This article considers the history of the Australian bush hut and its common building material: bark sheeting. It compares this with traditional Aboriginal bark sheeting and cladding, and considers the role of Aboriginal ‘bark strippers’ and Aboriginal builders in establishing salient features of the bush hut. The main focus is the Queensland region up to the 1870s.

This article analyses the musical work of the Brisbane Musical Union (BMU) between its founding in 1872 and the consolidation of its position by 1898. During this period, the BMU benefited from the dedicated leadership of its main conductor, R. T. Jefferies, who drew upon his high standing as a violinist, ensemble player and conductor in Brisbane to present regular choral concerts, mainly comprising oratorios, with an amateur choir. Despite financial challenges, difficulties over rehearsal and concert venues, periodic problems concerning the choice of repertoire, an insufficient number of available professional musicians and competition from rival local musical societies, Jefferies’ work with the BMU promoted an important aspect of high musical culture to the public and laid the foundations for further development of classical musical performance in Brisbane.

Frederic Jones became the Queensland Commercial Agent in the Far East in 1904. He worked assiduously to extend Queensland’s trade with Asia, often pursuing a vigorously competitive approach in his dealings with the other states. Based in Shanghai from 1906, he became the first official from Australia to serve in China. He persuaded the Commonwealth government to authorise him to provide visiting Chinese merchants and travellers with documentation that would allow them to enter without undergoing the dictation test. Foreseeing the potential for trade complementarity between Queensland and China, after his appointment concluded in December 1907 he remained in business in Shanghai.

The spaces of our childhood maintain a particularly enduring hold when they cease to exist or are so reconstructed that the previous version is effectively obliterated. Recollections of an early home that no longer exists provide the framework for David Malouf’s celebrated 12 Edmondstone Street. In this article, I juxtapose Malouf’s experiences with recollections of my own family home in Kyogle, coincidentally situated at the other end of the old railway line that began just a couple of hundred metres from Malouf’s childhood dwelling. In addressing both the similarities and differences between Malouf’s and my own example, the discussion will develop around the fact that in contrast to the physical non-existence of the address of 12 Edmonstone Street, my own family home in Kyogle has not been extinguished; instead, it is today a disfigured ‘renovation’ of its former self. Ultimately, 12 Edmondstone Street – a piece of writing whose poetic power and mnemonic resonance go beyond the mortal limits of physical space – will operate as a literary shelter through which the power of memories of former living spaces can be articulated.

The thirtieth anniversary of the election of Wayne Goss’s Labor Party to government in Queensland was marked on 2 December 2019. Considered a landmark political event, the 1989 state election saw the once-dominant National Party dispatched from office after thirty-two years of conservative government in this state. The election of an energetic new premier kick-started a period of purposeful public administration reform and public accountability renewal that many have described since as ‘the birth of modern Queensland’. Yet the end of the divisive Bjelke-Petersen era, as Goss’s ascent was characterised, was for some an uneasy time of accelerated transformational change. From these varied perspectives, and through the recorded recollections of public figures and senior administrators of the time, this article looks back at a modern benchmark for ‘historic’ state elections in Queensland.

This article sets out to explain how the relatively unremarkable 2018 by-election result in which a sitting Labor candidate held her seat with a mediocre swing towards her resulted in the panicked removal of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull from office and his immediate resignation from the parliament. The combined Queensland state Coalition party, the Liberal National Party, convinced itself that it could win the marginal outer-metropolitan seat of Longman in Queensland but when its expectations were dashed, it became spooked and set in train a chain of events that ousted Turnbull and installed Scott Morrison as prime minister. Turnbull was widely seen by the Coalition party room as having run a lack-lustre campaign in the 2016 federal election, and not having performed well in the 2018 by-election campaigns. Perhaps unwisely, Turnbull made the Longman by-election a direct leadership contest between himself and opposition leader Bill Shorten. However, Labor’s tactics in the by-election ‘outmanned, outspent and out-campaigned’ the Coalition’s faltering campaign in the seat, causing the relatively unremarkable outcome in Longman to become a catalyst for a challenge to Turnbull’s leadership. When parliament reconvened, Peter Dutton became the ‘stalking horse’ who resulted in the rise of Scott Morrison to the top office.

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.