‘Moreton Bay’ was certainly a name to be conjured with among the early Australian penal stations. As well as being a forbidding secondary detention centre, it represented — both within and around itself — a microcosmic world of early colonial race and ethnic relations. For this custodial system was rudely imposed upon pre-existing and long-enduring social orders of a dramatically dissimilar kind. It intruded into human populations that greatly outnumbered its own, implanted itself and militarily usurped portions of territory in a variety of locations, occupied by and spiritually amalgamated with a substantial body of Aboriginal communities. To these people, for whom life was ‘a billowing of the consciousness of country’, it was a visitation utterly without precedent. The repercussions of its ongoing presence were largely uninvited and unrehearsed. The station's existence was at first a wonder and a puzzle, then an impediment and a curse. It greatly transformed immutable lifeways, invariably impoverishing them; it reduced social options rather than expanding them; it denuded the host culture of its efficacy; and it assailed the people's health and decimated their numbers. The familiar environment was reconstructed and the old place-names largely obliterated and changed. For the incomer, to name was to own. The many visible signs of Aboriginal material occupancy were ignored as palpable evidence of legal possession and, eventually, erased. Erased too was much of the evidence of these very acts of erasure, whether material, cultural or human. Detailed evidence of what happened — or was perceived to have happened — in the myriad interactions between Aborigines and non-Aborigines of the convict settlement between 1824 and 1842 is scanty and fragmented: staccato bursts of often-tantalising information against an otherwise frustrating backdrop of silence. Distance from Sydney as well as London was the essential buffer that nurtured this atmosphere of secrecy, feeding its potency and allowing the Moreton Bay regime to proceed virtually as a law unto itself insofar as northern frontier relations were concerned.

Helen Taylor made a unique contribution to the democratisation of history in Queensland. She gave us, in Abraham Lincoln's immortal words, History ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’. In so doing, she loosened the stultifying stranglehold of both schools and universities — history's traditional domain. Since history appeared on the school curriculum, generations of children have undergone the arid and depressing experience of being adjudged ‘not good at history’ because of an inability to memorise a string of meaningless dates. The successful ones who went on to study the subject at university encountered a program that was academic and elitist in both content and purpose. Thought by many to be a worthy successor to the Classics for the training of fine minds, it was for a long time concerned almost exclusively with the activities of governments, the machinery of power in the domestic context and its external manifestations overseas, foreign policy and imperialism. Helen Taylor's notion of history was something very different.

Writing in a book published in 1918 in honour of Jesse Jewhurst Hilder (1881–1916), shortly after the artist's tragic early death from tuberculosis, Bertram Stevens declared:

A typescript of a woman's diary deposited at the Mitchell Library in the 1970s contains some intriguing exchanges for the historian of the frontier. The diarist is unnamed — never a good omen for a primary document — but the uneven entries and the diary's passing mention of some of the people on Durundur Station from October 1842 to May 1843 give it the weight of authenticity. Our informant, ‘the wife of an employee of the Archers’, arrived on the station in October 1842, only six months after the north had officially been opened for free settlement and only a little over twelve months since David Archer had established this pastoral lease. She had arrived as part of a group of fourteen labourers and mechanics sent from one of the Archer estates in Scotland, and settled on one of the few stations to establish good relations with the traditional owners of the region. Her employer was among the more religious of the Archer brothers — a renowned family of Queensland pastoralists — and he was much taken with the idealism of the Evangelical movement. He refused to hunt the Dalla of the Blackall-D'Aguilar Ranges from their country and was determined to build peaceful relations with the traditional owners.

Olga Penton died of heart failure at her home in Sydney one evening in 1973. She was found the next morning sitting upright in an armchair, with a plate of cold chicken half-eaten on her lap, a knowing smile on her face, and looking a lot younger than her 76 years. This is an image that captures the cheerful stoicism of her last twenty years of life. Fifty years earlier, another sedentary image captures an earlier self: the image is of Olga sitting naked in a bath, presiding over an intellectual salon of writers and free-thinkers in the Brisbane flat she was sharing with her new husband, Brian Penton. It is hard to be sure whether this second image exactly corresponds to reality — neither of my informants was personally present at any of the bathroom salons, and both reported them as a spicy rumour rather than an observed fact — but whether true or not, we can say that the rumour expresses the ambience of intellectual sophistication and sexual daring that seems to have surrounded her at the time.

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.

An increase in the incidence of leprosy among North Queensland Aboriginal people in the late 1930s gave rise to fears that the disease might spread and threaten the white population. This concern resulted in an uninhabited offshore island being selected as a leper colony that was exclusively for blacks: it became a place to which Indigenous people suffering from leprosy were forcibly transported, isolated and treated. Queensland's right to take such action was enshrined in law by the Leprosy Act of 1892 and subsequently by the Public Health Act of 1937 which, while repealing the Leprosy Act, retained the main elements of the earlier legislation.

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.

