This study arose from an encounter with some paintings (still lives, Madonnas and other religious or genre scenes of mainly seventeenth-century Northern European origin) at the Queensland Art Gallery in 2012. They were intriguing because they were part of a bequest by squatter and colonial parliamentarian Thomas Lodge Murray-Prior (1819–92), which formed the nucleus of the original Queensland Art Gallery collection when it opened in 1895. Little is known about them, but they raise questions: What part did they play in the life of the donor? Did he collect them merely to burnish his reputation? Were they hung in a town house or in the bush? How did they enter the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery and what reception did they receive? What subsequent use has been made of them? This article examines the collection and the role it played in Murray-Prior's life, arguing that it is a coherent collection of Northern European art and more than a status symbol. Furthermore, it has much to say about a period that saw the development of art collecting and exhibiting. As such, it is the perfect foundation for an art gallery in colonial Australia.

Thea Astley once commented that, ‘everybody is living on a cyclonic edge’, and that many of her characters were ‘always touching on the edges of cyclones’. In Queensland literature, cyclones often appear as tropes of apocalypse: new worlds of person and place are revealed out of the destruction of the old. In Astley's novel A Boat Load of Home Folk (1968), the tempestuous forces of personal cyclones, as well as those of the cyclone destroying the island around them, overtake a group of stranded cruise passengers, and consequently place and person assume unique meanings as the characters try to survive. Although one of her least-known works, A Boat Load of Home Folk is a profound novel of human experience in which Astley uses the elemental cyclone as a trope of apocalypse that is both an instrument of destruction and a catalyst of revelation.

Gold Coast beaches oscillate in the cultural imagination between everyday reality and a tourist's paradise of ‘sun, surf and sex’ (Winchester and Everett 2000: 59). While these narratives of selfhood and becoming, egalitarianism and sexual liberation punctuate the media, Gold Coast literary fictions instead reveal the beach as a site of danger, wholly personifying the unknown. Within Amy Barker's Omega Park, Melissa Lucashenko's Steam Pigs, Georgia Savage's The House Tibet and Matthew Condon's Usher and A Night at the Pink Poodle, the beach is a ‘masculine’ space for testing the limit of the coastline and one's own capacity for survival. This article undertakes a close textual analysis of these novels and surveys other Gold Coast fictions alongside spatial analysis of the Gold Coast coastline. These fictions suggest that the Gold Coast is not simply a holiday world or ‘Crime Capital’ in the cultural imagination, but a mythic space with violent memories, opening out onto an infinite horizon of conflict and estrangement.

The histories of Australian Aboriginal and African American peoples have been disregarded for more than two centuries. In the 1960s, Aboriginal and African American civil rights activists addressed this neglect. Each endeavoured to write a critical version of history that included their people(s). This article highlights the role of Aboriginal Australian poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal (formerly Kath Walker) (1920–93) and African American poet Sonia Sanchez (born 1934) in reviving their peoples’ history. Using Deleuze and Guattari's concept of ‘minor literature’, the essay shows how these poets deterritorialise the English language and English poetry and exploit their own poetries as counter-histories to record milestone events in the history of their peoples. It will also highlight the importance of these accounts in this ‘history war’. It examines selected poems from Oodgeroo's My People: A Kath Walker Collection and Sanchez's Home Coming and We A BaddDDD People to demonstrate that similarities in their poetic themes are the result of a common awareness of a global movement of black resistance. This shared awareness is significant despite the fact that the poets have different ethnicities and little direct literary impact upon each other.