Janette Turner Hospital is the author of eight novels, four collections of short stories, a novella published only in French, and a crime thriller under the pseudonym Alex Juniper. Her work has been published in 20 countries, and in 12 languages other than English. She is the recipient of a number of overseas literary awards, and both Griffith University (in 1996) and the University of Queensland (in 2003) have conferred honorary doctorates upon her. In 2003 she won the Queensland Premier's Literary Award for Best Fiction Book for her most recent novel, Due Preparations for the Plague, and the Patrick White Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement.

In January 1967 Janette Turner Hospital left Queensland for Boston. She was unpublished. 25 years of age, and very much the product of a loving but fundamentalist childhood that she understood as the ‘source of all comfort and security, but also the source of all harm’. She has called America. India. Canada and France ‘home’ and has also frequently taught in other European countries. Although she has two adult children who have made their lives in the United States and Canada, her parents and three younger brothers remain in Brisbane, so she returns regularly to sustain family ties.

This grainy old photograph from The Courier-Mail of 2 April 1971, under the headline ‘The Three Ancients’, shows three grey-haired men — James Devaney (identified as being 80 years old), Frank Francis (75), and Robert S. Byrnes (71) — standing around a middle-aged woman who sits at a Victorian-style desk in front of a photograph of the Queen. The caption explains this puzzling image. As an April Fool's Day gesture, the self-styled ‘three ancients’, all former presidents of the Queensland Branch of the Federation of Australian Writers (FAW(Q)), are singing a song called ‘Three Ex-P's’ (to the tune of ‘Three Blind Mice’) to the current president, Maureen Freer. The three men, we are assured, ‘have made a large contribution to the cultural activities of Queensland’.

There have been several anecdotal accounts of the literary scene in Brisbane during World War II and numerous references in more general works. In 2000, Queensland Review published some reminiscences of writers Estelle Runcie Pinney, Don Munro, Val Vallis and David Rowbotham, under the title ‘Writing in Brisbane during the Second World War’. Some of the more important general works include Judith Wright's ‘Brisbane in Wartime’, Lynne Strahan's history of Meanjin and Judith Armstrong's biographical work on the Christesens, The Christesen Romance. My interest in this subject arose from editing Judith Wright's autobiography, Half a Lifetime, published in 1999, and recently in editing, with her daughter, letters between Judith Wright and Jack McKinney which were mainly written in Brisbane in the later years of the war and the immediate postwar period. Initially my purpose was to gather information to elucidate people or events mentioned in these writings, but my interest widened to embrace more general information about the period. My research led me to the conclusion that Meanjin and its editor Clem Christesen were catalysts for many of the literary activities in Brisbane during World War II, not just among resident Australians, but among troops temporarily stationed in Brisbane — particularly Americans, whom Christesen cultivated and published. This article records a few glimpses of literary life in Brisbane, and incidentally in the rest of the country, during a period described by Patrick Buckridge as never having been researched ‘in enough detail’.

According to Stephen Dovers, environmental history can provide broad historical perspectives on things like colonial impacts, the evolution of technologies, the emergence of institution settings, the growth of commodity trade and changing land use regimes. It is a useful method of gathering baseline data on the past states of natural environments and, because this often relies on ‘local knowledge’, has the potential to foster community participation and engender community empowerment. Through the intelligent critique of past regimes, such history can, moreover, convey policy lessons, by offering what elsewhere Dovers describes as an ‘antidote to policy amnesia’. He also suggests that ‘a more innocent and less driven purpose’ of environmental history is ‘to unearth stories worth listening to’. While Dovers is careful not to claim too much for environmental history, and concedes that it ‘provides clues and some cues at best’, he may well be understating the power of stories, especially those that relate to relationships between people and place. Peter Hay reminds us that there is a powerful congruence between empathy with place and a commitment to the protection and maintenance of local natural ecosystems. A deep sense of place instils a desire to act ethically towards that place, and usually it is grounded in a concern for the life — human and otherwise — that has been integral to it. However, it is also formed out of emotional attachments to scenery — land and seascapes built up, as Simon Schama puts it, ‘as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock’.

Paris, London, Milan, Tokyo, New York, the Gold Coast — the Gold Coast? The Gold Coast may not rank as an international focal point for high fashion, but it can claim the distinction of hosting the world's first major hotel named after, or more accurately branded by, one of the big names of the international fashion industry — Versace.

Several things have inspired me to interview the editors of two of Queensland's free gay and lesbian newspapers, Queensland Pride and QNews. First, both newspapers are in transition in 2004. QNews has appointed Australia's first female editor of a broad-spectrum gay community paper. QNews also seemed to be significantly altering the content of its fortnightly publication. At the same time, in an unrelated move, Queensland Pride has shifted from a fortnightly newspaper to a monthly magazine format and included a lesbian-specific section, the L-Pages.