This article provides an overview of the contribution to colonial Queensland studies by the late Bill Thorpe, explaining the reasons for his enduring association with Queensland, and reviewing his long-standing collaborations with former PhD supervisor Raymond Evans and members of the Ipswich Aboriginal community. It argues that the belated appearance of his doctoral thesis on the subject was a significant intellectual event in seeking to theorise colonialism in Queensland, drawing upon interdisciplinary insights and examples. The article spans his career, from the ambitious class analysis of his early writing to an assessment of his local study of the Deebing Creek Reserve in late career, in order to identify his strengths as a social and economic historian, and to situate his work in the context of generational change and the reconceptualisation of Queensland studies.

My first reaction on reading Tom Hurstbourne or A Squatter's Life was surprise. When I first met them, the novel's editors, Gerard Benjamin and Gloria Grant had been very forthcoming about how they came by the manuscript – an intriguing saga in itself. However (and I hope they don't mind me saying this), I remember that they were deliberately a bit cagey about what the book was like as a work of fiction. What little they did say led me to expect something like a pioneering saga, with a straightforward life-narrative, probably beginning with the hero's childhood in the Old Country, then moving quickly to the Australian outback where the hero would undergo a series of challenges, hardships and adventures, suffering a bit along the way but emerging more or less triumphant at the end, sometimes with a wife, children and extensive landholdings. Quite a few Australian novels of this kind were published in the second half of the nineteenth century, and even more in the early decades of the twentieth – books like Miles Franklin's All That Swagger, Mary Durack's Kings in Grass Castles, Brian Penton's Landtakers, Roy Connolly's Southern Saga, Jeanie Gunn's We of the Never Never, and many others by lesser known authors.

TEN o'clock, the time appointed for Spicer to meet Wilson, saw both Spicer and Mason in the office of Wilson. ‘Momin’ sir. 'Scuse me takin’ the libbaty, but he's a friend 0' mine, sir, that knows wot's agoin' on,’ ejaculated Spicer in answer to an enquiring look of Wilson's. ‘He's safe as a bank and mum's the word. Puffiickly fly to the bisness, an’ ‘ull deal with yer in my sted, which Jack Mason 'is name his, as rummy a card as hever got free passidge to Bot'ny Bay.’

In 1987, years of frustration with Queensland's sexually repressive culture compelled a homosexual man named Cliff Williams to write to the national gay magazine OutRage. Williams outlined a number of the difficulties he faced being gay in Queensland and ended his letter with the exclamation, ‘To hell with homophobic Queensland!’ This exclamation captures many of the tensions in Queensland in the 1970s and 1980s. While these decades were a time of immense political change for gay and lesbian Australians, Queensland's political culture was particularly resistant to the gay and lesbian rights movement.

In 1963, Rockhampton was chosen by the Australian Broadcasting Commission to become its first television station in Queensland. ABC Rockhampton TV belonged to a select number of outlets that, in the days before aggregation and extensive networking, gathered and broadcast their own news and local programs to regional viewers. This article details the unearthing and preservation of records vital to this research, and uses these to document the highs and lows of the Rockhampton station. We argue that the history of ABC Rockhampton TV forms a neglected chapter in the ‘getting of regional television’ and the production of local content, and provides an account of the early operations of the organisation from its inception in 1963, an overview of its achievements and an explanation of the reasons for its abrupt demise in the mid-1980s. Additionally, we identify the achievements of particular programs and staff members, and acknowledge the personal tragedies that dogged the station and its community in the closing phase.

Probably no one who has entered either federal or state Parliament in Australia departed from it as loathed and despised as Malcolm Arthur Colston. A Labor senator from Queensland between 1975 and 1996, he is remembered by that party as a ‘rat’ who betrayed it for the sake of personal advancement. Whereas many Labor parliamentarians – most notably Prime Minister ‘Billy’ Hughes in 1917 have left the party because they strongly disagreed with it over a major policy issue or a matter of principle, in the winter of 1996 Colston unashamedly left it to secure the deputy presidency of the Senate and the status, income and several other perquisites that went with it. Labor's bitterness towards Colston stems not merely from the fact that he showed extraordinary ingratitude towards a party that had allowed him a parliamentary career but more especially because, between his defection from the party in August 1996 and his retirement from Parliament in June 1999, his vote allowed the Liberal-National Party government led by John Howard to pass legislation through the Senate that might otherwise have been rejected.