This special issue of the Queensland Review is devoted to exploring the conceptual and practical implications of bold new Queensland research on youth development programs that has genuine global relevance. The articles in this issue, from leading and emerging Australian and international scholars and practitioners, explore and unfold the different dimensions of this Queensland research for an Australian and global audience of youth researchers, practitioners, policy-makers and general readers. By bringing scholars together with paid and volunteer practitioners to contribute to this special issue, Queensland Review takes a unique approach to exploring youth programs. The independent practitioner voice — especially the volunteer practitioner voice — is largely absent from the scholarly forum, and this issue brings aspects of practitioners’ anecdotal and evidential work to the fore. The articles enable practitioners to share with us how they experience and understand their work with young people, other practitioners and communities. Overall, the scholarly and practitioner contributors to this issue of Queensland Review explore key questions and challenges inherent in the work adults do with children and young adults in youth programs designed to foster their positive development.

This issue of Queensland Review takes as its focus the literature of the Sunshine Coast and its hinterland. Under a conceptually rigorous regime, it might be deemed necessary to interrogate some of these terms closely: both ‘literature’ and ‘the Sunshine Coast’ are both, for different reasons, potentially contestable notions — as also, in this context, is the word ‘of’: does it mean ‘from’ or ‘about’ or both? Our authors have elected not to contest these matters in the abstract, but rather to adopt broadly inclusive definitions of all three terms — and, for that matter, of ‘the hinterland’. Our cover image does something similar. An unattributed colour photograph taken nearly half a century ago, looking westward from the northern tip of Bribie Island (or thereabouts) to the Glasshouse Mountains, it captures — rather cunningly given the proximity of human habitation just outside the frame — something of the primeval beauty of both the littoral and the hinterland, a recurrent theme in this collection.

Vance and Nettie Palmer were among Australia's most important literary partnerships. Previous accounts of their life and work underplay their commitment to the creation of an environmental imagination. After the trauma and disillusion of the Great War, they lived in Caloundra from 1925 to 1929 (and from then had an ongoing connection). While it is generally acknowledged how important their time there was in terms of Vance's emerging work in literary fiction, and through Nettie's work as a freelance journalist, what has not been addressed is their extraordinary environmental writings about the region. Regional writings were largely dismissed in the 1990s as of comparative insignificance to national narratives — just as today the reputation of the inter-war writers, those associated with the Palmers, is at a low ebb. During the 1920s, Nettie developed critical categories to accommodate a double standard in Australian writing: regional and universal literature. She went on to argue for the support of writing in Australia at the regional level. Vance reflected on his explorations of place directly in a series of articles. This paper reframes the Palmers’ Caloundra work in the ‘bio-regional’ terms of climate change and the historical cultural imaginary.

This article introduces a new strengths-based approach to youth development program practice developed in Queensland, Australia. This approach is encapsulated in a good practice framework, its six principles, their underlying indicators and examples of action. The framework is a wholly new synthesis of academic, youth and practitioner expertise, and demonstrates the complex ecological nature of youth programs and the bi-directional links between the diversity of staff and youth needs, and contributions made within the program environment. I introduce the framework by discussing each of the six principles, which focus on the themes of learning and development; leadership and decision making; an inclusive ethos; community service; partnerships and networking; and ethical promotion. Taken together, the principles presented here embody an innovative, comprehensive and comprehensible framework for volunteer and paid youth practitioners, service providers and youth studies scholars.

Recent research has shown that programs provided by youth development organisations are of considerable benefit to those young people who engage with the aims and activities of such programs. These programs (e.g. Scouts, Guides, Boys’ and Girls’ Brigades, Surf Lifesaving) are generally provided and run by adult volunteers. This article seeks to explore the main issues for volunteers with regard to implementing these programs, including the reasons why people volunteer in the first place, what community support and resourcing are available and the difficulties of running a program with too few volunteers. The main limiting factor in the success of these programs is the available volunteers, their individual skill levels, the time they have to give and whether they feel the return for their efforts is worthwhile. Community and parental recognition is also a significant factor in their satisfaction and longevity. Volunteers generally gain satisfaction and motivation through a mix of self-worth gained through community service and being able to pass on the program and ethos of their particular organisation. How long a volunteer serves as a leader is closely connected with their satisfaction level. The author's many years of experience at local and state level provides insight into the recruitment and retention of volunteer leaders and their important role in continuing to provide youth programs at the local level.

