The arrival of Queensland's first Governor on 10 December 1859 was an occasion for celebration; in the words of Brisbane's newspaper, ‘never was welcome given with heartier zest’. As Sir George Bowen stepped ashore at a temporary landing stage in the Botanic Gardens, he was greeted with an ornamental arch, a semicircular frame covered in flowers and greenery, bearing words of welcome. This ‘triumphal arch’, as it was called, was the creation of Andrew Petrie, a pioneer settler and building contractor, and Walter Hill, the Curator of the Gardens. It was to be the first of hundreds of similar arches erected throughout Queensland for almost a century. They were a regular feature of public celebrations until relatively recent times, marking the arrivals and travels of Governors, occasional visits by royalty, the opening of major roads, railways and bridges, and, to a lesser extent, historical milestones. They ranged from grand, highly decorated structures – often the work of professional designers – erected in the metropolis for royal visits to simple arches of greenery, put up by even the smallest regional communities for special occasions, such as welcoming visiting Governors. This paper takes a closer look at these curious structures and the symbolism behind them for, as Stephen Alomes observes, public rituals provide valuable insights into Australian life, revealing contradictions between imperial loyalties and burgeoning nationalism, indigenous and derivative, traditional and modern.

It has been observed elsewhere that Queensland, as a self-governing colony, did not ‘arise like the sun at an appointed time’ within an Empire on which the sun never set. Rather, to paraphrase British historian E.P. Thompson in another context, ‘It was present at its own making.’ December 1859 was only a moment of disjuncture according to certain political, administrative and fiscal effects. As a society, as a culture, Queensland was already in full and exuberant existence, having carved out a sense of its own intrusive perpetuity over a preceding period of some 35 years from both the lands of others and the labours of mostly convict, emancipated and indentured men and women. And these in turn marked the Antipodean sequel to ‘blue water’ Imperialism – trans-oceanic nomads drawn by the hazy promise of land on foreign shores or projected unwillingly there by the logic of their metropolitan transgressions. People of many nations, of ‘interacting, sometimes colluding, sometimes colliding cultures’, from its generative convicts, soldiers, penal commandants and manifold Aboriginal peoples to its waged workers, squatters, selectors, merchants and administrators, were in effect this colonial society in embryo, both formed and in process of formation. Only a name for the place was now lacking. Although small, isolated and stunted, this was nevertheless a multi-faceted, diverse and unequally graded social order, cloaked only one-dimensionally in the mantle of Britishness and Christianity. What follows are some observations about this conceptually unstable sense of consonance and divergence and the coincident business of simultaneously being and becoming.

The personal and political styles of leaders have long fascinated historians, biographers and political scientists eager to unravel the intricate nature of leadership and its impact on history. While some subscribe to the ‘Great Man’ theory that alleges that leaders' individual characters alone determine events, others believe in a ‘materialist’ conception where the prevailing socio-economic forces of the day shape history. The truth is probably a combination of the two. While leaders and events are primarily a function of environments, it will undoubtedly be leaders' individual characters that determine the finer details of history.

‘Royalty’ and ‘Empire’ were, throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. of supreme significance to all the Australian colonies. While each colony was well integrated within the Imperial framework, they remained largely reliant on the economic and geopolitical management of the British Empire. Though different colonial/national identities developed in Australia, the colonies' economic, military and diplomatic dependence on Britain strongly orientated them towards the Queen and ‘home’. Colonial Governors served as the vital link between the colonies and both the Imperial government and the Queen of the British Empire. Appointed by Britain and entrusted with the same rights, powers and privileges as the Queen, the role of Governor was one of great influence and authority.

From their foundation at the turn of the twentieth century, the remoteness from large population centres of Queensland's reserves for Aboriginal and Islander people was a key factor in maintaining them. Activism by the people themselves, reports and commentary by journalists, and research by historians like Charles Rowley, Raymond Evans, Henry Reynolds and Ros Kidd have raised the public's awareness of past and present reserve conditions. Although important in itself, the tide of events may seem to be of only marginal professional concern to students of literature, yet a question worth considering is whether textual analysis can contribute usefully to the reform process. In this essay I demonstrate a form that such a contribution might take, by examining an unofficial canon of texts associated with Palm Island. In some respects a representative place of confinement for Aboriginal and Islander people, Palm Island has been described as ‘the largest and historically most punitive of Queensland's reserves’ (Watson 1993: ix). I explore the texts for the insights they provide into the changing attitudes and understanding of whites and blacks, as the forces of repression and resistance have wrestled for dominance. My aim is to contribute to the conversations among Indigenous and non-Indigenous people that are presently shaping Palm Island's future.

