In September 2004, the Museum of Brisbane, Museums Australia and the Centre for Public Culture and Ideas at Griffith University hosted a symposium, ‘Cities and Museums’, at the university's Southbank campus. This event initiated a conversation among museum professionals and academics from across Australia. Nick Winterbotham, from Leeds City Museum, and Morag Macpherson, from Glasgow's Open Museum, and were keynote speakers. Their papers provided perspectives on museum policy and practice in the United Kingdom and Europe, and demonstrated how museums can contribute to urban and cultural regeneration. Those papers are available on the Museum of Brisbane website (www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/MoB). The Cities and Musuems section in this issue of Queensland Review brings together papers that explore the relationship of cities and museums across global, national and local Brisbane contexts, and from diverse disciplinary perspectives. The disciplines represented in this selection of papers from the symposium include social history, urban studies, literary fiction, and heritage and cultural policy.

In 2004, as the centenary of women achieving the right to vote in Queensland elections drew near, plans were made to hold a conference: ‘A Celebration of the Centenary of Women's Suffrage in Queensland and the Achievements of Queensland Women in Parliament’. The conference was about Queensland women in Parliament, a joint endeavour of Professor Kay Saunders of the University of Queensland and the Royal Historical Society of Queensland. The conference was held on Saturday, 5 February 2005 in the Red Chamber (the former Legislative Council Chamber) of Parliament House. Speakers were assembled to present a history of the attainment of women's suffrage in Queensland and to recognise the achievements since 1905 of Queensland women as politicians in both the state and federal spheres. The majority of those papers appear in this issue of Queensland Review.

As a young journalist at the Courier-Mail newspaper, my mother once met the famous British children's writer Enid Blyton, who stopped in Brisbane briefly. There was a press conference in a hangar out at the airport. Many important people were there — the Australian publisher, someone from the British High Commission, someone from the Prime Minister's Office, along with reporters from Sydney and Melbourne — and my mother, my beautiful young mother, in a panama hat with gloves and white glasses, excited to be there, to be amongst it.

The centenary of the passage in early 1905 of the Act to Amend the Elections Acts, 1885 to 1899, which extended the right to vote to white women in Queensland, marks a moment of great importance in the political and social history of Australia. The high ground of the history of women's suffrage in Australia is undoubtedly the passage of the 1902 Commonwealth Franchise Act that gave all white women in Australia political citizenship: the right to vote and to stand for parliamentary office at the federal level. Obviously this attracted the most attention internationally, given that it placed Australia on the short list of communities that had done so to date; most women in the world had to await the aftermath of the First or Second World Wars for similar rights.

This call to arms sounded by the Worker towards the close of the campaign for womanhood suffrage in Queensland captured well the class antagonism that prevailed within the movement. At this late stage, there was little chance that the conflicting elements within the movement could put aside their differences and unite in a concerted effort to secure the female franchise. To all intents and purposes, the struggle for womanhood suffrage had become a class war.

Australia is a nation of suburbs. The vast majority of Australians live in the subregions of our principal metropolitan areas. Even those of us moving to so-called ‘sea change’ regions outside the big cities want to live in transplanted suburban estates. For most of us, an oil change is a more pressing prospect than a sea change.

In a thumbnail sketch of Queensland's first female parliamentarian, Irene Longman, in 1931, the Clerk of Parliament Charles Bernays commented on the novelty of a woman in Queensland's Legislative Assembly. ‘The innovation,’ he averred, ‘takes long to convert itself into a common-place. The public are slow to acquire a habit.’ Bernays' comment was apposite. Although the Elections Act of 1915 enabled non-Indigenous women as well as men to stand as candidates for Queensland's Lower House, no woman took up this opportunity until Longman's successful bid for the seat of Bulimba in 1929. In the 31 Queensland elections held from 1918 to 2004, women were, until very recently, a tiny minority when compared to the thousands of examples of male candidates for the same period.

I tend to approach cities from and through their margins because this is the path that makes most sense to me. I grew up on the urban fringe in Elizabeth, a ‘satellite town’ north of Adelaide. Founded along the lines of the British new towns, Elizabeth was named for a queen who, to her credit, always popped out for a visit whenever she was around. By 1960, Elizabeth had a car factory, 30, 000 British migrants and a path into the future that would come to haunt it as its factories were downsized and its public housing was turned first into welfare housing and then — in the picturesque language of new prejudices — into ‘housing of last resort’ for the people no one wanted.