This article compares Vance Palmer's classic novel, The Passage (1930), set in Caloundra, with Susan Johnson's The Landing (2015), a comic novel of manners set at the northern end of the contemporary Sunshine Coast. It considers the novels’ different perspectives on Australian society and changing values, including attitudes to nature, arguing that Palmer's novel now seems more idealistic than realist while Johnson's cynicism about Australian life shows some disturbing elements beneath the comedy.

This article reflects on the importance of adult volunteers in Foróige, a leading Irish youth development organisation. Volunteers make up some 97 per cent of all youth workers in Ireland. Outcomes for huge numbers of young people are mediated through and depend upon volunteers’ suitability, availability, knowledge and skills. The article takes as its starting point three pieces of research in Foróige. Using this evidence, I describe what appear to be the key strengths of the cohorts of volunteers we studied and how Foróige builds on these to reach positive youth development outcomes similar to those sought by the Queensland framework. To support this, Foróige has invested heavily on volunteer development to increase volunteer engagement and provide more roles in which volunteers can participate in achieving youth development outcomes. I explore the value of the positive interactions between volunteers and young people, the role of volunteers in increasing young people's connectedness to community, and the impact on volunteers of other life issues that compete for their time. I outline how the outputs and outcomes of youth work in Foróige would be hugely diminished without adult volunteers.

Vance Palmer's The Passage (1930) and Eleanor Dark's Lantana Lane (1959) bracket the period during which the narrow coastal strip north of Brisbane from the Pumicestone Passage to the Noosa River was being transformed economically and culturally into what we know today as the Sunshine Coast. In the 1920s and 1950s respectively, Palmer and Dark participated in changing the region, and as established writers they reflected upon that metamorphosis in literary works that reached a national audience at a time when Brisbane's near north coast was off the beaten track for professional writers. But for millennia prior to colonisation, this area had sustained a vibrant economy and culture centred on bunyas from the mountains and seafood from the coast. By the late nineteenth century, this vast economic and cultural network had been radically disrupted by the incursions of timber-getters and pastoralists, and many of the traditional owners who had survived the frontier wars had been removed. While the inscription of a new identity on the region in the twentieth century was driven by the real estate speculators who coined the name ‘Sunshine Coast’, Palmer in The Passage and Dark in Lantana Lane share a more cooperative, sustainable, egalitarian and anti-imperialist vision for the region, with some indirect and ambiguous debts to its Aboriginal past.

According to Judith Wright, John Blight's best poems were about the sea. From the 1940s, when he lived around the Sunshine Coast, he wrote about the rhythms of life by the sea and about human relationships with the more than human world. In the 1960s, he published 180 sonnets in two volumes, A Beachcomber's Diary and My Beachcombing Days. The sonnet form, he said, cut him down to size. This paper considers Blight's work and its engagement with the littoral zone: the seascapes and ecology of the Sunshine Coast. It attempts to hear the sea's voices — muffled, indistinct — and to illuminate Blight's ideas about its alien nature.

When relationships within a community organisation are productive, staff are more likely to be happy, to understand and to be effective in their role. In youth-focused organisations delivering volunteer-led youth programs, a productive organisational relationship is essential to ensure effective recruitment, development and retention of staff, and the delivery of quality programs. This article provides a unique examination of the organisational relationships within Girl Guides Australia, between the volunteers who govern the organisation and those who deliver the youth program. The results of an extensive Australia-wide review of the adult volunteer training program are discussed, and changes to the ways in which relationships are fostered and understood in the organisation are outlined. The review has led to new understandings that modern volunteering requires changes to the ways in which organisational relationships are managed and supported, with a move away from compulsory ongoing training to a focus on volunteers as lifelong learners. Above all, this article shows how productive organisational relationships are when underpinned by founding relationships on openness and honesty, supporting relationships using learning and development, and building relationships using a quality people-management framework.

