Edition 21
Hidden Queensland
- Published 2nd September, 2008
- ISBN: 9780733322839
- Extent: 296 pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm)
Hidden Queensland explores the most remarkable transition in Australian political history: in the people, the politics and the policies – and also exposes the lingering impact of secrets.
The election of Kevin Rudd as prime minister signalled a momentous change in Australia – political power moved north for the first time. As he said, ‘You can take the boy out of Nambour, but you can’t take Nambour out of the boy.’ This edition explains how this happened and what it means for Australia.
The lead essay by Julianne Schultz provides a fresh and comprehensive analysis of how today’s leaders and visionaries forged their ideals in the ashes of corruption and conflict. She describes the way networks with radical roots were formed and nurtured in the subtropical heat.
This accounting of the recent past – and coincidences that emerge only in hindsight – provides a unique insight into the motivations of those now at the epicentre of national power.
Behind the utopian dreams – and the weather – which draw record numbers of newcomers to Queensland, there are older narratives and bitter conflicts buried throughout the state.
An outstanding collection of writers in this fifth anniversary edition breathe life into these stories, so that they will not be lost to history.
In this Edition
Long gone, but not forgotten
IN 1989 I was party to a writ sought by a number of historians to prevent the destruction of Special Branch records. The writ was provoked by the decision of the Queensland police, with the agreed and required authority of the State Archivist, to...
Disruptive influences
The present is a hinge on which the past and the future swing. – Raymond Evans[i] FOR THOSE TOUCHED by the perverse blessing of a youth spent in interesting times, the echoes of those years are likely to reverberate for a lifetime. We are all products...
Moonlight reflections
The case against the former premier was famously abandoned in 1991 when a jury split – with one of two dissenters a member of the Young Nationals. The lack of resolution left open one of the biggest questions: was Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen a crook? Queenslanders remained divided on the great divider. Ask and they will tell you. Joh was a villain; Joh was a martyr.
Not just good girls
Women in public life in Queensland experienced criticism and ridicule that was sharper and more personal than that directed to their male counterparts. They were often said to have abandoned their rightful roles as wives and mothers, were accused of being too noisy, too silent, too dumb, too much of a smarty pants. It was suggested that wealthy women had a ‘silver spoon’, while the few working-class women who struggled into the ranks above were said to lack grace and class.
Mandate of heaven
WHEN HE KNEW we were moving to Australia, my father wrote to two friends in Brisbane asking where our family should settle. He was looking for a town rather than a city, but not too small. It had to have a good hospital and...
Done and dusted
Please forget the past. The future looks bright ahead.[i] – Otis Blackwell, ‘Don't Be Cruel' FOR MY SINS, I was educated entirely in Queensland – or, as the authorities in my day preferred to call it, publicly instructed. This went on for seventeen years – from 1949...
After consensus
I TRAVELLED FROM Sydney to Far North Queensland in 1970 to carry out ‘salvage work' on a dying and little-recorded language, Gugu-Badhun. I was a postgraduate student in linguistics and my main teacher was to be Dick Hoolihan, who came from the Valley of...
No simple twist of fate
ON THE DAY we left Townsville for Bowen, a photo of soldiers wearing white hoods graced the cover of the Townsville Bulletin. On a bleak stretch of highway, we narrowly missed the debris of a freshly smashed semi-trailer. This was uncomfortable country. Closer to Bowen,...
Theft in the name of science
DURING THE NINETEENTH and early twentieth centuries, numerous skulls and skeletons of Queensland Aboriginal people found their way into museums and scientific collections throughout the world. These bones were greatly prized as evidence strengthening now long-discredited theories of human racial diversity which had pernicious consequences...
Voodoo politics
IN THE '70s and early '80s, Terry Forrester was an inveterate street marcher who took every opportunity to put the boot into Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen's corrupt cops, shady lands deals and conservative government. In the further reaches of Queensland's gutter press, Terry sought to...
Growling at the sea
Ailanman never growl the sea or anything. Not say anything bad about the sea when you are on it. Because the sea we treat like a polite thing ...– Flo KennedyIN THE EARLY 1990s, I spent three years living and working in the Torres...
A war, an attic, a gun
WHEN MY SON was young - six perhaps, or seven – my mother made him a promise. We were stacking books and cleaning shelves on a soupy summer's day, the three of us preoccupied until then with dust and wasps' nests in spines. Brisbane's...
Journeying with nuns
GROWING UP IN Queensland, it was almost impossible to be unaware of the influence of the Sisters of Mercy. The Mercy nuns were pioneers in education and health care in Queensland, established All Hallows' Convent, the first secondary school for girls in Brisbane and...
Falling to earth
GRACE DIED THIS March , in her ninety-ninth year. We had been willing her towards the big one hundred, urging her on. For myself, I'd been offering up the prayers of the faithless: arid incantations that they are. It was probably a kind of...