An old friend, Jim Cleary, working on the monumental Bibliography of Australian Literature at the University of Queensland, recently rang to tell me about the elusive modernist poet Anna Wickham. ‘Wickham’ is the pen-name of Edith Alice Mary Harper, ‘one of the most significant feminist poets of modernism’, who published between the 1910s and the 1930s. The author of over one thousand poems, covering a remarkable diversity of forms, Wickham was described in the memoir of American publisher Louis Untermeyer as ‘a remarkable gypsy of a woman’. During her tempestuous life, she mixed with members of the London Chelsea and Bloomsbury sets, plunged into the literary and artistic circles of the Parisian demi-monde, had a brief sexual relationship with pioneer American modernist poet H.D. (Hilda Dolittle), was sexually spurned by lesbian heiress and literary patron Natalie Clifford Barney, and became closely aligned with D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda von Richthofen, as well as Dylan Thomas and Caitlin MacNamara, falling out with the latter couple after throwing a drunken ‘Thomas and fellow writer Lawrence Durrell out of the house’. She was also close friends with the erratic novelist Malcolm Lowry, whetted the appetites of Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, and helped to mentor the young Stephen Spender. Somewhat like T.S. Eliot's wife Vivien Haigh-Wood, she was incarcerated at one point in a mental institution by her husband, solicitor Patrick Hepburn, And, like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. she died by her own hand, hanging herself in her decaying home on Parliament Hill, London, following the freezing winter of 1947.

The letter from ‘Mother’ in the Brisbane suburb of New Farm endorsed the assumed and actual centrality of unpaid work within the home for most white women in Queensland — especially for wives — in the interwar years. It accepted a division of labour in which men were defined primarily as breadwinners; by contrast, and despite female participation in the formal economy, the major role for women was that of wife and mother. This allocation of responsibilities was a fundamental component of the gender segregation which characterised work and the Queensland economy in this period.

Two of the most significant donors to the University of Queensland were Mary Emelia Mayne and James Mayne, the last surviving children of Irish immigrants Patrick and Mary Mayne. They provided the funds to purchase the university's St Lucia site, donated rural land at Moggill, and left their estates to fund Chairs of Medicine and Surgery at the university. Whether the university has sufficiently acknowledged their philanthropy has been the subject of comment in recent years. Unfortunately, the work of Malcolm Thomis — which traces how and when the university acknowledged the Maynes and why it was not until 1973 that Mayne Hall was opened — is not generally known, so public misunderstanding continues. Entwined with this is a perception that the 1936 portrait of James Mayne has not been displayed in a place of honour. Although the university endeavoured to ensure that the portrait of James Mayne was displayed in the most appropriate place possible, in the earlier years the embryonic development at the St Lucia campus resulted in its being sent to the Queensland National Art Gallery (now the Queensland Art Gallery). Since 1945, it has been on display in key university buildings, and today is prominently displayed in the James and Mary Emelia Mayne Centre.

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.

Over the last 30 years, many books have appeared on different aspects of childhood in Australia. There has not, however, been an authoritative published history of childhood that is specific to the Depression years. Sue Fabian and Morag Loh's Children in Australia: An Outline History and Jan Kociumbas's Australian Childhood: A History include chapters that offer overviews of Australian childhood during the Depression, and Lynette Finch's special issue of Queensland Review, Young in a Warm Climate, is the only major study specific to children in Queensland. This paper makes a contribution to Queensland Depression historiography and the history of Queensland children by exploring how the children of Brisbane's working-class unemployed spent their leisure hours, and what effect — if any — the Depression exerted over the choices that were made. It will show mat there was neither uniformity of experience nor a sharp discontinuity between the Depression years and those that preceded and followed this decade.

There are two published versions of ‘The Red Snake’ by Francis Adams. The first appeared in The Christmas Boomerang, 24 December 1888: 17–18; the second in Francis Adams, Australian Life (London: Chapman and Hall, 1892, 3–24). The present edition is based on the Christmas Boomerang version. Revisions made by Adams for Australian Life have been incorporated where they correct errors or improve the literary qualities of the work, but not where their purpose is merely to remove Queensland references for an English audience. The accidentals (spelling and punctuation) of the first edition have been adopted here, rather than Queensland Review house style.

While food historians have begun to focus attention on world's fairs, Vaccaro's detailed study of food at the 1904 World Fair in St Louis (2004) is at the vanguard of publishing in this area. Similarly, although the intense interest in culinary matters that is now identified as ‘foodie’ culture was developing in Australia in the 1980s, little attention has concentrated on this aspect of Brisbane's World Expo '88 (also widely known simply as ‘Expo '88’), which was staged from April to October 1988 as part of the national Bicentennial celebrations. Expo '88 dominated local headlines and became a part of the national imagination during the bicentennial year but, although commentators at the time predicted that it would ‘doubtless be a focus of research for a long time to come’ (Day 1988: iv), other matters have since dominated reflection about this period of recent Australian history. Yet food was specified in the ‘Cultural and Entertainment’ category of one of the three exposition's official sub-themes of ‘Leisure: The Universal Pastime’, and did play a number of important roles in and at Expo '88. Moreover, Robinson has identified Expo '88 as one of the ‘plethora of social, economic, cultural and political determinants’ that explains the diversity of cuisines available in Brisbane today (2007: 71).