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.

To posit Queensland's modernism may seem like an oxymoron. Queensland is often the butt of the southern states’ jokes. North of its more cultured and intellectual sibling-states (or so popular perception would have it), Queensland is ‘backward’, naïve, behind the times, provincial. According to this mythology, Brisbane is a glorified country town, Queenslanders refuse daylight saving for the sake of their very sensitive cows and curtains, and there is very little ‘culture’ to mention.

Susan Stanford Friedman argues that modernisms are multiple, polycentric and recurrent. This article takes up her invitation to focus on the circulation of people and ideas that connected modernisms from different parts of the planet by reconsidering two moments in the literature of colonial Queensland as instances of proleptic modernism. The publications of Policy and Passion by Rosa Praed in 1881 in London, and of the ‘The Red Snake’ by Francis Adams in 1888 in Brisbane encapsulate early manifestations of the cultural unease and destabilisation that drove the development of modernism/s as the expressive domain of modernity/ies. Striking thematic and stylistic parallels with the work of canonical modernists — HD in the case of Praed, and Conrad in the case of Adams — suggest not only that modernism began to manifest itself in Anglophone culture much earlier than is generally conceded, but also that the cognitive dissonance generated by the colonial experience was centrally implicated in its development.

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.

Pat Hanna's Famous Diggers, a professional vaudeville theatre troupe comprising ex-Great War Anzac soldiers (initially, mainly New Zealanders, as Hanna was himself) played for nearly two years (1923–24) at the old Cremorne Theatre in Brisbane. One item Hanna premiered at the Cremorne was Louis XI, a short (ten-minute) comic sketch he wrote himself. Modernism in the inter-war years, given its usual location within avant-garde aesthetics, high culture, internationalism and radical politics, is not — with the notable exception of Brecht's cabaret work in the 1920s — usually associated with popular theatre. While one comic playlet hardly challenges that positioning, Louis XI was a direct result of the Great War's profound reshaping of modern life. Many of the dramatised sketches performed by Hanna's company, including Louis XI, were structured around a contrast between events as they had occurred in the trenches and as they were portrayed in a utopian or dystopian fantasy, sometimes triggered by shell shock or a dream. Several, again including Louis XI, involve the past, and express the curiosity and cultural dislocation Australian- and New Zealand-born soldiers felt as they moved for the first time through real-life landscapes and architecture they had known only from popular history and romance.

The script of Louis XI used as the basis for this edition is the only known surviving version, a typescript on lined foolscap held in the National Archives of Australia, Canberra, in the Copyright Applications Series CRS A1336/1 item 14,222. It appears to have been typed from an earlier script that has not survived — probably a much-amended manuscript given numerous transcription errors, and was not subsequently corrected. As a consequence, it retains traces of that earlier version. Its title, typed in caps at the top of each page, is ‘SHELL SHOCK’, but on the first page this has been crossed through and ‘Louis XI’ written in heavy black ink, followed by ‘written and produced by GP Hanna at Cremorne Theatre Brisbane/1924’.

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’.

Brisbane has sometimes been represented as a bulwark of literary traditionalism against the advances of poetic modernism in the southern capitals during the first half of the twentieth century. But as William Hatherell showed in The Third Metropolis, modernism had a brief but intense flourishing in the northern city during and immediately after World War II. This article traces the reception and practice of poetic modernism in Brisbane even earlier than that, in the period between the wars, both in the form of a vigorous critical debate over ‘modernistic poetry’ in the Courier-Mail and elsewhere, and also in the composition and publication of a significant quantity of self-consciously modernist poetry in Brisbane's evening daily, the Telegraph, with the active encouragement of the paper's literary editor, Colin Bingham, from 1930 to 1939.

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.

The broad brush strokes of Dorothy Cottrell's paintings in the National Library of Australia mark her as a modernist artist, although not one who painted the burgeoning Sydney Harbour Bridge or bright still-life paintings of Australian flora. Rather, she captured the dun surrounds of Ularunda Station, the remote Queensland property to which she moved in 1920 after attending art school in Sydney. At Ularunda, Cottrell eloped with the bookkeeper to Dunk Island, where they stayed with nature writer E.J. Banfield, then relocated to Sydney. In 1924 they returned to Ularunda and Cottrell swapped her paintbrush for a pen, writing The Singing Gold. After advice from Mary Gilmore, whom her mother accosted in a pub, Cottrell send it to the Ladies Home Journal in America. It was snapped up immediately, optioned for a film and found a publisher in England, who described it as ‘a great Australian book, and a world book’. Gilmore added, ‘As an advertisement for Australia, it will go far — the Ladies Home Journal is read all over the world’. Cottrell herself also went far, emigrating to America, where she wrote The Silent Reefs, set in the Caribbean. Cottrell's creative, intellectual and physical peregrinations — all undertaken in a wheelchair after she contracted polio at age five — show how the local references the international, and vice versa. Through an analysis of the life and writing of this now little-known Queensland author, this essay reflects the regional and transnational elements of modernism as outlined in Neal Alexander and James Moran's Regional Modernisms, illuminating how a crack-shot with a rifle once took Queensland to the world.

