I do not approach writing this essay with any relish. In fact, I have consistently and resolutely been putting it off, secretly relieved when the bulk of Ross's own writings took a while to reach me and even when the retina in my left eye came away, obviating any chance of my getting down to work for several more months. The year 2010 has been a painful one. My close colleague, Bill Thorpe, died just before it began and during the year I lost two other long-tenn female friends. This all comes, they say, with the territory of ageing. Either you go yourself, knocked down somewhere in the valley of your sixties or seventies, or you helplessly watch your peers – your acquaintances and loved ones – being carried off by some rampant malignancy: one figure after another photo-shopped forever out of the group portrait of your life.

This article provides an overview of the contribution to colonial Queensland studies by the late Bill Thorpe, explaining the reasons for his enduring association with Queensland, and reviewing his long-standing collaborations with former PhD supervisor Raymond Evans and members of the Ipswich Aboriginal community. It argues that the belated appearance of his doctoral thesis on the subject was a significant intellectual event in seeking to theorise colonialism in Queensland, drawing upon interdisciplinary insights and examples. The article spans his career, from the ambitious class analysis of his early writing to an assessment of his local study of the Deebing Creek Reserve in late career, in order to identify his strengths as a social and economic historian, and to situate his work in the context of generational change and the reconceptualisation of Queensland studies.

My first reaction on reading Tom Hurstbourne or A Squatter's Life was surprise. When I first met them, the novel's editors, Gerard Benjamin and Gloria Grant had been very forthcoming about how they came by the manuscript – an intriguing saga in itself. However (and I hope they don't mind me saying this), I remember that they were deliberately a bit cagey about what the book was like as a work of fiction. What little they did say led me to expect something like a pioneering saga, with a straightforward life-narrative, probably beginning with the hero's childhood in the Old Country, then moving quickly to the Australian outback where the hero would undergo a series of challenges, hardships and adventures, suffering a bit along the way but emerging more or less triumphant at the end, sometimes with a wife, children and extensive landholdings. Quite a few Australian novels of this kind were published in the second half of the nineteenth century, and even more in the early decades of the twentieth – books like Miles Franklin's All That Swagger, Mary Durack's Kings in Grass Castles, Brian Penton's Landtakers, Roy Connolly's Southern Saga, Jeanie Gunn's We of the Never Never, and many others by lesser known authors.

On 23 and 24 March 1919, a period of civil unrest in Brisbane was sparked by the flying of the international workers' flag. These events are now referred to as the Red Flag March and Riots. The red flag – the flag of the trade unions – had become tinged with radicalism due to its association with the Russian Revolution. On 19 September, the government reacted to the use of the red flag by extending the May 1918 War Precautions Regulation 278, which prohibited the display of the Sinn Fein colours. This change prohibited the display of the red flag on the grounds that it was the flag of an enemy country. The Russians who were arrested for flying red flags at the Red Flag march were arrested under Regulation 27BB.

This article had its genesis in a family photograph of my paternal grandmother's parents, Rowland and Rebecca Walton (see Figure 1). I knew little about them apart from their English origins, but their appearance was intriguing: definitely stalwart pioneers, but what kind of pioneers? Popular cultural knowledge in Australia provides one central image of the pioneer, summed up concisely by Katharine Susannah Prichard: ‘It will be a nation of pioneers, with all the adventurous, toiling strain of the men and women who came over the sea and conquered the wilderness.’ Prichard's notion was directly inspired by a painting, The Pioneer (1904) by Frederick McCubbin (1855–1917), described by Tim Bonyhady as ‘one of the most influential paintings of the emigrant experience in Australia’. Utilising a triptych fonnat, it recounts (in the words of a contemporary reviewer) ‘its own legend of the useful toil, the homely joys, and destiny obscure of the pioneer, who does not live, as the rude cross in the third panel indicates, to see the growth or share in the prosperity of the fine city seen in the background of the panel’.

TEN o'clock, the time appointed for Spicer to meet Wilson, saw both Spicer and Mason in the office of Wilson. ‘Momin’ sir. 'Scuse me takin’ the libbaty, but he's a friend 0' mine, sir, that knows wot's agoin' on,’ ejaculated Spicer in answer to an enquiring look of Wilson's. ‘He's safe as a bank and mum's the word. Puffiickly fly to the bisness, an’ ‘ull deal with yer in my sted, which Jack Mason 'is name his, as rummy a card as hever got free passidge to Bot'ny Bay.’

