What follows is an edited transcript of a panel session entitled ‘Reading and Writing the War’, which was held at the Warana Writers' Festival at the Old Customs House, Brisbane, in September 1995. The moderator was Patrick Buckridge (PB), then Director of the Queensland Studies Centre, and the panellists were Estelle Runcie Pinney (ERP), Don Munro (DM), Val Vallis (VV), and David Rowbotham (DR).

This paper has many beginnings. My interest in Rosa Praed's involvements with spiritualism and theosophy has taken me into the nineteenth century literatures and practices of spiritualism, to debates about the specification of human nature and human origins and to the recent literature on the administration and regulation of populations in the cities at the centre of Empire and the colonial periphery. But my thinking about Lemuria had been caught up with the ‘nowhere’ of Utopian discourse.

When the Ipswich Punch described colonial Ipswich as ‘the Modem Athens of the North’ (quoted in Deppeler-Hagan 1999: 28), it endowed the fledgling city with the image of a strong cultural background based on the traditions of Europe. However, the literary culture which existed in that period could not reflect all that the appellation might imply. Some of the town's inhabitants may have been educated in England and brought knowledge of European literature and thought to the new colony, but many were more concerned with earning a living than with cultivating their minds.

Repeated ‘boom and bust’ phenomena have characterised the history of Queensland as a colony and state. In terms of infrastructure and cultural institutions, this has led to significant discontinuities: vital strategic centres of colonial power, such as Cooktown, now languish in relative obscurity and the role of their inhabitants as authors and agents of colonialism receives little attention. This study investigates the life of an early inhabitant of Cooktown, E.A.C. Olive, in the context of his location on Australia's northern frontier.

In 1992, the Climbing World Finals event in Birmingham attracted around 5,000 spectators to watch 24 males and 16 females compete in two separate competitions for prize money. In this entertainment spectacular, super-fit young athletes climbed walls using artificial hand and footholds, racing against the clock to determine who would claim the title of the world's ‘best’ climber. In the same year, climbing appeared as a demonstration sport at the Albertville Winter Olympics. And also in the same year, the first indoor climbing gymnasium in Australia opened its climbing wall. There are now around 80 operating around the country under the auspices of the Australian Indoor Climbing Gyms Association Incorporated.

This paper explores the rise of adoption as a cultural phenomenon by examining some crucial changes in Queensland law.