In April 2015, The Pool emerged as the winning proposal for Australia's exhibition at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale.1 Creative directors Aileen Sage and Michelle Tabet explained that the pool was ‘a lens through which to explore Australian cultural identity’ and ‘aptly represents a distinctively Australian democratic and social space’.2 In Australia, the public pool was popularised in the post-war period, particularly in Queensland where it offered relief from the long, hot and humid summers. Although Brisbane already had several floating baths along the Brisbane River from the mid-nineteenth century, large-scale, in-ground pool construction in the state did not start in earnest until the mid-1950s, when the personal and social benefits of recreational time with family and friends became well established. In Queensland, as elsewhere in the country, the government encouraged the construction of swimming pools, and many became memorial pools, dedicated to those who had fought to defend an Australian ‘way of life’. Their design was to reflect the civic and social foundations of the initiative, and in Queensland architects took delight in all the opportunities it afforded. The result was a widely diverging collection of predominantly humble and economical structures that were rarely ordinary or dull. Analysing three key pools that were constructed in regional Queensland between 1955 and 1965 — in Rockhampton, Mackay and Miles — this article draws out some of the defining features of Queensland's modern memorial pools, and highlights how this typology became the quintessential ‘Australian democratic and social space’.3

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.

Criena Rohan's The Delinquents (1962) has always had a cult appeal — in 1989 it was made into a movie, starring Kylie Minogue as Lola and an unknown American as Brownie — and was recently reissued as a Text Classic. A short novel written by a writer who did not have a long career, and published between more commonly scrutinised periods of Australian fiction, The Delinquents is still, however, liminal. The Delinquents is very much a novel of rebellion and subversion, as its teenage protagonists, Brownie Hansen and Lola Lovell, pursue their love over the opposition of both sets of parents the police, the bourgeois consensus and everybody who is not them. By the fiery smoldering of its passion, though, their love sustains them and they emerge at the end, buffeted but united and resilient. This article argues that Rohan's book represents a Queensland iteration of a ‘regional modernism’.

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.

Eleanor Dark's last published novel, Lantana Lane (published 1959), is not usually included in accounts of Australian modernism. The novel's strong criticisms of modernity, its regional focus and the Cold War context complicate its inclusion as a modernist text. However, revised understandings of modernism generated in the past few decades of scholarship allow for a reinvestigation of Dark's novel as a response to the conditions of late modernity. In particular, Dark explores the pressures exerted on local space by modern capitalism in a period of post-war reconstruction, showing how the national and global scales encroach upon and threaten to annihilate local particularity. Through drawing on a number of broadly modernist practices, including those of entanglement, suspension, metageography and primitivism, Dark pushes back against modernity's narratives of progress and attempts to recover space for the literary and the small scale. Lantana Lane demonstrates how ‘regional modernisms’ written from ‘peripheral’ locations can draw attention to the uneven distribution of modernity within national and global space, and offer alternative — if provisional — sites of attachment.

The twentieth century was a time of massive upheaval in the intellectual, theological and architectural spheres of society. Two world wars, massive post-war population growth and a building boom coincided with the Second Vatican Council and the liturgical movement within the Christian churches, and encountered the modern movement in architecture. This prompted a demand for a re-evaluation of church building design. In Brisbane, new approaches to church building design emerged in the 1960s, with widely divergent results. The architects, denominations and church parishes within the city — although all sought to address liturgical change and emphasise the active participation of the congregation in the services — held different opinions on how the quintessential church characteristics, immanence and transcendence, could be adapted to modern times. Analysing three exemplary Christian churches in Brisbane, this article demonstrates how in each of these designs their architects sought to evoke immanence and transcendence in a decisively new and modern manner, seeking inspiration from progressive ideas in Europe, Britain and America while striving to create buildings suited to the climate of South-East Queensland. Liturgical change, modern architecture and regional climate considerations provided compounding opportunities to rethink church design from first principles.