This paper provides a comparative perspective on the development of tourism in Queensland through analysing the history of tourism in Hawaii. Both Queensland and Hawaii are heavily dependent on tourism, with the future of tourism being a constant focus of public debate in each case. Since Hawaii embarked on tourism development decades before Queensland, the history of Hawaiian tourism may present some important lessons for tourism in Queensland. Also, Hawaii is Queensland's most important competitor for the Japanese and emerging Asian markets (such as South Korea, Taiwan and mainland China) in sun-and-surf tourism.

Brisbane is the kind of city that if it did not exist would have to be invented — and indeed it has by many of its writers. Its history of settlement and its political conservatism of the slash, burn and bulldoze variety has urged writers like Sam Watson in his novel The Kadaitcha Sung to depict it as a place of punishment, violence, racism and red-necked parochialism. The same sense of oppression informs David Malouf's mixed nostalgic references to the city as a place of beauty and boredom, a city you can love and hate in Johnno. In similar vein, Jessica Anderson in Tirra Lirra by the River, Angelika Fremd in The Glass Inferno and Janette Turner Hospital in both short stories and novels, depict Brisbane as a place one needs to leave but also a place where epiphanies are possible, and where the past haunts the present with a ferocious insistence. For novelists Rosie Scott, Janette Turner Hospital and Venero Armanno, Brisbane is simultaneously Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Many writers depict Brisbane as a great place to grow up in but you wouldn't want to live there — unless you are Hugh Lunn. Brisbane has been, and arguably still is by some writers, seen both favourably and unfavourably as a provincial backwater, unsophisticated and straight — still a frontier town in the popular and literary imagination if not in reality, a place where it is likely that you will know somebody who knows somebody you know. This is pointed out repeatedly by John Birmingham, author of the whimsical He Died With a Felafel in his Hand, by way of a distinguishing feature of flat life in Brisbane in contrast to other (Southern) capitals. In Brisbane, Birmingham writes:

Brisbane in the 1980s provides a case study of how a small, but intensely self-conscious experimental art-scene could be created by a very few people marginalised within a conservative culture. This was a uniquely Australian phenomenon, possible only in a country of densely-populated, capital cities, isolated from each other by great distances.

In 1945, as Australians unknowingly entered the last year of the Second World War, the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) in Queensland undertook a unique radio history project that ran for two years. The original intention of the programme, as suggested by its title The Q Story, appears to have been propagandist and thus in keeping with official policy: to provide morale-boosting entertainment with a nationalist theme in the context of wartime. As the programme progressed, however, it appears to have developed an alternative legitimacy in response to public demand.

The general consensus of historians is that Queensland was economically dependent on primary production, and that, compared to the southern states, its manufacturing sector was relatively underdeveloped and unsophisticated. Generally speaking, however, the discipline of economic history has not paid sufficient attention to Queensland history, nor has economic analysis in the general body of Queensland historiography been as rigorous and encompassing as it could be. Some of the main themes on economic development considered in Queensland historiography are the patterns of expansion and dominance of the pastoral industry, the growth in agricultural activity associated with closer settlement schemes, and from after the First World War, the institutionalised responses intended to give primary producers control over marketing their own commodities. This reflects the obvious rural bias that infused the political economy of the period. However, close empirical analysis of the economic processes and sectoral composition of Queensland's industrial base demonstrates that the economic significance of the secondary industry sector has been somewhat understated historiographically. Furthermore, the impact of internal and external political, financial and ideological forces that effectively marginalised early Labor government plans to encourage the development of secondary industries have not been adequately researched. To illustrate the context of this, an examination of the dominant patterns of government sponsored developmental policy needs first to be undertaken.

The paper takes as its point of departure the proposition that for the Liberals to return as a significant electoral force in Queensland state politics they need to be far more successful in metropolitan electorates than in the 1983–92 period.

The extent of the electoral advancement in the greater metropolitan area in 1995 is examined by a classification of seat types and by voting patterns in the recent past. It is found that such success was variable, heavily dependent upon the legacy of the National urban vote (1989–92) and the propensity of erstwhile ALP voters to opt for Others, rather than the Liberals when registering their primary vote.

In the 1830s and 40s, in the absence of any real law enforcement body, uncontained conflict between settlers and Aborigines in what was to become southern Queensland resulted in a spiral of violence that was at times gratuitous. Some whites killed blacks out-of-hand. For their part, Aborigines retaliated when and how they could. One settler, for example, told how in a little over two years fifteen of his shepherds had been murdered and whole herds of his animals had been butchered simply for the fat their kidneys contained.

Throughout the history of British colonies, the intermingling of commerce and ‘civility’ produced the kinds of colonies that Britain (like other imperial nations) most needed — colonies which not only produced raw materials or space for recalcitrant criminals, but also spaces in which imperialist discourses could educate, convert, and expand what was known of human consciousness. The imperial ‘duty’ was to civilise and conquer the unknown non-Western world for imperial consumption and ‘native’ edification. Through education, both religious and secular, European missionaries sought to inculcate native minds and bodies with the tenets of Western Christianity and culture. Whilst many recent studies have examined the ways in which imperial discourses conquered and codified ‘other’ cultures and peoples, the history of the missionary movement exemplifies a particularly overt form of the dissemination of imperial/Christian discourses. Through Christian teachings, which not only codified religious thinking but also appropriate social behaviour, imperial discourses shaped the manner in which life was experienced under Christian and imperial rule. This paper will explore the ways that missionary activity assisted and effected colonial control.

In December 1995 I spent a week with the Aboriginal community of Palm Island. Here seven elderly men and women shared with me their life stories; stories of families torn apart by police deportations, of confinement in dormitories, of hunger and hardship, of decades of forced unpaid labour, and recent years of struggle on partial wages. These Aboriginal workers have been fighting for ten years to force the Queensland government to abide by the laws of the nation. Citing 1975 Federal anti-discrimination legislation which confirms that no worker should be paid less than the legal entitlement solely on the grounds of race, religious beliefs, or gender, these workers had turned to the Human Rights Commission for justice.