While working as a dairy farmer in the Sunshine Coast hinterland during the 1920s, Jack McKinney began contributing short stories to the popular weekly, the Australian Journal. Drawing on his own experience and sense of humour, he developed these stories into a series, ‘According to Noonan’, which the Australian Journal published until 1939 and reprised in the 1950s. This article will examine these stories and consider them in relation to McKinney's later life and writing.

What are some strategies for preparing adults as allies to young people striving for social justice in metropolitan areas that are becoming more segregated and more diverse? This question is especially important at a time when young people are aware of segregation, and want to communicate and collaborate with others who are different from themselves, across the boundaries that segregate them. Some adults successfully support and engage with youth as adult allies. Many adults are, however, conditioned to position youth in secondary roles, and would benefit from more information about how to successfully engage with young people as allies. This article analyses the efforts of adults like these, drawing upon work in metropolitan Detroit, an area that is among the most segregated in the United States, and that also has small pockets of diversity. It views adults as allies in their broader context, identifies exemplars of practice and discusses the lessons learned from empirically based practice.

There is an international movement promoting youth participation models and principles to empower more young people to be active in positive social change. To counter the prevalence of domestic violence, young people are more often targets of change rather than the instigators. Primary prevention of domestic violence is being pursued through gender-based respectful relationships education with young people. Generally, these programs are delivered using conventional adult educator models. In this study, the first year of activity of an emerging youth-led program for delivering respectful relationships education (R4Respect) is evaluated through the views of the young participants, aged from sixteen to twenty-four years, and non-participant adult stakeholders. The development of the model was guided by Good Practice Principles for Youth Development (Seymour 2012). The program is assessed using the Tiffany–Eckenrode Program Participation Scale (TEPPS) (Tiffany et al. 2012). For this article, the major themes of the study were reviewed to identify those most relevant to the Good Practice Principles. The study affirms the importance of these principles to building a participatory model in which young people feel valued and supported. Increased funding, capacity, and greater clarity and fairness in roles and responsibilities among the youth participants are suggested as program improvements.

Given that the Sunshine Coast and its hinterland have been, at least for a time, the haunt of several of several eminent Australian writers — the Palmers, Dark, Herbert, Astley, Wright, Cato, Williamson and Carey, to name a few — it seemed worth asking whether the principal, and for most of the twentieth century the only, newspaper servicing the region since 1903 — the Nambour Chronicle and the North Coast Advertiser — was part of a literary culture to which these writers felt they belonged and were contributing in the first half of the century. If not, why not? And if so, what kinds of contributions did it make to that culture? The tentative finding is that while the Chronicle did not make the kinds of direct, ‘homegrown’ contributions that some other metropolitan and provincial newspapers did, it maintained a literary presence and function by means of a regular diet of imported features, and by its particularly close and consistent relationship with the Nambour Town Library (and also, less consistently, with various School of Arts libraries in the district). The continuing connection between these two Nambour institutions — the Chronicle and the library — was personal and familial as well as civic in nature, and clearly suited the literary demands and expectations of a highly dispersed community that found its unity and identity by other means.

Counselling is not a well-understood concept. Many people who haven't undergone counselling believe a counsellor's role is to listen to a person tell their problem and then ‘help’ them by giving advice about what they should do. Children and young people struggle with the idea that a counsellor is not a human form of Google. It is not easy for them to hear that their problem is complex and that sometimes working out an action plan themselves, with guidance from a trained counsellor, offers better value to their lives in the long run. Kids Helpline is an Australian child and youth-focused telephone and online counselling service with a long-term view of what ‘helping’ looks like. The free-call 24/7 counselling line challenges young clients to see beyond the immediate gratification of receiving instantaneous ‘answers’ to problems, and to value more highly the process of learning problem-solving and decision-making skills, transferable from issue to issue over the course of a lifetime. This article seeks to highlight the early intervention and prevention role that child helplines play in young people's lives, encouraging and strengthening children and young people's early forays into exploring consequential thinking. The article describes the processes used by Kids Helpline counsellors to encourage children and young people to become action planners, and demonstrates young people's capacity to appreciate complexity and personal development.

There is increasing scrutiny on the factors necessary to ensure that youth development programs consistently enhance the learning and development of young people. One of these key factors is the involvement of high-quality youth work practitioners who can facilitate an individual or group process to the benefit of all participants. While the practice of reflective learning is a core best-practice principle of youth workers, there is little emphasis on their own structured learning and development beyond their initial qualification. Based on findings from a pilot project testing the first practitioner-led outcomes framework in New South Wales, Australia, this article examines the role of outcomes data in contributing to the ongoing development of youth workers and youth development organisations. It argues that external performance data is both critical to individual and organisational development, and can enhance existing reflective practices such as workplace supervision.

Lived experiences are the bones of this article: the lived experiences of delivering the resources needed for secure futures to young people in highly disadvantaged contexts. At the heart of the article is a biography of a young woman who captures the imagination. I share her story because the strength of her internal assets and her interest in articulating them contrast with her risk factors and the immediate impression of her demeanour. This article details the process of discovering these strengths through an interview that was part of a service evaluation. It offers a detailed walk through the processes that researchers and practitioners take to find the internal strengths of young people. In placing myself — an evaluation researcher — within the story, I offer a complete service landscape picture stretching from the lived experience of being under-resourced to the efficacy of interventions and then on to the production of policy evidence. Evidence is now a central plank in the struggle to close equality gaps, but its production is typically invisible. I set the scene with a brief account of myself — the storyteller — and then I turn to the question of what we broadly know about disadvantage experienced by young Australians. This is followed by a detailed account of the production of evaluation evidence. This inter-subjective account of the researcher and the researched, enables the story of a young woman who embodied and lived these ‘statistics’ to take flight. It offers insights into her assets and how they interact with the resourcing and policy landscape as she experiences it. Finally, I connect this story of how we find out about assets to the good practices identified in Seymour's Youth Development Research Project, which organises the articles in this issue.

There is a growing international emphasis on the use of research-based evidence to inform youth program policy, practice and funding priorities, and on involving young people as subjects and actors in gathering this evidence. Youth development organisations and programs increasingly are expected to engage in research that informs their program development and illustrates their effectiveness. Research partnerships that provide community access to external research expertise are one way by which youth organisations and programs can strengthen their internal research capacity. This article explores the youth-inclusive community–university partnership underpinning the Queensland Youth Development Research Project, and examines some of the multifaceted methodological and ethical dimensions of this approach across three dimensions of research: planning, doing and finishing. Successful youth-inclusive research requires paying attention to the diversity of challenges characteristic of youth research. These challenges, influenced by the complexity of child, young adult and older adult relationships, highlight the fundamental importance of understanding how power is expressed and mediated in youth research. Overall, the article argues that youth-inclusive research can be shaped to bring broader benefits to research, scholars, young people and the wider community beyond the aim of simply improving the research process itself.