This issue marks the twentieth anniversary of Queensland Review. It therefore seems appropriate to spend a few moments looking back over our two decades of continuous existence — something of a rarity among Australian scholarly journals. We do this not in a spirit of nostalgia (well, perhaps a little of that!), still less in a spirit of self-congratulation, but in a spirit of sober stocktaking and realistic appraisal.

Little-known and under-researched aspects of Queensland's history are the focus of the second issue of the twentieth anniversary volume of Queensland Review.

During the year 1888 — the centenary of white settlement — Australia celebrated the jubilee of Queen Victoria together with the advent of electricity to light Tamworth, the first town in the Southern Hemisphere to receive that boon. In the north-eastern colony of Queensland, serious debates involving local administrators included membership of the Federal Council, the annexation of British New Guinea and the merits of a separation movement in the north. In this distant colony, events in Ireland — such as Belfast attaining city status or Oscar Wilde publishing The happy prince and other tales — had little immediate global impact. Nevertheless, minds were focused on Irish matters in October, when the scion of a well-established west Ireland family — a select member of the traditional Tribes of Galway, no less — was named as the new governor of Queensland. The administrators of the developing colony roundly challenged the imperial nominators, invoking a storm that incited strong opinions from responsible governments throughout Australia and around the world.

At the end of his working life as a medical bureaucrat, Raphael Cilento twice tried his hand at Australian federal politics. After an initial joust at a Senate seat, he was encouraged by the fledgling Australian Democratic Union to try the House of Representatives. His choice of electorate was heroic. The seat of McPherson (Qld) was held by Arthur Fadden, one time prime minister and perennial member for this Darling Downs electorate. Standing as an ‘Independent Democrat’, Cilento targeted the Italian community in Stanthorpe, a district where he picked up half the vote in his otherwise unsuccessful campaign. His candidature attracted some notice. Brisbane's Truth described Sir Raphael as ‘the most distinguished Queenslander to ever enter the Federal political arena’. This might seem a little hyperbolic, but seen in the larger context of Cilento's national and international work, it was a defensible proposition. Seen literally, it is slightly less defensible since Cilento was not Queensland born. Rather, he came to adopt Queensland — and to seek to advance its standing as an example of successful white settlement of the tropics.

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).

The Pioneer Valley at Mackay is the centre of a thriving sugar industry that supports 120,000 people and brings millions of dollars into the Australian economy through milling sugar cane. The valley presents a vista of kilometre after kilometre of flat green and brown symmetrical patterns. In the growing season, rectangles striped with furrows carry on as far as the eye can see, blending into green blocks as the cane grows, with the pattern broken only by natural topographic features such as creeks, the Pioneer River, occasional hills and small towns. Cane totally dominates the flat land, but at the edges of the valley it is gradually overshadowed by the brown and grey of the higher untamed areas. Within this green, brown and grey picture is another pattern, the imposed logistics of roads, railways, and glistening galvanised roofs on the houses and sheds, softened by the dark green of mango and other fruit trees, stately hoop pines, fig and shade trees. On the edges of the valley floor, the hills become more numerous, feeding into the surrounding mountain ranges. The visual pattern partly relates to topography, but includes elements dating back to the shapes of the first land selections and subsequent surveying from the 1860s onwards, as well as the need for road and rail links between early settlements, and more recently by the needs of modern mechanical farming.

In late 1907, Charles Fraser, the Victorian government entomologist, travelled to North Queensland. His observations of the flora and fauna in this part of Australia were later published in the Victorian Naturalist. However, this journey was not motivated entirely by his desire to study natural history. As a sufferer of ‘rhematic [sic] troubles’, he spent a few days soaking in the mineral-impregnated waters at Innot Hot Springs, a small inland village approximately 150 kilometres south-east of Cairns. First established in the late 1880s, the tiny settlement is still visited during the winter months by many ‘grey nomads’ en route to Karumba, where the fishing is promoted as being excellent. They break their journey at Innot Hot Springs to soak in the indoor or outdoor swimming pools filled with mineralised water of varying temperatures sourced from the nearby Nettle Creek. Some view it simply as a place to relax after the long journey from southern Australia, having perhaps already tried the artesian bore water baths at Moree and Mitchell en route. Others may consider the mineral waters to have healing qualities; like Charles Fraser, they are literally ‘taking the waters’.

On 26 April 1937, German bombers attacked the civilian population in the Basque market town of Guernica. The event has become synonymous with the brutality of the Spanish Civil War, but its impact on the Basque diaspora has not been the subject of detailed investigation. Large numbers of Basques emigrated to live in north Queensland, and the overwhelming majority can be traced to the hills surrounding Guernica. Those living in Australia only became aware of the atrocity over time, but the symbolic importance of Guernica increased over the subsequent decades as hundreds more Basques arrived in Queensland's north. The bombing itself was traumatic, but it was understood in the context of an emigration and historical injustice wrought by Spain's Nationalist dictatorship.

