Last November, Brisbane hosted a meeting of G20 leaders in the midst of a spring heatwave. The CBD and the high-density residential area around the venue — largely occupied by professionals and students, with a sprinkling of bohemians — was in ‘lockdown’. Residents accustomed to walking and cycling on the riverside were denied access, and movement in and out of the zone was restricted. Security arrangements for Barack Obama were the subject of fascination for the media and locals, while pictures of Chancellor Angela Merkel mingling with drinkers at a popular bar in Caxton Street on the city fringe went viral. In their account of the way government enacted legislation to meet anticipated security threats and of the strategies police used on the ground, Tim Legrand and Simon Bronitt recall an earlier Queensland history. Although the G20 Safety and Security Act 2013 conjured the spectre of the Bjelke-Petersen regime's ban on public assembly, and set aside the Goss legacy of the Peaceful Assembly Act 1991, this time the story was different. Despite the massive police presence, officers’ interactions with protesters were civil and the protests peaceful, as our cover image shows.

Alfred Elliot's photograph on the cover of this themed issue is one of a series of images that captured Brisbane's reception for the Duke of York in 1927. The Duke, later King George VI, was in Australia to open the new Parliament House in Canberra. On glass plate, Elliot documented the decorated route of the royal procession. The cover image shows the centrepiece — an archway spanning Queen Street, which proclaims a ‘Citizen's Welcome’. Two decades earlier, this young immigrant had also photographed the crowd assembled in South Brisbane to vote in the 1899 Federation Referendum. Despite the establishment of the new Commonwealth of Australia in 1901, the citizens welcoming the Duke were still British. Modernity may have arrived in the shape of the automobile, but modern Australian citizenship was, and continues to be, a work in progress.

In this article, I reflect on my creation of a digital map that plots locations from David Malouf's fiction and non-fiction. I consider the vestiges of David Malouf's past — particularly his grandparents' fruit shop and its relationship to his spiritual home at 12 Edmondstone Street — and I demonstrate how Malouf's words leave traces of his experience at these locations. Recognition of these traces requires alertness to the ways in which the past is communicated through historical registers, maps and literature. Our recognition is enhanced through a deliberate evocation of the past in our own experience of the city. My map, ‘David Malouf's Brisbane’, helps this to occur.

In the months leading up to November's G20 summit in 2014, Brisbane's residents would have been forgiven for anticipating the outbreak of a local civil war. Media outlets were leading with headlines stating, among other sensational claims, that ‘G20 anarchists vow chaos and mayhem for Brisbane's streets’, ‘Black Bloc tactics aim for Brisbane G20 shock and awe’ and ‘Destructive protest plan for G20’. Meanwhile, some of the most severe restrictions on civil liberties seen in Australia in recent years were legislated by the Queensland parliament. The G20 Safety and Security Act 2013 (Qld) (the G20 Act) was passed with little demur by a chamber that was only divided over the question of whether the laws were severe enough, with Queensland opposition police spokesman Bill Byrne MP declaring himself ‘surprised’ at the leniency of some of the sentencing provisions and the ‘minimalist’ approach to restricted areas. Of course, in the event the much-anticipated violence did not occur, and the media's pre-summit hyperbole was exposed as just that. Rather more prosaically — and accurately — the post-event headlines dutifully reported ‘Passionate, but mostly peaceful protests’ and ‘G20 protest day wraps up peacefully’. Given that previous G20 summits in London and Toronto saw outbreaks of considerable disorder, we might succumb to the temptation of declaring the peaceful protests in Brisbane to be a vindication of the heavy powers granted by the Queensland parliament. But we believe that to do so would be egregious. Here we reflect on the historical and political motivations underpinning the G20 Act, and draw attention to the rather more measured policing strategy employed by the Queensland Police Service (QPS). We argue that the safety and security of G20 participants and protesters owed little to the restrictive powers granted by the G20 Act, but resulted from a policing strategy that successfully married traditional and modern precepts of policing large events.

