of society. Two world wars, massive post-war population growth and a building boom coincided with the Second Vatican Council and the liturgical movement within the Christian churches, and encountered the modern movement in architecture. This prompted a demand for a re-evaluation of church building design. In Brisbane, new approaches to church building design emerged in the 1960s, with widely divergent results. The architects, denominations and church parishes within the city — although all sought to address liturgical change and emphasise the active participation of the congregation in the services — held different opinions on how the quintessential church characteristics, immanence and transcendence, could be adapted to modern times. Analysing three exemplary Christian churches in Brisbane, this article demonstrates how in each of these designs their architects sought to evoke immanence and transcendence in a decisively new and modern manner, seeking inspiration from progressive ideas in Europe, Britain and America while striving to create buildings suited to the climate of South-East Queensland. Liturgical change, modern architecture and regional climate considerations provided compounding opportunities to rethink church design from first principles.

John Carne Bidwill was born in 1815 in England and died in Queensland in 1853. His short life is relevant to Australia's garden history, botany, the horticultural use of Australian plants in European gardens and the colonial history of Sydney, New Zealand, Wide Bay and Maryborough. He may have been the first to introduce plant breeding into Australia. In a short life, and working in his spare time, he contributed more than many full-time and longer-lived horticulturists. This included discovering new species, crossing new hybrids (specific and inter-generic), and propagating and promulgating plants for the nursery trade and gardeners. His efforts are marked by his name gracing many Australian and New Zealand plants, exotic plant hybrids and modern suburbs of Sydney and Maryborough. This brief biography outlines Bidwill's time in Australasia and Queensland.

To date, histories of literary culture in Queensland have not paid particular attention to newspapers, despite the fact that metropolitan and regional publications carried considerable material that allows us insight into the ways in which books were circulated and evaluated. Reviews and essays sat alongside advertisements run by department stores, specialist retailers, large distributors and newsagents, in turn jostling for attention with interviews with authors, poems, reports of literary gatherings and substantial critical essays. This article offers a ‘case study’ of literary materials in The Brisbane Courier, part of a project on the representation of literature (broadly conceived) in Australian newspapers from 1930. The year 1930 was chosen because the interwar years are so frequently characterised, in discussion of the critical study of Australian literature in particular, as a time of neglect, and the Depression as a catalyst for the gradual narrowing of literary horizons. Our larger aim is to understand this historical period better, as well as to calibrate the discussion of Australian literature against the discussion of literature generally. By focusing on a single year for data collection, we have been able to assemble a rich and detailed picture of ‘talk about books’. This, in turn, has enabled us to analyse the significant differences between, for example, the ways in which books are discussed and represented as commercial and aesthetic objects in regional and metropolitan newspapers (see Dale and Thomson 2010).

Repeated ‘boom and bust’ phenomena have characterised the history of Queensland as a colony and state. In terms of infrastructure and cultural institutions, this has led to significant discontinuities: vital strategic centres of colonial power, such as Cooktown, now languish in relative obscurity and the role of their inhabitants as authors and agents of colonialism receives little attention. This study investigates the life of an early inhabitant of Cooktown, E.A.C. Olive, in the context of his location on Australia's northern frontier.

This is a transcript of the key-note address delivered by David Anderson at the ‘Beyond the Brisbane Line Conference’, Queensland Studies Centre, Griffith University, in collaboration with the University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, November 1994. David Anderson is the presenter of ABC Radio's Queensland Sunday program.

This essay aims to explicate the conditions enabling Hansonism. Politically, it argues that the party's exploitation of cynicism about mainstream politics and deepening economic and social divisions have been enabled by the Howard government's zealous pursuit of neo-liberal politics, its dismantling of Labor's welfare safety net, its wedge politics, its cynical reneging on election promises, and its attacks on the fourth estate, not to mention his endorsement of Hanson's freedom of speech'. In terms of the media, the essay argues that Hansonism's protest vote is based on a ‘plague o’ both your houses'. The allied populist prejudices of several radio talkback hosts have drawn their strength from television's virtual displacement of political debate in its posture as voice of the people, its actual address to viewers as domestic, atomised consumers and the increasing populism of vernacular genres such as lifestyle programs and sitcoms. Examples include the most popular Australian film of the Howard-Hanson era, The Castle.

The Queenslander garden is instantly recognisable both by those blessed with a Queensland birthright and by those who are newly arrived or perhaps making a brief visit to the state while on holiday. Since the proclamation of the State of Queensland in 1859 the Queensland domestic garden has undergone various and numerous changes. There have been changes in size, design and preferred plant species. There have been changes in the householder's perception, use and management of the garden. Importantly there has also been change in what constitutes the Queenslander house.

During the 2001 Queensland state election, the Australian Labor Party's (ALP) ‘Just Vote 1’ campaign message sought to limit preference exchange among conservative parties. This paper analyses the impact of this tactic that produced a 53.6 per cent increase in the exhausted vote over the last election. The size of the landslide to Labor made this tactic irrelevant but it affected the outcome in five seats and could have been decisive in a closer election. The concern is raised that the optional preferential system produces a less representative and less democratic outcome than the compulsory preferential system.