Variously described as ‘the outstanding feature of the show’, the ‘finest . . . in Australia’ and ‘a breath-taking experience’, the district exhibits competition is a central and much-loved feature of the annual Brisbane Exhibition, Queensland's premier agricultural show. Although the contest has attracted enthusiastic crowds and substantial media attention across more than a century, scholarly analysis has been limited. Yet, as other studies have demonstrated, exploring key aspects of the histories of agricultural shows not only provides insights into some of post-contact Australia's oldest and most popular events, but also enriches our understanding of the ideas that have sustained and shaped our communities. This article contributes to that historiography through an analysis of the origins and subsequent meanings of the Brisbane district exhibits competition.

Environmental issues have been politically salient in Queensland throughout recent decades of Labor dominance. While in general Labor has benefited politically from being regarded as the ‘greener’ of the major parties, state Labor governments have also sometimes found environmental policy difficult to deal with. This is partly a reflection of the political passions that environmental and resource use conflicts can generate and is partly due to the pressures on environmental assets from population and economic growth in Queensland; primarily, however, it reflects the difficulty of reconciling environmental and sustainability policy goals with the historically dominant model of development in Queensland.

American Librarian Ralph Munn's historic tour of Australian libraries in 1934 is well documented. Along with Ernest Pitt, Chief Librarian of the State Library of Victoria, he spent nearly ten weeks travelling from Sydney and back again, visiting libraries in all the state capitals and many regional towns throughout the country. Munn's trip was funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which was then, through its Dominions fund, turning attention to philanthropic opportunities in the Antipodes. The resulting report, Australian Libraries: A Survey of Conditions and Suggestions for their Improvement (commonly referred to as the Munn–Pitt Report) is often credited with initiating the public library movement in Australia.

The concept of sustainability is often connected with environmental and socio-economic debates, but it is just as central to cultural developments. Historical studies of music-making within a local context often reveal that any ‘good idea’ needs both initiators and supporters, and also patrons and advocates. For example, the story of chamber music in early Queensland is bound up with contextual factors such as organisational and physical infrastructure and, more importantly, the contributions of leaders whose long-term vision encouraged audiences to participate. While important beginnings appeared during the colonial decades, changing circumstances required new approaches to sustaining chamber music traditions in the post-Federation era.

Regional Queensland and social media are not standard bedfellows in studies of Australian media use. Yet regional community responses to recent natural disasters on Facebook in particular warrant further investigation. Indeed, while the increasing use of social media by government organisations during disasters and other crises is by now well documented, the comparative surge in community uses — and particularly regional community uses — has received considerably less attention. This article is broadly interested in regional Queensland uses of Facebook during the 2011 Queensland floods, specifically the ‘Toowoomba & Darling Downs Flood Photos & Info Page’ (https://www.facebook.com/TmbaLockyerFloods?fref=ts 10 January 2011). Drawing on an interview with the page's creator, I consider both the speed and apparent efficacy of the page as a tool of grassroots (or unofficial) crisis communication, partly compared with its most obvious official counterpart, the Toowoomba Regional Council's Facebook page. Ultimately, I argue that the ‘Toowoomba & Darling Downs Flood Photos & Info Page’ offers an emphatically more useful model of social media-based crisis communication from which others might draw.

Dr Gertrude Langer arrived quite by chance in Brisbane in 1939 as a refugee from Hitler's Europe. She was a young, elegant Austrian refugee with a PhD in art history from the University of Vienna. After arriving in Australia, Gertrude and her husband, Dr Karl Langer, had hoped to settle in Sydney, but Karl's work as an architect moved them on to Brisbane. Gertrude Langer would become an important figure in Brisbane's post-war art scene through her salon-style lectures, art criticism and work with the Australia Council. She strongly believed that the arts were an important part of a community, and for this reason became a champion for the cause of contemporary art in Brisbane.

Mt Isa's story is an Australian foundation epic. Only heroic struggle could have dug the mine and built the city a thousand kilometres from the nearest deepwater port, in a scorched red landscape sparsely dotted with spinifex and eucalypts. In Mines in the spinifex (1970), Geoffrey Blainey celebrates the fortitude of the prospectors and entrepreneurs who overcame these obstacles to found what he calls ‘the greatest Australian mine of the [twentieth] century’ (1970: 64).

When analysed in context, prison graffiti can provide valuable insight into the lived experiences of incarcerated individuals. This study uses Brisbane's Boggo Road Gaol as a case study site to evaluate the importance of historical, social and political context in the interpretation of prison graffiti. Visual ethnographic methodology was employed to allow the triangulation of various contextualising resources: newspaper articles, government reports, biographies and institutional records, and the graffiti. We discuss the theme of resistance as an example to demonstrate the value of the contextual analysis of images. By locating the graffiti within the historical, social and political context that it was produced, the significance of the graffiti is identified, and the ambiguity associated with the interpretation of images potentially is reduced. A contextualised analysis of prison graffiti provides a narrative of prison life, allowing the independent expression of prisoners to be ‘heard’.

The themes of cultural dislocation and the struggle to feel ‘at home’ in a new land figure prominently in Australian literature, and considerable critical attention has been devoted to the distinctive articulations of these preoccupations by well-known writers of Irish birth or descent, such as Victor Daley, Bernard O'Dowd and John O'Brien. Queensland's Irish writers, however, have been largely forgotten or overlooked — both individually and as a group.