Patrick Buckridge conducted this interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg on 19 June, 1995. Nicholas taught in the Faculty of Humanities at Griffith University for 17 years. He departed in August to take up a position as Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Simon de Montfort University in the United Kingdom.

Accounts of the air war of 1939–45 still hold a fascination for many: any comprehensive second hand bookshop will have at least one shelf devoted to aviation or war memoirs. My own longstanding interest began with a childhood awareness of my father's involvement in the war. Born in Maryborough and educated at Brisbane State High, he had been a pilot, first in the RAAF, then the RAF. He had joined up on his eighteenth birthday in 1942, gained his wings in Australia, received advanced training in England on Blenheim bombers then Beaufighters, and volunteered for the Middle East. But even these scant details I only managed to interrogate from him in the past year or so. Fifty years after the war, he has just started to talk about it to me, though selectively. Most of his friends were killed, either shot down or in flying accidents. As well, the Beaufighter was notorious as one of the most difficult and dangerous planes to fly. One pilot in my father's unit sensibly asked to be transferred to a different kind of plane because he found he couldn't handle the twin-engined fighter; the response of the Commanding Officer was to have the pilot immediately classified LMF — Lack of Moral Fibre — a fate most aircrew considered worse than death. It is absurd incidents such as this — brave men condemned by inflexible superiors, and so many others killed in accidents, often in landing or taking off under extreme conditions of weather and weariness — that emerge in the accounts by survivors as an antidote to more idealised reconstructions of the air war.

In the last issue of Queensland Review, it was argued that the idea of Queensland literature has a history, and that the various competing formulations of that idea have implications for Queensland identity and politics. Queensland art, likewise, has some currency as an idea, particularly as an ‘art off centre’ to borrow the title of a recent conference. It is, therefore, somewhat surprising that the idea of ‘Queensland music’ has not emerged as a useful way of constructing a cultural or political identity. ‘Music in Queensland’, suggesting an exotic and not fully acclimatized cultural form, is instead the designation used in the few — mostly unpublished — works which treat Queensland's musical history.

This is a transcript of the key-note address delivered by David Anderson at the ‘Beyond the Brisbane Line Conference’, Queensland Studies Centre, Griffith University, in collaboration with the University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, November 1994. David Anderson is the presenter of ABC Radio's Queensland Sunday program.

In 1990, the Queensland Government launched its now discredited Home Ownership Made Easy scheme. HOME provided financial assistance to ‘moderate’ income earners by offering fixed interest, low start loans, and was accompanied by HOME Shared and HOME Buy which targeted public housing tenants. While HOME differed from past programs in its detail, it can be seen as the most recent attempt by a State Labor Government to extend owner occupation in Queensland. Between 1915 and 1957, the Queensland Labor Party actively sought to promote home ownership through a range of programs including the Workers' Dwellings and Workers' Homes schemes. These programs were a reflection of a fundamental belief in home ownership as ‘every man's right’ and as an ‘essential’ element of the ‘Australian way of life’. Thus, Queensland Labor displayed none of the ambivalence which characterised Labor Party attitudes to home ownership elsewhere in Australia. Williams contends that the Australian Labor Party was trapped between its commitment to assisting the poor, its reluctance to play the role of landlord, and its support for home ownership. The Queensland Party experienced no such ideological quandary. While other Labor Governments tended to accept an obligation to provide public rental accommodation for those unable to buy homes of their own, Queensland Labor continued to display a distaste for ‘public landlordism’.

Queensland was a late starter in the employment of policewomen and, apart from a brief period in the early 1970s, has lagged behind other jurisdictions in utilising women. The aberrant history of policewomen in Queensland suggests additional evidence for the characterisation of Queensland as ‘the deep north’. Apart from the influence of general cultural and political factors, fluctuations in the fortunes of policewomen relate specifically to the discretionary powers held by police commissioners in personnel policies; problems of corruption and lack of accountability in particular have had a gender dimension, but close scrutiny of recent reforms has tended to ignore the impact of the Fitzgerald Report on women in the police force. Seismic changes have occurred at the level of policies and procedures and, although cultural change is limping behind, Queensland is now a leading State for access of women to a career in policing.

Fifteen years ago, on Christmas Day 1980, I wrote a list of four people whose biography, if I had the time and ability, I would like to write. They were as follows: Queensland premier and federal treasurer, E.G. (‘Red Ted’) Theodore; Australia's only Communist member of Parliament, Fred Paterson; New Zealand born Communist and author of the superb social realist novel Sugar Heaven, Jean Devanny; and that remarkable American observer of Australia, Clinton Hartley Grattan.