This issue's cover image, ‘Parallel Universe: Stones Corner’, comes from the Museum of Brisbane exhibition, Navigating Norman Creek. Trish FitzSimons created a series of short documentaries that reveal the natural and social ecosystems sustained by Norman Creek, even as the city encroaches ever closer and more densely. The overhanging branches of her arresting image form a barrier that protects the stream, its wildlife and the local people who use the creek for recreation and dreaming. It also suggests that this place has survived because there is something impenetrable about it. This image sets up a theme about habitat and dwelling that loosely links the essays in this issue.

Governments across the globe use public–private partnerships to foster entrepreneurship while limiting their risk. The Prickly Pear Destruction Act 1912 enabled the Queensland government to enter contracts with private entities for land heavily covered with prickly pear (Opuntia and Nopalea species). The story of Cactus Estates Ltd, the first negotiation under the Act, provides an opportunity to analyse this response to local ecologies changed by nineteenth-century plant transfers. Most scholarship on the invasion of prickly pear focuses on the science of entomology due to the spectacular success of the introduction of Cactoblastis cactorum in 1926. This article examines an earlier period in the history of applied science in Queensland. The Queensland government, along with scientific and business communities, pursued poisons for controlling the density of plant growth as the preferred mechanism for eliminating plants. Cactus Estates Ltd experimented with arsenic-based poisons for this purpose. An examination of Cactus Estates Ltd provides evidence of the state's willingness to produce a multifaceted approach to dealing with invasive species in Australia in the early twentieth century.

Almost 5,000 Italians were interned in Australia during World War II, a high proportion of them Queensland residents. Internment was a pivotal experience for the Italian community, both locally and nationally, complicating Italian Australians’ sense of belonging to their adopted country. Through an examination of two migrant autobiographical narratives of internment, Osvaldo Bonutto's A Migrant's Story and Peter Dalseno's Sugar, Tears and Eyeties, this article explores the impact of internment on the experience and articulation of cultural and civic belonging to Australian society. It finds that internment was a ‘trial’ or ‘transitional’ phase for these internees’ personal and civic identities, and that the articulation of these identities and sense of belonging is historically contingent, influenced by the shift from assimilation to multiculturalism in settlement ideology, as well as Italian Australians’ changing place in Australian society throughout the twentieth century.

The clustering of book culture in rural locales around the world is a growing phenomenon. Creative and cultural activity in these bookish communities enhances social capital, and their book-based economies contribute to sustainability. Maleny, in South-East Queensland's Sunshine Coast hinterland, has long been recognised as a centre for books, readers and writers. It is the home of two writers’ festivals, Outspoken and Maleny Celebration of Books. The community attracts city dwellers, and those who like to escape to the Blackall Ranges for relaxation, as well as people who choose to live a ‘slow’ life in the area. Onyx (2005) identified high levels of social capital. In this article, I consider the potential of Maleny to position itself as a ‘book town’. However, my findings confirm that, despite the community's reputation as a place of cultural consumption, prosperity is a hindrance to book town development.

Madge Roe was a Brisbane-based illustrator who specialised in Australian flora and fauna. She captured the everyday in sketches and line illustrations to share with family and friends, and donated her time and talents to public causes. Although an avid supporter of and participant in Brisbane cultural groups, she was not a leading artist. Vida Lahey, however, was highly respected nationally and developing an international reputation. Both artists were embedded in family networks that sustained and promoted their well-being; both engaged with Brisbane culture, though in very different ways. In this paper, I argue for thinking holistically about culture and place as they are engaged by meaning-making ‘subjects’. Through Lahey's painting, Memoriam to Madge Roe, Roe's death notice and family sources, I focus on the articulation by subjects of geo-cultural meanings. By using this term, I indicate that meaning making is closely tied to place, to transitions between places and to the family as a form of subject ‘placement’.

Andrew McGahan is one of Queensland's most successful novelists. Over the past 23 years, he has published six adult novels and three novels in his Ship Kings series for young adults. McGahan's debut novel, Praise (1992), won the Vogel National Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript, Last Drinks (2000) won the Ned Kelly Award for Crime Writing, and The White Earth went on to win the Miles Franklin Literary Award, The Age Book of the Year Award and the Courier-Mail Book of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards. In 2009, Wonders of a Godless World earned McGahan the Best Science Fiction Novel in the Aurealis Awards for Excellence in Australian Speculative Fiction. McGahan's unashamedly open critiques of Australian, and specifically Queensland, society have imbued his works with a sense of place and space that is a unique trait of his writing. In this interview, McGahan allows us a brief visit into the mind of one of Australia's pre-eminent contemporary authors, shedding light on the ‘what ifs’ and ‘idle daydreaming’ that have pushed his ideas from periphery to page.

Andrew McGahan's novel 1988 and short story ‘Kill the Old’ are re-evaluated in terms of their responses to the political and cultural needs of mid-1990s Queensland. These neglected and undervalued grunge works question the official celebrations connected with Australia's Bicentenary, especially Expo ’88, and interrogate predominantly white and masculinist notions of Australian identity. In so doing, they contribute to a less insular and ‘fuller version’ of Queensland literature.

This article discusses the evocation of the Gothic as a narrative interrogation of the intersections between place, identity and power in Andrew McGahan's The White Earth (2004). The novel deploys common techniques of Gothic literary fiction to create a sense of disassociation from the grip of a European colonial sensibility. It achieves this in various ways, including by representing its central architectural figure of colonial dominance, Kuran House, as an emblem of aristocratic pastoral decline, then by invoking intimations of an ancient supernatural presence which intercedes in the linear descent of colonial possession and, ultimately, by providing a rational explanation for the novel's events. The White Earth further demonstrates the inherently adaptive qualities of Gothic narrative technique as a means of confronting the limits to white belonging in post-colonial Australia by referencing a key historical moment, the 1992 Mabo judgment, which rejected the concept of terra nullius and recognised native title under Australian common law. At once discursive and performative, the sustained way in which the work employs the tropic power of Gothic anxiety serves to reveal the uncertain terms in which its characters negotiate what it means to be Australian, more than 200 years after colonial invasion.

In the opening of the above-mentioned article, the line ‘Donald Horne famously wrote, ‘Australia was born urban and quickly grew suburban’ (1964)’, should read: ‘Graeme Davison famously wrote, ‘Australia was born urban and quickly grew suburban’ (1994:98).’

The author would like to apologise for the oversight.