Some of the guests at the opening of the Queensland Art Gallery's exhibition Vida Lahey: Colour and Modernism on 16 October 2010 expressed their consternation when Lahey's most famous work, Monday Morning, was not included. Despite it being one of the icons of the Gallery's collection, it remained on display in the permanent collection galleries – a choice that was quite deliberate.

In 1987, years of frustration with Queensland's sexually repressive culture compelled a homosexual man named Cliff Williams to write to the national gay magazine OutRage. Williams outlined a number of the difficulties he faced being gay in Queensland and ended his letter with the exclamation, ‘To hell with homophobic Queensland!’ This exclamation captures many of the tensions in Queensland in the 1970s and 1980s. While these decades were a time of immense political change for gay and lesbian Australians, Queensland's political culture was particularly resistant to the gay and lesbian rights movement.

The apparent resuscitation of Queensland print and literary culture in the decade after the fall of Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen in 1987 and the National Party in 1989 can be seen to be the product of three factors: an over-statement of the dereliction of literary life in Queensland under Bjelke-Petersen, and perhaps a corresponding overstated case for its contemporary recovery; the effectiveness of government and institutional mechanisms of support; and the professional development and networking of writers and other print culture agents. Together, these factors have contributed to a transformation of the profile and scale of literary activity in Queensland and to a renegotiation of the place of Queensland literature in the national context.

In 1963, Rockhampton was chosen by the Australian Broadcasting Commission to become its first television station in Queensland. ABC Rockhampton TV belonged to a select number of outlets that, in the days before aggregation and extensive networking, gathered and broadcast their own news and local programs to regional viewers. This article details the unearthing and preservation of records vital to this research, and uses these to document the highs and lows of the Rockhampton station. We argue that the history of ABC Rockhampton TV forms a neglected chapter in the ‘getting of regional television’ and the production of local content, and provides an account of the early operations of the organisation from its inception in 1963, an overview of its achievements and an explanation of the reasons for its abrupt demise in the mid-1980s. Additionally, we identify the achievements of particular programs and staff members, and acknowledge the personal tragedies that dogged the station and its community in the closing phase.

Despite the current preoccupation with globalisation, literary criticism remains heavily focused on national cultures. In the context of Australian literature, comparisons are regularly made with the literatures of other British Commonwealth nations, but surprisingly infrequently with that of Britain's first and most successful colony, the United States. This article explores thematic and cultural connections between the work of American-born modernist poet and novelist H.D. (1886–1961) and the Australian-born postmodern novelist Janette Turner Hospital (born 1942). It suggests that the transnational phenomenon of ecstatic Protestantism, which originated in northern Europe and was disseminated widely around the globe along the channels of commerce and colonisation, has been a key influence in shaping the literary imaginations of these writers. Indeed, Protestantism – far from being a spent or reactive force – continues to generate new forms of modernity as its emphasis on transformation is exported from somewhat inward-looking religious communities into broader cultural domains.

Probably no one who has entered either federal or state Parliament in Australia departed from it as loathed and despised as Malcolm Arthur Colston. A Labor senator from Queensland between 1975 and 1996, he is remembered by that party as a ‘rat’ who betrayed it for the sake of personal advancement. Whereas many Labor parliamentarians – most notably Prime Minister ‘Billy’ Hughes in 1917 have left the party because they strongly disagreed with it over a major policy issue or a matter of principle, in the winter of 1996 Colston unashamedly left it to secure the deputy presidency of the Senate and the status, income and several other perquisites that went with it. Labor's bitterness towards Colston stems not merely from the fact that he showed extraordinary ingratitude towards a party that had allowed him a parliamentary career but more especially because, between his defection from the party in August 1996 and his retirement from Parliament in June 1999, his vote allowed the Liberal-National Party government led by John Howard to pass legislation through the Senate that might otherwise have been rejected.

During the Global Financial Crisis of 2009, many commentators drew parallels with the Great Depression of the 1930s. While the suffering of those Australians affected by the recent economic turmoil cannot be dismissed, the impact of the Global Financial Crisis on the nation as a whole was modest compared with that of the Great Depression. The levels of unemployment that were reached during the Depression, and the ensuing poverty and social turmoil, would be unlikely to occur today on the same scale due to welfare provisions set in place by government and charitable institutions.