This issue begins with a collection of essays reflecting on last year's Queensland election, which saw Annastacia Palaszczuk returned as Premier. Ms Palaszczuk had become Queensland's opposition leader after Anna Bligh's government was routed at the polls when Campbell Newman made the move from Brisbane mayor to extra-parliamentary leader of the Liberal National Party in 2011. The LNP's landslide win in 2012 saw Labor reduced to seven seats. Newman's ‘can do’ style did not translate from municipal to state government. He was the Energiser Bunny who set about sacking public servants and conducting ‘community consultations’ about the sale of state owned assets. His unpopularity was manifest, yet Palaszczuk's success at the 2015 election caught the commentariat by surprise. She led a minority government, and in 2016 held on to achieve a narrow majority. The essays in this issue examine the electoral politics, campaign strategies and media (mis)management that cemented her hold on power.

Some time during late 2018, Queensland will become home to exactly five million people. That milestone alone is enough for any state to take stock, but when faced with both fiscal opportunity and economic challenges — and a recent state election that exposed a deeply divided electorate — it is clear that Queensland in 2018 finds itself at crossroads. Do we, in our economic and social policy, embrace risk and look forward to an optimistic future, or does a fearful Queensland turn inwards to seek a golden past that may never truly have existed? Do we continue to build a globalised and multicultural Queensland, or do we return to parochialism, protectionism and populism?

History will record the 2017 Queensland state election not only for its series of firsts — Annastacia Palaszczuk is the first woman state premier to win two successive elections — but also because it defied expectations. Despite its own lack-lustre campaign, an inauspicious economic climate and the revival of Pauline Hanson's One Nation (PHON), Palaszczuk's Labor Government enjoyed a small after-preference swing to it (despite a small primary swing against it) to win four additional seats and, with it, its first majority in the Legislative Assembly. Conversely, the Liberal-National Party (LNP) lost three seats in a significant primary swing against it, while PHON, after a chaotic campaign, won a just single seat in a statewide primary vote that fell well below expectations. This article argues that these unexpected results can be attributed to a number of factors, ranging from Palaszczuk's relative popularity to voters’ desire for stable government to their disdain for an opposition (and opposition leader) many conflated with both PHON and former LNP Premier Campbell Newman. The article also suggests the election of the first majority government since 2012 could mark the stabilising of a hitherto volatile Queensland electorate as Palaszczuk appears to extend Labor's second electoral hegemony.

There appears widespread consensus that economic downturns and peaks in immigration boost the appeal of populist parties. Economic crises, so the argument typically goes, increase fear and frustration among poor working-class voters. According to this ‘losers of globalisation’ logic, the recent revival of populist parties like One Nation should be attributed the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and a worsening global refugee crisis. At first glance, this logic seems plausible and intuitive. However, recent research has revealed that populist parties can thrive in times of economic prosperity, and attract large numbers of relatively affluent voters. According to this more recent research, support for populist parties tends to follow a V-curve pattern, with such parties attracting both voters who are ‘doing it tough’ financially (relative deprivation) and voters who enjoy above-average levels of prosperity (relative gratification). In this article, we analyse One Nation's performance in the 2017 Queensland state elections from this new vantage point. Although we did not encounter a clear V-curve pattern, the findings nonetheless confirm earlier research showing that ‘income’ is a poor predictor of One Nation support. Discussion focuses on directions for future research, and urges populism researchers to move beyond a narrow focus on crisis, deprivation, and ‘losers of globalisation’.

Based on an analysis of the 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey results and the results of the 2017 Queensland state election, this paper observes that residents of the south-east corner of the state appear to adopt feminine values as opposed to the masculinity for which Queensland is known. The results underscore the ‘two Queenslands’ thesis, which posits that the single geographic state of Queensland has cleaved over time into two entities quite distinct in their economic, political, social and cultural form. Moreover, they add fuel to the debate about secession. As residents of the south-east continue to develop their own identity, the desire for a state of South-East Queensland could at some point become a realistic scenario.

Queensland's 2017 state election resulted in Annastacia Palaszczuk's Labor government being returned with a slim majority. While not a resounding victory, the result seemingly vindicated the premier's decision to head to an early election, and reinforced her standing in a succession of opinion polls as ‘preferred premier’ for most voters. The result also halted the short sequence of Queensland governments being voted out of office in no uncertain terms by a supposedly volatile electorate. The extent to which Labor's recent electoral success in Queensland — and the quelling of that volatility — can be attributed to Palaszczuk's leadership is still open to debate. It is instructive, though, to note the differences in leadership and campaigning styles between Palaszczuk and her opponents, which saw her drag a decimated Labor Party back to office after a single term in opposition, then saw it returned with a working parliamentary majority. This article highlights those differences over the last term of government, contrasting the performance of the two major parties in Queensland in terms of their leadership and election campaign approaches. The analysis helps to explain some of the reasons for the respective parties’ recent electoral showings.

Election campaigns see a travelling press pack assembled to follow the party leader for the duration of the campaign, often to mystery locations. This ensures the press pack is conveniently ushered around to many picture opportunities where politicians can be observed in an organised and risk-free environment. Over time, reporting on major political events such as elections has changed as political parties stack their communications teams with professional ‘spinners’. This article looks at the campaigns of Labor, the LNP, Pauline Hanson's One Nation and The Greens during the lead-up to the 2017 Queensland election, as well as assessing the impact of social media on the campaign.