Where the wild things are
WHEN WE WERE moving from Sydney to Brisbane this year, people suggested different things I'd need to get used to: hot, sticky summers; the absence of city beaches; and the city's baseline fauna, which apparently ran to mighty flying cockroaches and massive spiders. Driving north,...
The Olden Days – Red light district
It is all but impossible to traverse modern Brisbane and not have your sexual potency called to account. Billboards so big they have their own postcode inquire, in a vaguely threatening way, whether you want LONGER LASTING SEX? Commercial FM radio spices up its...
The Olden Days – The good ol’ days
Words are not meanings for a tree– Judith Wright, ‘Gum Trees Stripping' (1955) Queensland was a great place to grow up in. There were beaches, sunshine and good times. Of course, you had to go to school to learn spelling, vulgar fractions and social studies...
The Olden Days – The second last chalkie
In late 1989 it fell to me, the senior chalkie at the Brisbane Stock Exchange, to train my successor. At the time I did not know he would be the exchange's last trading floor clerk. I had been a chalkie on and off for...
The Olden Days – Toowoomba
The huge cop – they all seemed to be huge in Queensland in 1976 – rustled through my desk drawer as if I wasn't standing right beside him.‘What exactly are you looking for?' I asked. He ignored me. After some more rustling, he pulled...
The Olden Days – The Russian poet’s visit
The story of the Russian poet's visit to Brisbane began with a dinner invitation from Kevin Windle, general editor and chief translator of the contemporary Russian writing series I was working on during the dark days of the Bjelke-Petersen era. As well as the...
My Queensland – Training in resolve
The first forty-six years of my life were spent in Ipswich and Brisbane; the territory has imprinted itself at the deepest level of my being. The Queensland that my children and grandchildren know is still imbued with the same sense of place, though they...
My Queensland – Finding a voice
Think Queensland and I immediately conjure apartheid births and prototypes, stolen Aboriginal wages, native title rise and fall, the National Party, the Country Party, and any other Queensland wheat-belt-born party with a minority to vilify. But maybe this is all in the past? Our new prime...
My Queensland – Writers trails
Google ‘hidden Queensland' and you find tourism operators trade on the presumption that the state isn't an obvious destination by touting hidden ‘oases', hidden valleys and secluded tropical beaches. It's as if it is still one of Australia's best-kept secrets, despite having been the...
My Queensland – This is not for you
Recently a woman of my acquaintance, a woman who writes but is not, she insists, ‘a writer', helped me to see something I could not recognise, though I have encountered it again and again since I came to Queensland. When I first fled north,...
My Queensland – It may not be France …
Iwas swerving around the road in a fashion that looks drunken to southerners, and I bet you they'd also have missed the trail of flat toads puked out by my rear tyres along the bitumen. The ‘pop' is only just perceptible when you squash...
Scratch the Surface – Wonder years
Early Saturday morning was an odd time for dad to be mopping the porch. Stranger still was the fact he had the front door closed. I was scratching sleep from my eyes when I opened the door to see the yellow sponge swipe through...
Scratch the Surface – The sea-goats
Thirty kilometres to the south, the seaside town of Sarina lies in wait, rousing weary drivers and snoozing navigators with the ecstatic greens of the Pioneer Valley cane plantations, ambushing those not yet ready for the gaudy tropical climes of Mackay. It irrigates the...
Scratch the Surface – The architecture of exposure
Not so long ago, I was informed that the house I was staying in was a brothel. Pulling up in a taxi outside the busy Vulture Street driveway, the driver had cocked his head towards the house and remarked: ‘I know this place. Used...
Scratch the Surface – Nude Queensland
If I tell you I am sitting on a balcony typing these words in the glorious Queensland sun, you will possibly be envious. If I tell you I am nude, you will probably think me deviant. I wonder why? The difference is a few...
Scratch the Surface – Trespass
Arecurring dream had run throughout the half-century of her life – a dream where the foundations of the house she was living in were being washed away by high tides. The dream was not unusual, she knew – and was no doubt tied to...
Scratch the Surface – Flower power
The first sight from the air is a glint in the distance, a hill, an impression of water, a scattering of buildings. Then the plane banks and skims across a stretch of mangroves and an arc of river the colour of rust. Cooktown. Outside,...
Busted
THERE'S A BANGING on the front door. So early on a Monday? Don't they know I'm a student? I roll over and clamp the pillow to my head but the pounding doesn't stop. I rub the sleep from my eyes and get up. Through...
Justine and Col and Mr Heggarty
The mango trees are behind Mr Heggarty's milking shed. I can see them from the road, three dark cut-out shapes against the sky. I think about biting into the squishy fruit, the sugary juice. My mouth begins to water so I clear my throat...
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