At a recent conference of the International Planning History Society, Michael Cohen, formerly of the World Bank, argued that ‘the city is missing in action’:

The year 2005 is an important one for Queensland women for three reasons. It is the centenary of women getting the vote (25 January 1905). It is the 90th anniversary of women getting the right to stand for Parliament (23 November 1915). Finally, it is the 76th anniversary of the first woman being elected to the Queensland Parliament (11 May 1929).

This article provides a brief literary history of Indigenous writing in Queensland. The literature covered here is informed by the experiences of the personal, the familial and the communal, and enlarges the meanings of both the literary and the political because Indigenous writing is part of, not separate from, the daily lives and struggles of its authors. Related to this is the question of the sacred, and Indigenous relationships to the land are an abiding preoccupation of the writing explored here. Literature, as well as the way it is read, is intimately related to Indigenous efforts to achieve cultural autonomy and calls for recognition of difference and shared humanity and agency. It thereby becomes a tool of recognition, acknowledgment and transformation, producing new kinds of knowledges and new kinds of readers.

In 2001 I was invited to give a public lecture at the Centre for the Study of the History of the Twentieth Century, a scholarly research institute within the University of Paris. The invitation was extended by Professor Stephane Dufoix, who writes on the internment of enemy aliens in World War II, one of my academic specialisations. However, I was not asked to speak about this area of expertise. Indeed, it turned out to be a ‘Don't mention the war’ event. Rather, Professor Dufoix and his colleagues were fascinated by Pauline Hanson and were interested in an Australian perspective on the rise of extreme right-wing populism and the Down Under equivalent of the French les laissés-pour-compte (‘those left behind’) or les paumés (‘the losers’).

Women won the right to vote in Queensland in 1905, but had to wait until 1915 and the election of the first Labor government to govern in its own right before they became eligible to stand for Parliament. It was then another 14 years before the first woman, Irene Maud Longman, was elected. She, however, lasted only one term as she had won a safe Labor seat, Bulimba, in the anti-Labor swing of 1929 as a Country–National candidate. When Labor returned to power in 1932, her parliamentary career was terminated. It was to be another 34 years until the second woman, Vi Jordan, was elected. She won Ipswich West for Labor in 1966, and held it until defeated in the strong anti-Labor swing of 1974, having served eight years. Although she was anxious to reclaim the seat in 1977, an internal ALP power struggle saw pre-selection go against her in favour of David Underwood. Thereafter, Labor did not have another successful female candidate until 1983, when Anne Warner won the former Liberal seat of Kurilpa. Meanwhile, Rosemary Kyburz had won the then ALP seat of Salisbury for the Liberals in 1974; she held it until beaten in 1983 by the future Labor premier, Wayne Goss. Vikki Kippin had meanwhile become the first woman to represent a Far North Queensland, seat when, also in 1974, she won Mourilyan for the Nationals, losing it in 1980 to Labor. There was a strong indication that, had she won in 1980, she would have become the first woman Cabinet minister (Reynolds, 2002a). Another six years elapsed before that occurred, when Yvonne Chapman entered the ministry.

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.

I have drawn the title for this paper, which celebrates the 100-year anniversary of the abolition of plural voting in Queensland, from S.R. Davis, who described the electoral experience of the Australian states as:

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.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people represent more than 3 per cent of the Queensland population, but only one Aboriginal person has so far been elected to the Queensland Legislative Assembly. (Mr Eric Deeral was the National Party member for Cook from 1974 to 1977.) This fact suggests that the Indigenous population and minorities in general do not have much influence on government in Queensland. Questions therefore arise as to why and what can be done to address this deficiency.

‘Forget Policy — I've Got Great Legs!’ That newspaper headline was one of the most interesting if not anomalous banners to appear during the 1998 federal election campaign. It was run in the Daily Telegraph as the header to an article about Pauline Hanson, who was busy campaigning for the Queensland seat of Blair in the state elections. As one might expect from the headline, the story dismissed any consideration of Hanson's political agenda in favour of blatant and highly sexualised comment about her very feminine physical attributes. Whilst this sort of media attention openly negated Hanson as a serious political force, it was indicative of the way the media had come to portray her since she arrived on the political scene two years earlier. Moreover, it was symptomatic of the media's widespread concern with portraying female politicians of all parties in accordance with worn-out assumptions and clichés, which rarely — if ever — were applied to their male counterparts.