This discussion of George Loyau's prolific literary output will examine journalism in the wider context of literary production and raise questions about the role of journalists as entertainers as well as social and political commentators. Journalism remained Loyau's working profession for four decades (1860–1898). Yet it is easily overlooked because of his significant contribution to early Australian poetry and history. Loyau's verse and fiction were widely disseminated in the colonial press of the 1860s and 1870s, a time when he wrote for metropolitan and regional papers in all the mainland colonies except Western Australia. Regional Queensland, however, was the starting point and final location for a remarkable career which combined periods of public prominence with harrowing personal adversity. Indeed, the distinctive irony of Loyau's career is that adversity was never more acute than in those periods when his reputation as a poet and historian was being made. By contrast, regional journalism provided Loyau with the material means and social support he lacked in the large colonial centres. A recurring theme for the larger study of colonial journalists is the question of mobility. While metropolitan and political reporting were mostly highly prized by ambitious young journalists, Loyau's career confirms the role of regional networks in journalism and the existence of a class of readers who continued to crave popular fiction and entertainment as weekly staples. Although such journalism remained at odds with the political culture of the Fourth Estate, Loyau's literary persona proved both durable and complex, combining a deepseated sense of cultural inferiority with the celebration of the ephemeral through the practices of popular journalism.

The colonial editor enjoyed a privileged position in nineteenth century Queensland, and through the newspaper editorial provided a regular social and political commentary. An analysis of the character and influences of an editor provides valuable insights into the forces that shaped the community and, at times, the colony. In the second half of the nineteenth century a popular vocation for many men with at least a passing education was journalism. Their creative spirits were to find an outlet in the plethora of provincial papers. In this whirlwind of journals, papers, and issues, it was Thadeus O'Kane of Charters Towers who stood head and shoulders above his scribbler peers. O'Kane was to be an inspiration to his colonial colleagues as a provincial catalyst for polemical discussions on the many popular political and social treatises and ideas of the late nineteenth century.

These words express the heart of Farnham Edward Maynard's commitment to British seamen striking while in Australian ports during August to November 1925. Two principal issues arose to precipitate this strike. Uppermost was the poor level of pay provided by the shipping companies, and associated distress for the seamen's families when their principal ‘bread-winner’ was overseas. Their wages had been reduced from £10 per month to £9 by a board on which they believed they had inadequate representation. Such low wages were not, they maintained, adequate recompense for their work, particularly when coupled with the second issue: the living conditions aboard ship. Still angered by the waterside workers' industrial action at the end of 1924 and the following riots in Sydney during January 1925, local industry had little sympathy with the demands of overseas militants, however; nor had the Australian government, which made it clear that British seamen responsible for causing strike action in Australia would be deported. Not even the Waterside Workers' Federation, blamed for many of the recent troubles, supported the British seamen; declaring that the action proved the futility of a minority opposing the great majority', and provided ‘sufficient proof that no section of a union can accomplish success when attempting to achieve an objective against its executive, combined with majority rule’. The seamen were advised ‘to take their disputes to where they belong and rectify them there’.

So rhapsodised the editorial in the Toowoomba Chronicle on 14 June, 1890. From the nineteenth century the drop in temperature which greeted the traveller's ascent to the elevated tablelands of the Darling Downs was greeted as a sign of a more vitalising and health-giving climate than the sub-tropical humidity of the Brisbane coastal plain. Katie Hume in 1866 felt Toowoomba's air 'cool and English like … after the heat of Brisbane’, while the consumptive Walter Coote argued in 1887 that the Downs possessed ‘a climate as healthful and even invigorating as that of any place in the World’ (Hume 160, Coote 201). The Social-Darwinist connection between the moral character of a people and the temperature of their climate was a frequent theme of nineteenth century culture. The imperial triumphs of European civilisation were often explained by Europe's temperate climate, for the cooler the climate the more ‘civil’ the people are deemed to be (Spurr); and Europe's temperate climate was also an acknowledged cause of the reasoned moral restraint of the civilised colonial settler. Thus the celebration of Toowoomba's ‘European’ climate served to familiarise an alien Australian space as a place which would support European settlement.

In the 20 years before the Second World War the frontier war dragged to a close in remote parts of north Australia with the 1926 Daly River massacre and the 1928 Coniston massacre. There was a rapid decline in the Aboriginal population, giving rise to the idea of the ‘dying race’ which had found policy expression in the State ‘Protection’ Acts. Aboriginal and Islander labour was exploited under scandalous rates of pay and conditions in the struggling north Australian beef industry and the pearling industry. In south east Australia, Aborigines endured repressive white control on government reserves and mission stations described by some historians as being little better than prison farms. A largely ineffectual Aboriginal political movement with a myriad of organisations, none of which had a pan-Aboriginal identity, struggled to make headway against white prejudice. Finally, in 1939, John McEwen's ‘assimilation policy’ was introduced and, though doomed to failure, it at least recognised that Aborigines had a place in Australia in the long term.

This paper focuses on the power and control over Aboriginal lives from the mid 1940s to the 1960s during the period of administration of the Queensland Preservation and Protection Acts, 1939 to 1946, whose provisions — including control of wages, property and people's movements — are indicative of increasing systematic management of Aborigines.

This paper discusses the ways in which ideas of ‘the tragic’ function in recent narratives of contact history in Australia. ‘Contact history’ is used here to refer to first and second generation contact between Aboriginal people and the European invaders in Australia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and I shall be primarily concerned with those historical narratives which attempt to ‘re-write’ history to include Aboriginal responses during this period. Within Australian historiography this project is said to have commenced in the 1970s, prompted by wider events in the Australian community such as the Aboriginal land rights movement (Curthoys 1983, 99). One of the best-known contributors to this project of inclusion has been Henry Reynolds, now the author of eight books dedicated to it. I shall be examining two of Reynolds' most recent contributions to this area: With the White People (1990) and The Fate of a Free People (1995). At the same time that Reynolds and other professional historians have engaged in this project, there has been an increasing body of work by Aboriginal writers — much of it classified as fiction rather than academic historiography — examining these same themes of initial contact and resistance to invasion. In order to clarify some of my arguments about the function of the tragic mode in Reynolds' work, I shall also discuss a recently published short story by the Aboriginal writer, Gerry Bostock.

This paper will examine aspects of voluntarism and the voluntary principle on the home front in Australia during World War Two. The general assumptions which pervade historical texts and public consciousness consistently refer to voluntary work as simply knitting socks and balaclavas and little else. In fact the voluntary work carried out during World War Two was far more encompassing, complex and multifaceted. It may be surprising to some, although not, I suspect, to those who lived through the war, that voluntary work was extensive, crossed class and cultural boundaries, and had the overwhelming support of the community. Although this paper will focus on the state of Queensland, it is important to give a general outline of the types of voluntary work carried out on the home front, and what was involved.

‘War's End’ must of necessity be linked with war's beginning and the years between. The exodus from North Queensland to the south (mainly Brisbane) after the fall of Singapore, and the transition from a rural environment to city living, offers a unique insight into war's effect and aftermath from a woman's point of view. This exodus south, which swelled the ranks of women in a burgeoning industrial and martial clime, wrought enormous social upheavals never before experienced in living memory.