In September 2004, the Museum of Brisbane, Museums Australia and the Centre for Public Culture and Ideas at Griffith University hosted a symposium, ‘Cities and Museums’, at the university's Southbank campus. This event initiated a conversation among museum professionals and academics from across Australia. Nick Winterbotham, from Leeds City Museum, and Morag Macpherson, from Glasgow's Open Museum, and were keynote speakers. Their papers provided perspectives on museum policy and practice in the United Kingdom and Europe, and demonstrated how museums can contribute to urban and cultural regeneration. Those papers are available on the Museum of Brisbane website (www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/MoB). The Cities and Musuems section in this issue of Queensland Review brings together papers that explore the relationship of cities and museums across global, national and local Brisbane contexts, and from diverse disciplinary perspectives. The disciplines represented in this selection of papers from the symposium include social history, urban studies, literary fiction, and heritage and cultural policy.

As a young journalist at the Courier-Mail newspaper, my mother once met the famous British children's writer Enid Blyton, who stopped in Brisbane briefly. There was a press conference in a hangar out at the airport. Many important people were there — the Australian publisher, someone from the British High Commission, someone from the Prime Minister's Office, along with reporters from Sydney and Melbourne — and my mother, my beautiful young mother, in a panama hat with gloves and white glasses, excited to be there, to be amongst it.

Australia is a nation of suburbs. The vast majority of Australians live in the subregions of our principal metropolitan areas. Even those of us moving to so-called ‘sea change’ regions outside the big cities want to live in transplanted suburban estates. For most of us, an oil change is a more pressing prospect than a sea change.

I tend to approach cities from and through their margins because this is the path that makes most sense to me. I grew up on the urban fringe in Elizabeth, a ‘satellite town’ north of Adelaide. Founded along the lines of the British new towns, Elizabeth was named for a queen who, to her credit, always popped out for a visit whenever she was around. By 1960, Elizabeth had a car factory, 30, 000 British migrants and a path into the future that would come to haunt it as its factories were downsized and its public housing was turned first into welfare housing and then — in the picturesque language of new prejudices — into ‘housing of last resort’ for the people no one wanted.

At a recent conference of the International Planning History Society, Michael Cohen, formerly of the World Bank, argued that ‘the city is missing in action’:

This article provides a brief literary history of Indigenous writing in Queensland. The literature covered here is informed by the experiences of the personal, the familial and the communal, and enlarges the meanings of both the literary and the political because Indigenous writing is part of, not separate from, the daily lives and struggles of its authors. Related to this is the question of the sacred, and Indigenous relationships to the land are an abiding preoccupation of the writing explored here. Literature, as well as the way it is read, is intimately related to Indigenous efforts to achieve cultural autonomy and calls for recognition of difference and shared humanity and agency. It thereby becomes a tool of recognition, acknowledgment and transformation, producing new kinds of knowledges and new kinds of readers.

Brisbane author Nick Earls holds a position of exceptional significance for a writer in his home town. After some 10 years in the literary limelight, Earls was chosen as the face of the city in a television and print media campaign for Brisbane tourism (the ‘It's happening’ campaign), suggesting that he and his work would be widely recognised, and his opinions respected — key reasons for choosing a celebrity to promote any product. Earls represents a new type of public role for writers, who often must cross boundaries of intellectual respectability and popular cultural or ‘celebrity’ appeal to succeed in the current media climate. Leading up to the Brisbane promotional campaign, Earls had a long association with the local press, which enabled him to work simultaneously as a serious author, comedian, boy-next-door and social commentator. His decision, in his early published novels, to make maximal, unapologetic use of Brisbane as a setting earned him the title of ‘Brisbane's favourite son’ (MacColl 1998). At times he has used this title to his advantage; at other times the press has made him work in an ambassadorial role for Brisbane even as the themes and scenes of his writing were changing. Earls has also had considerable international success, particularly with his first novel for adults, Zigzag Street. Using theories about the production of celebrities and close analysis of Earls' press coverage, this article examines the author as a text, looking at the interaction between Earls, his novels and the broader condition of the contemporary publishing and media industries for clues as to how Earls, over other Brisbane writers, found himself with the keys to the city.

Southeast Queensland — the region encompassing Coolangatta and the McPherson Range to the south, Cooloola and the Blackall Range to the north, and the Great Dividing Range to the west — represents one of Queensland's most significant literary landscapes. For millennia, this area — defined by mountains and waterways — contained important gathering places for ceremonies and trade, and its inhabitants elaborated the meaning of the landscape in a rich complex of stories and other cultural practices such as the bunya festivals. Colonisation disrupted but did not obliterate these cultural associations, which remain alive in the oral traditions of local Aboriginal people and, in more recent times, have surfaced in the work of writers like Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Sam Watson.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people represent more than 3 per cent of the Queensland population, but only one Aboriginal person has so far been elected to the Queensland Legislative Assembly. (Mr Eric Deeral was the National Party member for Cook from 1974 to 1977.) This fact suggests that the Indigenous population and minorities in general do not have much influence on government in Queensland. Questions therefore arise as to why and what can be done to address this deficiency.

When a history of the Australian environment movement was published several years ago, the joke that went around the environment movement was that the first (and sometimes the only thing) purveyors of the book would read was the index to check whether their names were there. If some of the reports we have heard from around the bookshops of Brisbane are true, Radical Brisbane has received a similar response. We feel for Ray Evans and Carole Ferrier, the editors of Radical Brisbane, because everyone who has been around the activist scene in Brisbane over the last 40 years will want to see themselves, or at least their organisations, represented. Inevitably, given the limitations of such publications, many have been disappointed. The point of this review essay is not to critique the inclusions and omissions in order to assuage individual egos, but to further an understanding of the basis of radical politics and to interpret why Brisbane has been the seat of dissent as much as of development in this state.