This article discusses Sunshine Coast writer Inga Simpson's nature writing in three recent novels, Mr Wigg (2013), Nest (2014b) and Where the Trees Were (2016c). It addresses Simpson's self-categorisation as a nature writer, and shows how the recurrent motif of sacred trees allows three introspective protagonists to reach new understandings of universal themes: loss of love and innocence, ageing, inheritance, childlessness, sexuality, death, ancient cultures, cultural integrity and preservation of the environment. The article considers Simpson's ‘anti-Gothic’ approach to landscape in her novels, yet also shows how her ‘realist’ depictions of place evoke unease surrounding the issue of white belonging in Australia. Simpson's metaphoric self-identification with trees, particularly the Australian ironbark, is pivotal to the quiet power of her fiction's exploration of belonging in the Australian landscape.

This article reflects upon the 1475 Dulwich Squadron Air Training Corps (ATC) Cadet Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) training course. The course was first delivered in 1982 for fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds, running between November and April every year since then. The contemporary course consists of 210 hours of instruction, training, outbound exercises, in-class workshops, debriefing, individual feedback and coaching. The focus of this course is on communication, teamwork, emotional intelligence, confidence and courage. The young people are taken out of their comfort zones delivering talks, giving instruction to other cadets and taking turns in leadership during the challenging outbound exercises. The core philosophy of the course is to present the young people with complex problems where there is no right answer. Then the young people are debriefed, drawing out lessons that they have learnt themselves and using a positive constructive frame for the learning. This article explores our journey across various iterations of leadership courses to this contemporary course, why this work has been important, what worked, what didn't and how this work has positively changed the outcomes for cadets and the operation and practices of the 1475 Squadron, to deliver a strong young leadership team.

No matter how excellent a framework for a new program is or how great it looks on paper, the challenge is how to ‘translate’ it into practice in such a way that it is an asset to the paid staff, volunteers and children involved. In this article, experiences of program development and delivery at Criss Cross Consultancy (CCC), where programs to empower vulnerable people are designed, are shared. With reference to the Good Practice Framework, the article draws on extensive program management experience to explore how good communication can support the effective design, implementation and delivery of programs. It illustrates the link between practice, meaningful communication and inclusion. Meaningful communication enables program content to be designed and adjusted to meet the needs of staff and children; shared decision-making to build co-ownership; recognition of expertise and matching people to roles; and effective top-down and bottom-up communication practices that engage with everyone. These communication outcomes are explored and examples are provided to illustrate how meaningful communication underpins the success of translating a program idea into a reality.

Peter Carey has said of his 2008 novel, His Illegal Self, that it grew from an image he recalled of a hippie mother and her son wandering along the edge of the Bruce Highway near Caboolture, and an American who arrived in his commune near Yandina who turned out to be a drug dealer wanted by the FBI. In typical Carey fashion, the three central characters in His Illegal Self are in the process of escaping from the narratives that have been imposed upon them, and metamorphosing into different and better selves. His Illegal Self is the first of Carey's books in which he reverses the angle of vision on the cross-cultural comparison of Australia and America that has engaged him throughout his career. This reverse comparison is set some thirty-five years in the past, against a background of the protest movements against the Vietnam War in both countries. Unlike several of his earlier novels, His Illegal Self lacks a pronounced sense of self-conscious storytelling, and this increases the direct emotional impact of the novel, intensifying the reader's empathy with the characters’ emergence from their imposed identities.

Nearly one in three students living in the segregated, multicultural city of Malmö, Sweden, fails to finish school with a completed diploma. To remedy this situation, students can attend introductory programs, but only some students who do so end up with a diploma. The aim of this article is to understand why young people from a migration background drop out of secondary school and why some of them drop back in and become school achievers. We explore what makes learning matter among youth who drop back into schooling. In seeking possible answers to this question, we listened to and learned from the students themselves. We hope readers will learn about the elementary forms of an enabling opportunity structure for school achievement, about the significance of relational capital, and about the deeply associated meanings of family and friendship and their importance to school success. The article is framed by the interdependencies of two conditioned temporalities: the temporality of the past — that is, the dropping-out process — and the temporality of the present, that is, the dropping-back-in process. We argue that school failure is not an inevitable phenomenon, and show that young people who are supported to drop back into schooling can discover that they are capable of learning with passion and perseverance.

