This issue of Queensland Review, our second with Cambridge University Press, consists of two autobiographical reflections on Queensland in the 1950s, followed by six scholarly articles on various aspects of Queensland history – musical, literary, legal, architectural and institutional.

Queensland's heritage city of Maryborough was the focus of the Australian Garden History Society's 32nd Annual Conference, held from 19–21 August 2011. The Society is again delighted to collaborate with Queensland Review to bring the papers from this conference to publication, just as it did with those of the 2003 conference. Maryborough was selected for this event because the city centre is remarkably intact and coherent, and because of the appeal of its numerous charming ‘Queenslander’ houses to Southern delegates. The topics of the conference and the tours organised by the conference committee confirmed Garden History Society chair John Dwyer's opening description of Maryborough, quoted from the Australian National Trust's 1982 Historic Places publication, as ‘one of the four most charming places in Australia’.

Let me begin by acknowledging the Aboriginal presence in the district around Maryborough. The earliest European officials named this then-unknown area the Wide Bay, after the curving mainland between Fraser Island and Double Island Point that had been named ‘Wide Bay’ by Captain James Cook as the Endeavour sailed north along the coast in 1770.

My cousin Harvey was beginning to annoy the crap out of me. It was mid-1956 and I had just turned twelve. Harvey had been saying it all morning, over and over, like he was mesmerised: ‘Elvis the Pelvis, Elvis the Pelvis’, with a stupid grin on his face. It had been on the front page of the Courier-Mail that day – a story about a new American singer who wiggled his pelvis like a girl. There was even a little cartoon of someone contorting himself like Plastic Man. But the more Harvey said it, the more stupid it sounded. It was starting to coalesce into one ridiculous word: ‘Elvisdapelvis, Elvisdapelvis’. I shouted, ‘Will you cut it out? That is not his real name, you know. It's just what the papers say.’ Harvey picked up the paper again: ‘But it's funny. Look at him wriggling. Elvisdapelvis.’ We went down into the backyard to play badminton, but he wouldn't stop. ‘Elvis!’ he called out as he threw the shuttlecock up; and then, ‘da PELVIS!’ as he served it like a missile at me over the net. ‘If you don't shut up, I'm not playing,’ I said. ‘He's just another one they've all got it in for. You haven't even heard him yet.’

Queen's Park in Maryborough is one of many public gardens established in the nineteenth century in Queensland: in Brisbane, Ipswich, Toowoomba, Warwick, Rockhampton, Mackay, Townsville, Cairns and Cooktown. They were created primarily as places of horticultural experimentation, as well as for recreational purposes. They formed a local area network, with the Brisbane Botanic Garden and the Government Botanist, Walter Hill, at the centre – at least in the 1870s. From here, the links extended to other botanic gardens in Australia, and beyond Australia to the British colonial network managed through the Royal Botanic Gardens (RBG), Kew. It was an informal network, supplying a knowledge of basic economic botany that founded many tropical agricultural industries and also provided much-needed recreational, educational and inspirational opportunities for colonial newcomers and residents. The story of these parks, from the time when they were first set aside as public reserves by the government surveyors to the present day, is central to the history of urban planning in regional centres. This article provides a statewide overview together with a more in-depth examination of Maryborough's own historic Queen's Park.

Ten years ago, a colleague and I co-wrote an article about the Bunya pine tree in Queensland's literary history. In the course of our joint research, we made an interesting and surprising discovery: that there appeared to be two separate and distinct ways of seeing or imagining the Bunya in early Queensland literature – there were, in effect, two different Bunyas. One was the Romantic Bunya, a dark, gloomy, threatening tree, overwhelming in size, and sublime in its capacity to elicit awe and even terror from those nervous European explorers who found themselves surrounded by them. This is the Bunya described in Leichhardt's letters and in the novels of Rosa Praed, for whom it evoked anxieties about cannibalism among the Aboriginal tribes who gathered at the triennial feast.

The early development of Queensland's musical culture has only been partly documented. Despite a number of general surveys and a few specialist publications in recent decades, the largest body of research, dating mostly from the 1970s and 1980s in the form of academic dissertations, remains unpublished. As I demonstrated in a recent article for this journal, the narrative of Queensland's music can be traced in various ways, including focusing either on a specific organisation or ‘cause’ – phenomena that in turn interface with the efforts of countless individuals. An alternative strategy is to survey a specific genre of music-making, where likewise a diverse range of performers, repertoire, venues and events are part of the mix. This article endeavours to trace the development of chamber music in colonial Queensland as an important subset of an active concert life that included numerous popular entertainers, touring artists and musical-theatrical troupes. Support of chamber music, a so-called ‘high-class’ genre, was also viewed by some colonists as an emblem or barometer of increasing cultural self-worth, particularly in the two decades leading up to Federation.

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.

