Since invasion and subsequent colonisation, Australia has a history of preferring and privileging people who have white skin. As I have remarked elsewhere:

Opening address by Paddy Jerome, Jarowair elder and Bunya Mountains custodian, to the Bunya Symposium hosted by the Queensland Studies Centre and Global Arts Link for the On the Bunya Trail Project at the ECO Centre, Griffith University, 24 April 2002.

These lines from Judith Wright's poem At Cooloola (1955) remind us that Fraser Island is not just the world's largest sand island, but has a human presence. However, it is the largest sand island in the world, covering 1,840 square kilometres, and in 1992 it was inscribed on the World Heritage List in recognition of its outstanding and universal natural values.

Brisbane used to be called the Deep North. It spoke of a place where time passed slowly in the summer heat, where rednecks ran the parliament and the press, blacks died from beatings and the police thought themselves above the law. Even though Brisbane is situated in the bottom southeast quarter of the great northern state of Queensland, its sobriquet represented a state of mind.

Tourism has been a major driver of economic and social development in Queensland since the end of World War II. In 2011, tourism's direct contribution to the economy was estimated to be $7.8 billion, and it generated direct employment of an estimated 118,000 full-time equivalent jobs (Queensland Tourism 2011). The multiplier effects of tourism account for another $9.2 billion, making it the most important component of the state's service sector. These figures suggest that the approach adopted by the Labor government over the last two decades to manage and develop Queensland tourism has generally been positive. However, a closer examination of recent trends and criticisms reveals that visitor demand has flat-lined: the industry is struggling under the weight of global and local pressures, investment has slowed, and there are issues of stagnating demand, competitiveness, service quality, industry capacity and innovation. Moreover, Queensland is losing international market share compared with New South Wales and Victoria (Tourism Research Australia 2011). Given that governments have a key role to play in creating and maintaining policy conditions that contribute to both a healthy economy and social well-being, what have been the Queensland Labor government's contributions to tourism, and what are the key challenges into the future?

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.

Aboriginal peoples have been ‘doing business’ with foreigners for centuries (McCarthy 1939; Langton, Mazel and Palmer 2006), yet research to date has focused either on traditional exchange networks (Donovan and Wall 2004) or the impact of Western goods. Thus Harrison (2002) and Jones (2007) plotted Aboriginal exchange values and redistribution systems for iron and cloth. The general impression from such works is that, following European contact, Aboriginal society was radically transformed, while Europeans received curios. For example, Western goods stimulated a ‘glass artefact industry’ (Harrison 2003) and Aboriginal ‘doggers’ controlled dingos (Young 2010), but only officials or anthropologists had use for the resultant spearheads and scalps. At best, Aboriginal–European trade is considered inconsequential — ‘trinkets for trash’ — while Noel Butlin's (1994) analysis of the colonial economy entirely ignores it. Discussion of profitable exchange seems limited to the post-1950s arts trade (Kleinert 2010: 175). The notion that Aboriginal people might ‘flourish’ in trade or labour with Europeans (e.g. Anderson 1983) is discarded as absurd (White 2011: 81). This is perplexing, because colonial expansion saw commercial exchanges with Indigenous peoples all over the globe. Trade between Europeans and native people forms the opening chapter of national histories — for example, those of Canada and New Zealand (Innis 1999; Salmond 1997; McLusker 2006).

Nearly one in three students living in the segregated, multicultural city of Malmö, Sweden, fails to finish school with a completed diploma. To remedy this situation, students can attend introductory programs, but only some students who do so end up with a diploma. The aim of this article is to understand why young people from a migration background drop out of secondary school and why some of them drop back in and become school achievers. We explore what makes learning matter among youth who drop back into schooling. In seeking possible answers to this question, we listened to and learned from the students themselves. We hope readers will learn about the elementary forms of an enabling opportunity structure for school achievement, about the significance of relational capital, and about the deeply associated meanings of family and friendship and their importance to school success. The article is framed by the interdependencies of two conditioned temporalities: the temporality of the past — that is, the dropping-out process — and the temporality of the present, that is, the dropping-back-in process. We argue that school failure is not an inevitable phenomenon, and show that young people who are supported to drop back into schooling can discover that they are capable of learning with passion and perseverance.