This article explores the traces of an author's regional identity in a transnational travel memoir in which affinities to place are portrayed as pluralistic and fluid. It does so in order to explore the tenuous balance between ecocentric understanding of self within a community of ‘earth others’ on the one hand and fidelity to a regionally precise ‘home’ on the other.1 This constitutes an open-ended encounter with regionalism and ‘site-fidelity’ to destabilise the local/global binary. New understandings of foreign landscapes, places and cultures can be brokered upon a dialogue between those newly encountered landscape places, and the more intimately known regions from an individual's past.

The Queensland Emergency Services Cadets Program (ESCP) is a unique experiential education program that engages with young people aged from twelve to seventeen years, the majority of whom face the particular challenges of living in rural, remote and urban disadvantaged communities. The ESCP aims to build capacity and resilience in individuals, families and communities by providing young people with opportunities to develop skills, increase confidence, foster greater connection and belonging to community, and provide a sense of purpose through emergency preparedness. This article explores how ESCP positively impacts on cadets’ lives by delivering a capacity-building program that teaches disaster response and emergency management skills; allows all participants to enter on an even platform; draws on the cooperation and support of multiple emergency services, local councils, schools, businesses, community resources and dedicated volunteers; and is provided at no cost to participants. By positioning young people as capable and competent, and supporting them to learn and demonstrate their skills and knowledge within their community, the article argues the ESCP delivers specific and tangible developmental outcomes for young people and their communities. Specific outcomes discussed include the empowerment of cadets to become self-determining, the strengthening of the community's collective knowledge and the promotion of a positive image of young people within their community.

During 1947 and 1948, Thea Astley's life changed in ways that permanently affected her writing. In August 1947, she obtained a transfer to Imbil State School, west of Noosa. In November she re-sat failed University of Queensland exams in economics and history, and graduated with a BA in the following April. In January 1948, Astley took up a secondary teaching post at Pomona Rural High. On 27 August, she married Jack Gregson at the Gympie Registry Office. She transferred to Brisbane for the remainder of 1948, and early in the New Year moved with her husband to Sydney. This article contrasts poetry about love and place that Astley wrote during these transition years with the themes and tone of her novel, A Descant for Gossips, published in 1960 and set in Pomona (‘Gungee’) and its environs. Dedicated ‘To John’, Astley's love poems display a passionate lyricism and a commitment that, though usually nervous and conditional, encompasses moments of settled happiness and clarity. In Descant, by contrast, moments of fulfilment in the love affair of teachers Helen Striebel and Robert Moller are suffused with guilt. Similarly, Astley's youthful response in her poetry to the beauty of the ranges and the coast collapses a decade later in Descant into a dystopic rendition of Gungee as a town that punishes defiance and crucifies difference. The article concludes by speculating about causes for the transformation.

SoundSurfers is a youth-led program of Foróige Ireland that provides a safe, dynamic and creative environment for young people aged from ten to eighteen years to empower themselves through music technology, practice and public performance. This article analyses young people's experiences of SoundSurfers within the context of recent research on effective youth programs. It demonstrates how the program engages young people from disadvantaged backgrounds and describes how national education organisations such as Camara Education Ireland and its TechSpace program can successfully equip skilled youth workers for this work. By fostering a diverse community of participants supported by skilled youth workers, young people can develop mutual respect and share common interests through peer-supported activities. The authors illustrate how offering mainstream creative provision enables a process that builds interdependence and empathy in young people. The SoundSurfers inter-agency approach is also highlighted to emphasise the positive opportunities and outcomes that can arise from this approach.

Nancy Cato (1917–2000) was born in Adelaide and lived there for the first half of her life. Moving to Noosa in 1967, she became known for environmental activism as well as her writing. Through research for her historical novels set in Tasmania and on the Murray River, as well as her travels in Central and Northern Australia, she developed a strong interest in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. She published poetry, stories, plays and journalism, as well as novels set in the Northern Territory, North Queensland, the Riverland and Tasmania. She had a painter's eye as well as a gift for lyrics and a lifelong interest in storytelling. With the emergence of eco-criticism, we can now see her diverse career as a writer as cohering around her love of the natural world and her curiosity about how human beings lived in it. This article considers her writing about her adopted country around Noosa.