Agricultural shows are important events in rural and regional Australia. For over a century, they have often been the main annual festival on any given town's calendar. This importance makes the lack of scholarly attention to rural and regional shows puzzling. Recently, Australian exhibitions and agricultural shows have come in for some very welcome scholarly attention, although very little has been written about rural and regional events. Scholars such as Kate Darian-Smith and Sara Wills, Joanne Scott and Ross Laurie, Judith McKay, and Kay Anderson have all written on exhibitions and shows – although, of this group, only Darian-Smith and Wills have written on rural shows, the rest focusing more on inter-colonial and metropolitan Australian shows. Even Richard Waterhouse's groundbreaking study of rural Australian cultural history, The Vision Splendid, provides little detail on agricultural shows and their role in rural cultural life, although the show's importance is recognised.

Queensland's Jubilee Carnival of 1909 was, according to Australia's Governor-General, Lord Dudley, ‘the principal and most prominent feature in the series of festivities by which the people of Queensland are seeking to celebrate the jubilee of their existence’. Indeed, with the exception of the Carnival, the ‘series of festivities’ was rather lack-lustre, offering relatively little of substance to excite the attention of contemporaries or of later commentators. Offering a distraction from the political instability of the era – between 1907 and 1909, voters had gone to the state polls three times – the Jubilee Carnival reaffirmed and reinvigorated a story that had been told and retold each year at Brisbane's showgrounds for more than three decades. The particular power of the Carnival did not, therefore, derive from its status as a unique event that commemorated a defining moment in Queensland's development: the separation from New South Wales and the beginning of self-government in 1859. Instead, the significance of the Jubilee Carnival as the centrepiece of the 1909 celebrations depended on its effective alignment with Queensland's largest annual event, the Brisbane Exhibition, and on the resulting connections between the Carnival, the Exhibition and a narrative of successful colonisation that had been celebrated each year since the inaugural Brisbane Exhibition of 1876. For many non-Indigenous Queenslanders, it was a compelling story that resolutely ignored the unsavoury aspects of the state's past and present in favour of an uplifting account of a society in which perseverance, applied to nature's bounty in the interests of the British Empire, was rewarded. It was, above all, a story of progress – that most powerful of talismans for settler societies. The Jubilee Carnival thus reiterated a familiar story; in so doing, it confirmed the iconic status of the capital city's annual agricultural show and positioned the show's host, the National Agricultural and Industrial Association of Queensland (NAIAQ), as one of the state's most important organisations.

Worldwide, 25 January 2009 was celebrated as the 250th birthday of the great Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759–96). The anniversary celebrations will continue all through this year, however, as the Scottish Parliament has proclaimed – in recognition of Burns' powerfully unifying significance – that 2009 will be a ‘Year of Homecoming’ for all those Scots, or Scottish descendants, who compose the great intellectual, economic and social diaspora that has emanated from this tiny, harsh and indomitable country over the last 300 years.

In 1983, more or less mid-career as it turned out to be in the light of his early death, Ian McKay summarised his intentions as a potter:

The 1959 celebration of the Centenary of self-government in Queensland presented organisers with an opportunity to showcase the state at large, together with its character and potential. Public works – a supremely tangible stamp of governmental achievement – were foremost in two new facilities for approved culture and recreation: the new library on William Street and the Brisbane City Council's Centenary Pool on Gregory Terrace. Abiding links with Britain were evoked by the royal visit of Princess Alexandra, a service in Westminster Abbey and the ‘Centenary voyage’ of a British immigrant ship. Other aspects of the program celebrated Queenslanders simply being Queenslanders. Day-to-day events from local carnivals and festivals to sporting competitions were embraced by the Centennial organisers. The resulting celebrations revealed a state in transition, its abiding affection for royalty and the ties of Empire happily coexisting with a new relish for American leisure culture. They reveal more than that when we consider the execution of Centenary activities in more detail, and particularly those that sought to present an account of how and why the state had come to be as it was. The 1959 celebrations provided a moment when, in the full light of public interest and attention, a ‘sense of the past’ was mobilised in both formal and informal terms in an attempt to account definitively for the Queensland historical experience.

Lance Fallaw was born in Gateshead in the north of England in 1876. He graduated in Arts at the University of Durham, developing a deep love of English literature which he carried with him for the rest of his life as an itinerant literary journalist. In 1900, after working for a few years in Newcastle-on-Tyne, he took his leave of Britain forever, first going to South Africa, where he worked as a journalist, mainly in Durban, for about six years, thence to Rockhampton in 1906.

World Expo ‘88, also widely known as ‘Expo '88’ and locally simply as ‘Expo’, was held in Brisbane from April to October 1988, as a key event of the national Bicentennial celebrations commemorating the 200 years of European settlement of Australia. Other major components of the Bicentennial year – such as the symbolic re-enactment of the voyage of the First Fleet that culminated in the Parade of Tall Ships sailing into Sydney Harbour on Australia Day – together with other significant national events such as the 1956 and 2000 Olympic Games, have generated historically focused interest, which has been manifested and disseminated in the usual way in articles, books and museum exhibitions. Brisbane's World Expo '88, however, appears to be one of the few Australian so-called ‘signature’ events that has also generated its own long-lived series of commemorative memorials and festivals.