This article outlines the methodology and key findings of a media content analysis of news reporting in the Courier-Mail and Queensland Country Life on the issue of broad-scale land-clearing (BSLC) in Queensland during the period 1998–2006. The case study identifies and examines evidence-based arguments made by stakeholders in the public policy debate surrounding BSLC, including elected officials and judges, interest groups, government agencies, scientists, business owners and individuals, such as academics. In both newspapers, it was noted that throughout the period under review, arguments made on environmental grounds in favour of the policy goal of maximum immediate conservation tended to be concerned with establishing an accurate definition of the BSLC problem. However, reporting of arguments made on political and economic grounds reflected stark differences between the two newspapers. The findings of this study support observations that some participants in a contest over new policy may dispute (persistently, and regardless of previous developments) the validity of: (1) definitions of a problem; (2) proposed policy solutions; (3) matters of detail or technical application; and (4) the enactment and implementation of legislation.

Family and local community historians have always made use of criminal justice records. Increasingly available as digital files, these documents are accessible to anyone with access to an internet-linked computer or even smartphone. In many cases, the fragmented nature of these records means their richness remains a potential rather than reality. The Prosecution Project1 links these records as a large-scale Australian exercise in unlocking the criminal justice records of all the states. We seek to digitise and eventually make publicly accessible the records of the criminal courts, documenting not only the names of the accused but of magistrates, judges, lawyers, police and victims and other witnesses. The project is a significant collaboration between university researchers and a large and growing community of volunteers. This paper outlines what the project is doing, how we are doing it and illustrates its potential use for family and local historians interested in Australia's past.

During its 125-year history, the South Brisbane Municipal Chambers (Old Town Hall) has had numerous custodians and functions. Designed as a prominent landmark directly across the Brisbane River from the Queensland Parliament building, its ornate architectural features make it a unique example of late colonial extravagance. With the absorption of the City of South Brisbane into the greater Brisbane City Council in 1925, the building lost its original purpose, but was subsequently deployed in various ways. After serving as a Council Works Depot, it became the headquarters of the US armed forces Military Police during World War II, and was then converted into post-war residential flats for government engineers and architects. Since the late 1950s, ‘The Chambers’ has been an educational and cultural centre, initially as the first campus of the Queensland Conservatorium of Music, then as a centre for adult learning, and finally now in its completely refurbished form as part of the girls’ school Somerville House. This ‘building biography’ traces the various phases of this iconic landmark from the viewpoint of those who worked, lived or studied there, and also provides insights into its social context within the South Brisbane community.

This study arose from an encounter with some paintings (still lives, Madonnas and other religious or genre scenes of mainly seventeenth-century Northern European origin) at the Queensland Art Gallery in 2012. They were intriguing because they were part of a bequest by squatter and colonial parliamentarian Thomas Lodge Murray-Prior (1819–92), which formed the nucleus of the original Queensland Art Gallery collection when it opened in 1895. Little is known about them, but they raise questions: What part did they play in the life of the donor? Did he collect them merely to burnish his reputation? Were they hung in a town house or in the bush? How did they enter the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery and what reception did they receive? What subsequent use has been made of them? This article examines the collection and the role it played in Murray-Prior's life, arguing that it is a coherent collection of Northern European art and more than a status symbol. Furthermore, it has much to say about a period that saw the development of art collecting and exhibiting. As such, it is the perfect foundation for an art gallery in colonial Australia.

Thea Astley once commented that, ‘everybody is living on a cyclonic edge’, and that many of her characters were ‘always touching on the edges of cyclones’. In Queensland literature, cyclones often appear as tropes of apocalypse: new worlds of person and place are revealed out of the destruction of the old. In Astley's novel A Boat Load of Home Folk (1968), the tempestuous forces of personal cyclones, as well as those of the cyclone destroying the island around them, overtake a group of stranded cruise passengers, and consequently place and person assume unique meanings as the characters try to survive. Although one of her least-known works, A Boat Load of Home Folk is a profound novel of human experience in which Astley uses the elemental cyclone as a trope of apocalypse that is both an instrument of destruction and a catalyst of revelation.

Gold Coast beaches oscillate in the cultural imagination between everyday reality and a tourist's paradise of ‘sun, surf and sex’ (Winchester and Everett 2000: 59). While these narratives of selfhood and becoming, egalitarianism and sexual liberation punctuate the media, Gold Coast literary fictions instead reveal the beach as a site of danger, wholly personifying the unknown. Within Amy Barker's Omega Park, Melissa Lucashenko's Steam Pigs, Georgia Savage's The House Tibet and Matthew Condon's Usher and A Night at the Pink Poodle, the beach is a ‘masculine’ space for testing the limit of the coastline and one's own capacity for survival. This article undertakes a close textual analysis of these novels and surveys other Gold Coast fictions alongside spatial analysis of the Gold Coast coastline. These fictions suggest that the Gold Coast is not simply a holiday world or ‘Crime Capital’ in the cultural imagination, but a mythic space with violent memories, opening out onto an infinite horizon of conflict and estrangement.

The histories of Australian Aboriginal and African American peoples have been disregarded for more than two centuries. In the 1960s, Aboriginal and African American civil rights activists addressed this neglect. Each endeavoured to write a critical version of history that included their people(s). This article highlights the role of Aboriginal Australian poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal (formerly Kath Walker) (1920–93) and African American poet Sonia Sanchez (born 1934) in reviving their peoples’ history. Using Deleuze and Guattari's concept of ‘minor literature’, the essay shows how these poets deterritorialise the English language and English poetry and exploit their own poetries as counter-histories to record milestone events in the history of their peoples. It will also highlight the importance of these accounts in this ‘history war’. It examines selected poems from Oodgeroo's My People: A Kath Walker Collection and Sanchez's Home Coming and We A BaddDDD People to demonstrate that similarities in their poetic themes are the result of a common awareness of a global movement of black resistance. This shared awareness is significant despite the fact that the poets have different ethnicities and little direct literary impact upon each other.