Theorising about identity has become fashionable. During 1999 alone several conferences and seminars were dedicated to identities in Australia: “Alter/Asians: Exploring Asian/Australian Identities, Cultures and Politics in an Age of Crisis” held in Sydney in February, the one-day conference “Cultural Passports” on the concept and representations of “home” held at the University of Sydney in June, and “Asian-Australian Identities: The Asian Diaspora in Australia” at the Australian National University in September. To me as a Chinese who had his childhood and education in New Zealand this concern with identity is not exceptional: I remain a keen reader of New Zealand fiction and poetry in which Pakeha New Zealanders have agonised and problematised their search for identity as an island people living among an aggressive indigenous population and in an insecure dependent economy. New Zealand identity has always been problematised as has Chinese identity: what does it mean to be Chinese? Now Asian identity has become the current issue: “We're not Asians” was the title of the paper by Lily Kong on identity among Singaporean students in Australia. White Australians appear much more content and complacent with their identity and do not indulge as much in navel gazing. And yet it may be that it is the “Australian identity” that needs to be challenged and contested so that it becomes less an exclusively WASP-ish male mateship and more inclusive of women, Aborigines and Asians.

In the months leading up to November's G20 summit in 2014, Brisbane's residents would have been forgiven for anticipating the outbreak of a local civil war. Media outlets were leading with headlines stating, among other sensational claims, that ‘G20 anarchists vow chaos and mayhem for Brisbane's streets’, ‘Black Bloc tactics aim for Brisbane G20 shock and awe’ and ‘Destructive protest plan for G20’. Meanwhile, some of the most severe restrictions on civil liberties seen in Australia in recent years were legislated by the Queensland parliament. The G20 Safety and Security Act 2013 (Qld) (the G20 Act) was passed with little demur by a chamber that was only divided over the question of whether the laws were severe enough, with Queensland opposition police spokesman Bill Byrne MP declaring himself ‘surprised’ at the leniency of some of the sentencing provisions and the ‘minimalist’ approach to restricted areas. Of course, in the event the much-anticipated violence did not occur, and the media's pre-summit hyperbole was exposed as just that. Rather more prosaically — and accurately — the post-event headlines dutifully reported ‘Passionate, but mostly peaceful protests’ and ‘G20 protest day wraps up peacefully’. Given that previous G20 summits in London and Toronto saw outbreaks of considerable disorder, we might succumb to the temptation of declaring the peaceful protests in Brisbane to be a vindication of the heavy powers granted by the Queensland parliament. But we believe that to do so would be egregious. Here we reflect on the historical and political motivations underpinning the G20 Act, and draw attention to the rather more measured policing strategy employed by the Queensland Police Service (QPS). We argue that the safety and security of G20 participants and protesters owed little to the restrictive powers granted by the G20 Act, but resulted from a policing strategy that successfully married traditional and modern precepts of policing large events.

Much publicity has been given over the past decade to the discovery of the Wollemi pine (Wollemia nobilis) north of Sydney and its status as a ‘living fossil’. It is not generally realised that the bunya (Araucaria bidwillii), a unique part of Queensland's forests, has a similar status. The tree is the last surviving species of the section Bunya of the genus Araucaria. This section was more diverse and widespread during the Mesozoic, (Table 1), with some species having cone morphology similar to A. bidwillii appearing during the Jurassic with fossils extending into the northern hemisphere.

If, as a famous dead white European man once suggested, the point of studying racism is to change it, what can we learn about ending racism by studying it as whiteness? The first part of the paper summarizes some of the major issues and findings of recent studies of whiteness in the United States. It suggests that there is a hidden life at the heart of whiteness which is about preserving a set of specifically white constructions of masculinity and femininity, and that whites' lack of consciousness about this, and about white privilege in general, have undermined antiracist efforts. It summarizes some of the ways in which working-class white privilege is gendered, and how notions of masculinity and femininity are racial. Part II examines whiteness as ambivalence about the privileges and costs of whiteness as a useful entry point for understanding impulses to white antiracism.

Romantic Broome — the pearling centre of the North West … the locale of exciting novels! White-sailed luggers skimming across azure seas in the early dawn. Colowful Asiatics jostling in Sheba Lane — the famous street 0’ Pearls. And languorous tropical nights beneath the glittering southern Cross.

