The dangerous uncertainties and complications of George Speight's coup in Fiji have been partly formed by his association with white-collar crime in Queensland. Speight's involvement in at least one fraudulent financial scheme in Brisbane helped to shape the events leading up to his seizure of parliament and kidnapping of the elected government of Fiji on 19 May 2000. This parody ofa coup, led by Speight (a failed businessman with no military experience) and a small contingent of ascetic SAS-styled soldiers, soon to be joined by a gaggle of rustics and Suva's lumpenproletariat, was a spectacle of the unexpected. Speight's adventurism today imposes immense costs on the people of Fiji. His financial schemes when he was living in Brisbane left a number of victims in Queensland.

Despite constructions of Brisbane's colonial history as a predominantly authoritarian pursuit of progress, reconsideration of the early years of white arrival reveals alternative tendencies that suggest an ambivalence to the paradigm of progress. These tendencies are precursors to an environmental, ‘anti-political’ consciousness that continues to play a role in the city and that contributes to the perception that Brisbane is ‘different.’

What follows is an edited transcript of a panel session entitled ‘Reading and Writing the War’, which was held at the Warana Writers' Festival at the Old Customs House, Brisbane, in September 1995. The moderator was Patrick Buckridge (PB), then Director of the Queensland Studies Centre, and the panellists were Estelle Runcie Pinney (ERP), Don Munro (DM), Val Vallis (VV), and David Rowbotham (DR).

In Queensland, disputes between traders both domestic and international can be settled by a range of different mechanisms, from simple informal mediation (with a referee) to more formal arbitration (using a referee or a panel of referees, and set rules of procedure) and ultimately to full legal actions in court, the choice of court depending on the amounts involved. Parties to a dispute can use commercial organizations to help them resolve disputes (e.g. the Australian Commercial Dispute Centres in each State), or they can approach the Queenland Law Society or the Queensland Bar Association, which provide lists of experienced practitioners available to resolve disputes out of court. This is a much quicker and cheaper alternative to a court action, but where parties still cannot agree, the dispute must be finally resolved in court. Even then, the parties can still settle before the court makes a binding determination.

This paper has many beginnings. My interest in Rosa Praed's involvements with spiritualism and theosophy has taken me into the nineteenth century literatures and practices of spiritualism, to debates about the specification of human nature and human origins and to the recent literature on the administration and regulation of populations in the cities at the centre of Empire and the colonial periphery. But my thinking about Lemuria had been caught up with the ‘nowhere’ of Utopian discourse.

The objective of this paper is to document and explore the findings of a survey carried out in Brisbane from 16 August to 15 September 1999, on the settlement experiences ofrecent Taiwanese immigrants, their motive for immigration and their perception of Australian society. Ethnic immigrants in advanced industrialized countries have long been depicted as passive and powerless individuals. In the past fifty years, this tendency to portray migrants as disadvantaged victims has remained largely intact. However, the new wave of immigrants that arrived in the late 1980s mostly came from economically affluent north-east Asian countries, particularly from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Many of these people were skilled or professionally qualified independent immigrants, and a large number of them were in fact entrepreneurs who brought capital and other economic resources. Therefore, their settlement experiences may not necessarily involve marginalisation and dependency, nor is it appropriate to argue that they would be potential victims of structural discrimination. This study of the settlement experiences of Taiwanese immigrants in Brisbane aims, firstly, to examine the forces that motivated Taiwanese citizens to immigrate to Australia. Secondly, it explores the social and occupational mobility of Taiwanese immigrants measured by the changes in their self-identified class location between Taiwan and Australia. Finally, it investigates the sense ofbelonging of Taiwanese immigrants, and their interactions with their home country.

When the Ipswich Punch described colonial Ipswich as ‘the Modem Athens of the North’ (quoted in Deppeler-Hagan 1999: 28), it endowed the fledgling city with the image of a strong cultural background based on the traditions of Europe. However, the literary culture which existed in that period could not reflect all that the appellation might imply. Some of the town's inhabitants may have been educated in England and brought knowledge of European literature and thought to the new colony, but many were more concerned with earning a living than with cultivating their minds.

Since all resources are limited, their most judicious and efficient use can only be achieved through forethought and planning. Such resource allocation decisions are predominantly made by government. When this function is spread across three levels of government each with their own departments of state and other agencies this task is made more difficult. Integrated planning involves the coordinated delivery of Commonwealth, State, Local Government and private sector investment to implement an agreed plan. The level of government in both Canada and Australia best placed to initiate, formulate and guide the implementation of such integrated plans is local government. This is despite the fact that it has no constitutional recognition and, in both revenue raising and expenditure terms, it remains very much the third tier of government.

Repeated ‘boom and bust’ phenomena have characterised the history of Queensland as a colony and state. In terms of infrastructure and cultural institutions, this has led to significant discontinuities: vital strategic centres of colonial power, such as Cooktown, now languish in relative obscurity and the role of their inhabitants as authors and agents of colonialism receives little attention. This study investigates the life of an early inhabitant of Cooktown, E.A.C. Olive, in the context of his location on Australia's northern frontier.

Imagine the following scenario: your six-year-old daughter has come home sick from primary school with stomach cramps, diarrhoea and vomiting. You envisage a touch of gastro-enteritis – after all, it is common in kids – and expect it to blow over quickly. She's off her food and will only eat a few things, including peanut butter on toast. After a few days, her condition has worsened to the point that your family GP is considering hospitalising her. Later, you hear on the radio that Kraft, which initially only recalled eight brands of peanut butter, is recalling its entire peanut butter range due to possible contamination with salmonella bacteria from mouse droppings found in batches of roasted peanuts from a Kingaroy supplier (BRW 2.9.96). If this were you, chances are that you would feel angry because it is your daughter who has been affected. You are involved.

A Brisbane worker recently commented in an interview, ‘I think there's a lot of difficulty just in cultural diversity.’ The worker, a member of a racial minority group, said:

In 1992, the Climbing World Finals event in Birmingham attracted around 5,000 spectators to watch 24 males and 16 females compete in two separate competitions for prize money. In this entertainment spectacular, super-fit young athletes climbed walls using artificial hand and footholds, racing against the clock to determine who would claim the title of the world's ‘best’ climber. In the same year, climbing appeared as a demonstration sport at the Albertville Winter Olympics. And also in the same year, the first indoor climbing gymnasium in Australia opened its climbing wall. There are now around 80 operating around the country under the auspices of the Australian Indoor Climbing Gyms Association Incorporated.

This paper explores the rise of adoption as a cultural phenomenon by examining some crucial changes in Queensland law.