Historically, the Gold Coast is a ‘young’ city and urban area inextricably tied to tourism, and a reputation for sun and surf. While this is undeniably true, another lesser known narrative bound to music-driven youth culture from the 1960s to the 1980s is also part of the Gold Coast's history. With ‘heritage tourism’ linked to popular music in recent years, this article examines how the Gold Coast's youth culture history may potentially inform new tourist practices in the country's sixth largest city. Regardless of whether such heritage tourism is ever adopted by the Gold Coast's governing bodies, mapping this relationship between music, youth and place offers a new perspective on an active Australian city— one often stereotyped as a place with a penchant for erasing its past and only looking to the future.

When considering the question of reading provision in remote regions, Australian historians have tended to focus on the challenge of distributing books and other reading matter affordably across vast and sparsely populated areas. In the back-blocks of Western Queensland between the wars, however, the problem of distribution had been addressed with some success: by mail orders to metropolitan book retailers, subsidised postal rates, local Schools of Arts libraries, the Workers’ Educational Association and, above all, the efficient operations of the Queensland Bush Book Club, which performed extraordinary feats of remote distribution throughout the interwar period. Isolated booklovers could almost take for granted a steady — if somewhat limited and belated — supply of books to read. Two things they could not take for granted, however, were reliable, disinterested and informed advice about what books to choose (where choice was available) and — even more important — the opportunity to share their reading experiences with others. Walter Murdoch once said, ‘It is a basic fact that when you have read a book you want to talk about it.’ That may overstate the case a little, but there is no doubt that the desire to communicate the pleasures, occasional disappointments and sense of discovery in reading books — no matter how solitary the reading experience itself may have been — was and is very strong and widespread, and that single families or households did not then (and do not now) necessarily provide congenial environments for such ‘book talk’.

During the inter-war period, parts of Queensland were subjected to continued deforestation as successive state governments encouraged more intensive use of the state's vast land reserves. Yet running parallel to this process was the deliberate planting of mainly exotic tree species — although it was on a small scale and located mostly throughout the streets of the state's urban centres. This activity can be considered part of the earliest town planning efforts to improve the quality of the urban landscape in Queensland's settlements, through the provision of shade and attractive surroundings. However, the public demands for street trees can also be seen as part of a wider community movement that was concerned about the type of environment being created in Queensland, particularly as so much of the state's native forests were being destroyed and parts of the state during the 1910s and 1920s were overrun with prickly pear.

This article offers the fullest discussion to date of the career, achievements and writing of Associate Professor Frederick Walter Robinson, one of the founders of the English program at the University of Queensland and a major figure in Brisbane and Queensland cultural life from the 1920s to the 1960s. Robinson's career is considered in the context of the development of English as a university and school discipline, the intellectual and cultural life of Brisbane and the University of Queensland, and national cultural developments during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Through his university teaching and vigorous participation in many cultural and educational groups within and outside the university, Robinson was a highly influential figure — particularly in his pioneering work in teaching, documenting and researching Australian literature, developing the Queensland school curriculum in English and championing the importance of Aboriginal anthropology. The article makes use of unpublished material in Robinson's extensive papers in the Fryer Library, and suggests that a true estimation of Robinson's achievements has been hindered by the fact that so much of his work remains unpublished.

When Aubrey Mellor returned to Brisbane in 1988 to become the second artistic director of Queensland Theatre Company (QTC), the company had been under the direction of a British-born and trained director since its formation in 1969. QTC was part of the national state theatre company network established as a result of postwar cultural planning. The network was charged with promoting national drama and producing theatre to a high artistic standard, but this objective imposed very specific constraints around the companies' programming. This was particularly observable at QTC: the company had been culturally and geographically distant from the New Wave movement that emerged in Sydney and Melbourne between 1968 and 1981. Mellor brought his experience of working in key institutions during this movement to QTC where he pursued a personal mission to develop Australian playwriting. During his five-year leadership he transitioned the artistic identity of the company to a more contemporary artistic framework.

Henry George Lamond is no longer a household name, but he was once popular and widely known in Australia and overseas. An extremely prolific writer, he published fifteen books of fiction and non-fiction, and more than 900 essays and magazine articles in his lifetime. His essays and articles include writing in a wide range of subjects and genres, from romantic fiction to practical agricultural advice. He was perhaps best known for his animal-based books, including Horns and Hooves (1931), An Aviary on the Plains (1934a), Dingo (1945), Brindle Royalist (1946) and Big Red (1953a). These titles were popular in the United States, England and Australia. Some were translated into other languages, including German and French, and they even formed part of school curricula. His tales are set in the Australian landscape and are ‘littered with bush colloquialisms’ (Bonnin 2000).