Positioning the Queensland Smart State Initiative requires a close appreciation of key international perspectives that are developing in this arena. In particular, the paradigm shift that has occurred from information economy to information society to knowledge society, sends powerful signals. Moreover, there is a developing consensus on what the ingredients of a knowledge society should be. Queensland now has a clear list of policy choices to make and some housekeeping to undertake.

The bunya pine has a special meaning for Queenslanders, being endemic to the Bunya Mountains and Blackall Ranges in the South-East corner of the state, with a small stand in North Queensland. The bunya holds particular significance for local Indigenous peoples. They are bound to the tree through custodial rights and obligations and systems of traditional environmental knowledge that incorporate ‘classification …empirical observations of the local environment… [and] self-management that governs resource use’, built up through generations of interaction with the bunya forests. Indigenous groups celebrated their spiritual links to the bunya pine in large seasonal gatherings where they feasted on its edible nuts and performed ceremonies, adjudicated disputes and traded goods. The bunya's majestic height, striking unique silhouette, dark green foliage, unique botanical features and Indigenous associations held a fascination for colonial artists, natural scientists, entrepreneurs and gardeners. Over the years they assumed custodianship of the bunya pine, assimilating it into Western scientific, economic, legal, horticultural, environmental and symbolic systems, which replaced Indigenous custodial rights, obligations and knowledge. The spectacular bunya gatherings were mythologised in colonial writings as mystical, primeval ceremonies and barbaric rituals. Despite ‘fierce and actively hostile tribal resistance’ to colonisation of their lands, Indigenous groups were progressively driven out of the bunya forests. Empty landscapes left by the retreating forests – victims of timber felling and land clearing – came to symbolise the vanishing ceremonies and dwindling Aboriginal populations of South-East Queensland. While surviving Indigenous groups were swept into centralised reserves and settlements from the late nineteenth century, so too the bunya trees were cordoned off in 1908, for their own protection, in Queensland's second national park at the Bunya Mountains, where they stood ‘like the spirits of the departed original Queenslanders, mourning over the days which are forever gone’.

But what am I to say of the Bunya-Bunya brush? About this majestic tree whose trunk looks like a pillar supporting the vault of Heaven?

Idyllic accounts of South-East Queensland's triennial bunya festivals - invariably written by Europeans - seem to float like beckoning mirages above a relative historiographical desert.' The story of the bunya gatherings in the coastal Blackall Ranges or in the Bunya Mountains, at the north-eastern periphery of the Darling Downs, is largely cut adrift from the intricate race relations history of these districts, its aura of ‘romantic reminiscence’ conveniently unsullied by surrounding patterns of colonialism, racism and violence which punctuate the extended process of European intrusion and displacement.

By the time that Europeans became acquainted with the bunya, the gum tree was already well established as the iconic Australian tree. The genus Eucalyptus, with all its locally specific variants, was both distinctive to the continent and widely dispersed throughout it. In contrast, the bunya tree (classified as Araucaria bidwillii in 1843) grew in a small area of what is now South-East Queensland and was seen by few Europeans before the 1840s, when Moreton Bay was opened to free settlement. The physical distinctiveness of the bunya tree, and stories of the large gatherings which accompanied the triennial harvesting of its nut, aroused the curiosity of early European explorers and settlers, and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the bunya tree achieved a special status in local civic culture. Although heavy logging had largely destroyed the great bunya forests, the tree was planted extensively in school grounds, around war memorials and in long avenues in parks.

There appears widespread consensus that economic downturns and peaks in immigration boost the appeal of populist parties. Economic crises, so the argument typically goes, increase fear and frustration among poor working-class voters. According to this ‘losers of globalisation’ logic, the recent revival of populist parties like One Nation should be attributed the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and a worsening global refugee crisis. At first glance, this logic seems plausible and intuitive. However, recent research has revealed that populist parties can thrive in times of economic prosperity, and attract large numbers of relatively affluent voters. According to this more recent research, support for populist parties tends to follow a V-curve pattern, with such parties attracting both voters who are ‘doing it tough’ financially (relative deprivation) and voters who enjoy above-average levels of prosperity (relative gratification). In this article, we analyse One Nation's performance in the 2017 Queensland state elections from this new vantage point. Although we did not encounter a clear V-curve pattern, the findings nonetheless confirm earlier research showing that ‘income’ is a poor predictor of One Nation support. Discussion focuses on directions for future research, and urges populism researchers to move beyond a narrow focus on crisis, deprivation, and ‘losers of globalisation’.

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: