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.

As in many other places, tourism has become a seductive industry for government and business in Queensland over the past decade. As one of the sunbelt states, Queensland has become an attractive destination for international, interstate and intrastate visitors. Tourism has become a major industry in Queensland contributing 5% to GSP (Goss 87). In 1993, the state attracted 1.4 million international visitors or 51% of the inbound market (Trends, issue 1, July 1994:4). This represents a 16% average annual increase since 1991. Although domestic tourism has experienced a slowdown, the state attracted 2.4 million intrastate and 8.5 million interstate trips in 1993. The staging of Expo 88 in Brisbane is credited with stimulating a significant increase in interstate visits to Queensland (cf. Collins 1994b).

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.

The idea of ‘Queensland Literature’ has a history, but a rather discontinuous one. During the present century, it has emerged sporadically at particular historical moments, rather than as a constant preoccupation, which is how the idea of an Australian literature has figured during this period. An explanation of the different profiles of national and state literary histories in the post-Federation era might begin by asking what is at stake in each case? The cultural beneficiaries of one ‘construction’ of Australian literature are different from those of other, competing constructions of Australian literature. Nationally, there are social and political identities at stake. But at the state level, for most of this century, literature seems to have been much less involved in identity politics of that kind, considerably less than one might have expected, given the ferocity of interstate rivalry in sporting and other areas.

With the winnowing of time and the emphasis given to particular artists in our constructed histories of art (be it international, national or regional) it is often difficult to determine why artists were considered to be innovatory in their time. The works so judged survive but not the context which enabled them to achieve this prominence. So it is with Vida Lahey. It may seem a desperate measure to consider a flower painter as a vehicle for modernist ideas, but the art environment in Brisbane was particularly conservative and Vida Lahey's vibrant flower paintings were a significant presence.

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’.

In 1993, Queensland's Local Government Act was revised for the first time since 1936. This paper is born of a realisation, based on research sponsored by the Local Government Association of Queensland, that much less is known and understood about the development of local government in Queensland than we have previously believed. The consequences of this are particularly serious at present, because important changes are currently being made to local government features on the basis of a very imperfect understanding of the role, operation and significance of those features. In this paper, I deal with an important aspect of the territorial dimension of local government, and point to the contemporary significance of a deeper appreciation of the development of local government from the territorial perspective.

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.