Donald Horne famously wrote, ‘Australia was born urban and quickly grew suburban’ (1964), an observation that carries a weight of assumptions about suburban living. Historically, the Australian suburbs have been regarded as places of retreat, family life and female activity, and subsequently as a place where not much of interest happens. By contrast, a city's central areas are seen as more dynamic spaces and, with recent creative city thinking and planning, as potential powerhouses of innovation and creativity. This article challenges assumptions about suburban living as passive places of retreat through an examination of women in the creative workforce who are living and working in the suburbs. It draws on historical accounts of creative suburban activity and a research project that mapped and investigated the experience of creative workers in the outer suburbs of Brisbane and Melbourne. The study finds that there is much creative work occurring in suburban localities, but this is not as unusual as might be expected.

In just one of the many extraordinary moments during the spectacular Opening Ceremony of the 2012 London Olympic Games, thirty Mary Poppinses floated into the stadium on their umbrellas to battle a 40 foot-long inflatable Lord Voldemort. This multi-million pound extravaganza was telecast to a global audience of over one billion people, highlighting in an extremely effective manner the grandeur and eccentricities of the host nation, and featuring uniquely British icons such as Mr Bean, James Bond, The Beatles and Harry Potter, as well as those quintessential icons of Englishness, the Royal Family, double-decker red buses and the National Health Service.

Victoria Cooper and Doug Spowart's 2014 photographic exhibition Speaking About Place: The Nocturne Project sought to capture a sense of place in regional towns throughout Queensland. Incorporating both the physical landscape and the virtual space of social media, the project spoke to themes of regional art, identity and digital connectedness, in order to understand how a sense of place is developed and continually renegotiated through individual experience. Within the context of understanding regional identity and place promotion, this article considers whether regional-based art is able to highlight a shifting sense of place, facilitate social cohesion and contribute to the development and enrichment of local cultural spaces.

Cultural narratives also function as lifelines in the work of another Queensland Indigenous woman writer, Vivienne Cleven. Cleven's novel, Bitin’ Back (2001), begins when Mavis Dooley's son, Nevil, announces that he is no longer Nevil, but the writer Jean Rhys. Although Nevil eventually reveals that he has simply been acting as a woman in order to understand the protagonist of the novel he is writing, his choice of Rhys in particular is significant. Nevil selected Jean Rhys as a signifier of his female role because, he explains:

Mt Tamborine is a crucial location for Judith Wright's poetry, and for the development of her thought. She wrote the majority of her poetry collections while living on the mountain from 1948–75; it was there that she came face to face with the complexities of Australian ecologies and colonial histories. While her earlier poems from this period reflect a concerted, anti-colonial desire to separate the world of Tamborine from her European inheritance and perspective, by the early 1970s her work becomes preoccupied with symbiotic relationships between her body, her house and garden, and the surrounding landscape. This turn reflects broader shifts in thought in the mid-twentieth century, where notions of separation and precision were being problematised by the emerging field of quantum mechanics.

By the time poet David Malouf wrote Johnno (1976), his first work of prose fiction, he was in his late thirties and living in the Renaissance city of Florence. Both European Florence and antipodean Brisbane mirror and enfold the novel's eponymous hero, Johnno, and his narrator-creator, Dante. The Florentine poet, and by extension his medieval trappings, resonate throughout a tale about growing up in a frontier town far removed from the cosmopolitan centres of the Northern Hemisphere. This Italian connection can be explored further by considering Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities (1997) alongside Johnno. The depiction of Venice in Calvino's novel can operate as a point of contrast and comparison to the river city of Brisbane, conjured by Malouf's Dante.

The University of Queensland's Fryer Library is home to many fine literary vintages. Established in 1927 as the J.D. Fryer Memorial Library of Australian Literature in honour of a former Arts student and soldier in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), John Denis Fryer, the collection includes the papers of significant Australian journalists, novelists and poets, including Ernestine Hill, John Forbes, David Malouf, Bruce Dawe, Thomas Shapcott, Peter Carey and Oodgeroo Noonuccal among others.