Helen Taylor made a unique contribution to the democratisation of history in Queensland. She gave us, in Abraham Lincoln's immortal words, History ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’. In so doing, she loosened the stultifying stranglehold of both schools and universities — history's traditional domain. Since history appeared on the school curriculum, generations of children have undergone the arid and depressing experience of being adjudged ‘not good at history’ because of an inability to memorise a string of meaningless dates. The successful ones who went on to study the subject at university encountered a program that was academic and elitist in both content and purpose. Thought by many to be a worthy successor to the Classics for the training of fine minds, it was for a long time concerned almost exclusively with the activities of governments, the machinery of power in the domestic context and its external manifestations overseas, foreign policy and imperialism. Helen Taylor's notion of history was something very different.

A typescript of a woman's diary deposited at the Mitchell Library in the 1970s contains some intriguing exchanges for the historian of the frontier. The diarist is unnamed — never a good omen for a primary document — but the uneven entries and the diary's passing mention of some of the people on Durundur Station from October 1842 to May 1843 give it the weight of authenticity. Our informant, ‘the wife of an employee of the Archers’, arrived on the station in October 1842, only six months after the north had officially been opened for free settlement and only a little over twelve months since David Archer had established this pastoral lease. She had arrived as part of a group of fourteen labourers and mechanics sent from one of the Archer estates in Scotland, and settled on one of the few stations to establish good relations with the traditional owners of the region. Her employer was among the more religious of the Archer brothers — a renowned family of Queensland pastoralists — and he was much taken with the idealism of the Evangelical movement. He refused to hunt the Dalla of the Blackall-D'Aguilar Ranges from their country and was determined to build peaceful relations with the traditional owners.

We know about the first day at Wolston Park from a report in the Brisbane Courier of 1865. On 12 January of that year, seven prison warders (two of them women) and ten police constables escorted 57 male and twelve female lunatics from Brisbane Gaol ‘to the new Asylum at Woogaroo’. Since 1859, Queensland's insane had no longer been sent to Sydney, but were lodged instead at the Brisbane Gaol. Now the asylum was ready, its residents were loaded into cabs and taken down to the river. There they boarded a steamer named Settler and were conveyed down the river to the landing point near Woogaroo Creek. The name of the asylum hinted at the reality that this was Aboriginal land: the word Woogaroo, so it was remembered in the 1930s, being a corruption of an Aboriginal word meaning ‘to step over a person lying down’. Aboriginal people would be among the earliest inhabitants of the asylum, but not in great numbers. Instead, the institution was rapidly filled from its earliest days with the immigrant settlers who made up most of the colony's growing population.

An increase in the incidence of leprosy among North Queensland Aboriginal people in the late 1930s gave rise to fears that the disease might spread and threaten the white population. This concern resulted in an uninhabited offshore island being selected as a leper colony that was exclusively for blacks: it became a place to which Indigenous people suffering from leprosy were forcibly transported, isolated and treated. Queensland's right to take such action was enshrined in law by the Leprosy Act of 1892 and subsequently by the Public Health Act of 1937 which, while repealing the Leprosy Act, retained the main elements of the earlier legislation.

An old friend, Jim Cleary, working on the monumental Bibliography of Australian Literature at the University of Queensland, recently rang to tell me about the elusive modernist poet Anna Wickham. ‘Wickham’ is the pen-name of Edith Alice Mary Harper, ‘one of the most significant feminist poets of modernism’, who published between the 1910s and the 1930s. The author of over one thousand poems, covering a remarkable diversity of forms, Wickham was described in the memoir of American publisher Louis Untermeyer as ‘a remarkable gypsy of a woman’. During her tempestuous life, she mixed with members of the London Chelsea and Bloomsbury sets, plunged into the literary and artistic circles of the Parisian demi-monde, had a brief sexual relationship with pioneer American modernist poet H.D. (Hilda Dolittle), was sexually spurned by lesbian heiress and literary patron Natalie Clifford Barney, and became closely aligned with D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda von Richthofen, as well as Dylan Thomas and Caitlin MacNamara, falling out with the latter couple after throwing a drunken ‘Thomas and fellow writer Lawrence Durrell out of the house’. She was also close friends with the erratic novelist Malcolm Lowry, whetted the appetites of Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, and helped to mentor the young Stephen Spender. Somewhat like T.S. Eliot's wife Vivien Haigh-Wood, she was incarcerated at one point in a mental institution by her husband, solicitor Patrick Hepburn, And, like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. she died by her own hand, hanging herself in her decaying home on Parliament Hill, London, following the freezing winter of 1947.

Two of the most significant donors to the University of Queensland were Mary Emelia Mayne and James Mayne, the last surviving children of Irish immigrants Patrick and Mary Mayne. They provided the funds to purchase the university's St Lucia site, donated rural land at Moggill, and left their estates to fund Chairs of Medicine and Surgery at the university. Whether the university has sufficiently acknowledged their philanthropy has been the subject of comment in recent years. Unfortunately, the work of Malcolm Thomis — which traces how and when the university acknowledged the Maynes and why it was not until 1973 that Mayne Hall was opened — is not generally known, so public misunderstanding continues. Entwined with this is a perception that the 1936 portrait of James Mayne has not been displayed in a place of honour. Although the university endeavoured to ensure that the portrait of James Mayne was displayed in the most appropriate place possible, in the earlier years the embryonic development at the St Lucia campus resulted in its being sent to the Queensland National Art Gallery (now the Queensland Art Gallery). Since 1945, it has been on display in key university buildings, and today is prominently displayed in the James and Mary Emelia Mayne Centre.

Over the last 30 years, many books have appeared on different aspects of childhood in Australia. There has not, however, been an authoritative published history of childhood that is specific to the Depression years. Sue Fabian and Morag Loh's Children in Australia: An Outline History and Jan Kociumbas's Australian Childhood: A History include chapters that offer overviews of Australian childhood during the Depression, and Lynette Finch's special issue of Queensland Review, Young in a Warm Climate, is the only major study specific to children in Queensland. This paper makes a contribution to Queensland Depression historiography and the history of Queensland children by exploring how the children of Brisbane's working-class unemployed spent their leisure hours, and what effect — if any — the Depression exerted over the choices that were made. It will show mat there was neither uniformity of experience nor a sharp discontinuity between the Depression years and those that preceded and followed this decade.

While food historians have begun to focus attention on world's fairs, Vaccaro's detailed study of food at the 1904 World Fair in St Louis (2004) is at the vanguard of publishing in this area. Similarly, although the intense interest in culinary matters that is now identified as ‘foodie’ culture was developing in Australia in the 1980s, little attention has concentrated on this aspect of Brisbane's World Expo '88 (also widely known simply as ‘Expo '88’), which was staged from April to October 1988 as part of the national Bicentennial celebrations. Expo '88 dominated local headlines and became a part of the national imagination during the bicentennial year but, although commentators at the time predicted that it would ‘doubtless be a focus of research for a long time to come’ (Day 1988: iv), other matters have since dominated reflection about this period of recent Australian history. Yet food was specified in the ‘Cultural and Entertainment’ category of one of the three exposition's official sub-themes of ‘Leisure: The Universal Pastime’, and did play a number of important roles in and at Expo '88. Moreover, Robinson has identified Expo '88 as one of the ‘plethora of social, economic, cultural and political determinants’ that explains the diversity of cuisines available in Brisbane today (2007: 71).