To date, histories of literary culture in Queensland have not paid particular attention to newspapers, despite the fact that metropolitan and regional publications carried considerable material that allows us insight into the ways in which books were circulated and evaluated. Reviews and essays sat alongside advertisements run by department stores, specialist retailers, large distributors and newsagents, in turn jostling for attention with interviews with authors, poems, reports of literary gatherings and substantial critical essays. This article offers a ‘case study’ of literary materials in The Brisbane Courier, part of a project on the representation of literature (broadly conceived) in Australian newspapers from 1930. The year 1930 was chosen because the interwar years are so frequently characterised, in discussion of the critical study of Australian literature in particular, as a time of neglect, and the Depression as a catalyst for the gradual narrowing of literary horizons. Our larger aim is to understand this historical period better, as well as to calibrate the discussion of Australian literature against the discussion of literature generally. By focusing on a single year for data collection, we have been able to assemble a rich and detailed picture of ‘talk about books’. This, in turn, has enabled us to analyse the significant differences between, for example, the ways in which books are discussed and represented as commercial and aesthetic objects in regional and metropolitan newspapers (see Dale and Thomson 2010).

With the right breeding and care, food plants have – so far – fed and sustained human civilisation. But how much can be grown, where and how reliably are emerging themes in the food security debate. Forty years ago, a non-patented gene from a quaint old grain saved the world-leading, multi-billion dollar US corn industry. It was fortunate for the multinational seed, fertiliser and pesticide conglomerates that someone in China had the foresight to conserve it.

The cultural association of Queensland with a condition of imagination or unreality has a strong history. Queensland has always ‘retained much of its quality as an abstraction, an idea’, asserts Thea Astley in her famous essay on the state's identity (Astley 1976: 263). In one of the most quoted descriptions of Queensland's literary representation, Pat Buckridge draws attention to its ‘othering’, suggesting that Queensland possesses ‘a different sense of distance, different architecture, a different apprehension of time, a distinctive preoccupation with personal eccentricity, and . . . a strong sense of cultural antitheses’ (1976: 30). Rosie Scott comes closest to the concerns of this present article when she asserts that this so-called difference ‘is definitely partly to do with the landscape. In Brisbane, for instance, the rickety old wooden Queenslanders drenched in bougainvillea, the palms, the astounding number of birds even in Red Hill where I lived, the jacarandas, are all unique in Australia’ (quoted in Sheahan-Bright and Glover 2002: xv). For Vivienne Muller, Buckridge's ‘cultural antitheses’ are most clearly expressed in precisely this interpretation of Queensland as a place somewhere between imagined wilderness and paradise (2001: 72). Thus, as Gillian Whitlock suggests, such differences are primarily fictional constructs that feed ‘an image making process founded more on nationalist debates about city and bush, centre and periphery, the Southern states versus the Deep North than on any “real” sense of regionalism’ (quoted in Muller 2001: 80). Queensland, in this reading, is subject to the Orientalist discourse of an Australian national identity in which the so-called civilisation of the south-eastern urban capitals necessitates a dark ‘other’. I want to draw out this understanding of the landscape as it is imagined in Queensland women's writing. Gail Reekie (1994: 8) suggests that, ‘Women's sense of place, of region, is powerfully constructed by their marginality to History.’ These narratives do assert Queensland's ‘difference’, but as part of an articulation of psychological extremity experienced by those living on the edges of a simultaneously ideological and geographically limited space. The Queensland landscape, I argue, is thus used as both setting for and symbol of traumatic experience.

Some years ago, when South-East Queensland was threatened with being overrun with Tuscan villas, the Brisbane architect John Simpson proposed that revenge should be taken on Italy by exporting timber and tin shacks in large numbers to Tuscany. The Queenslanders would be going home – albeit as colonial cousins – taking with them their experience of the sub-tropics. Without their verandahs but with their pediments intact, the form and planning, fenestration and detailing can be interpreted as Palladian, translated into timber, the material originally available in abundance for building construction. ‘High-set’, the local term for South-East Queensland's raised houses, denotes a feature that is very much the traditional Italian piano nobile [‘noble floor’]: the principal living areas on a first floor with a rusticated façade of battens infilling between stumps and shaped on the principal elevation as a superfluous arcade to a non-existent basement storey. Queensland houses were very Italianate.

John Carne Bidwill was born in 1815 in England and died in Queensland in 1853. His short life is relevant to Australia's garden history, botany, the horticultural use of Australian plants in European gardens and the colonial history of Sydney, New Zealand, Wide Bay and Maryborough. He may have been the first to introduce plant breeding into Australia. In a short life, and working in his spare time, he contributed more than many full-time and longer-lived horticulturists. This included discovering new species, crossing new hybrids (specific and inter-generic), and propagating and promulgating plants for the nursery trade and gardeners. His efforts are marked by his name gracing many Australian and New Zealand plants, exotic plant hybrids and modern suburbs of Sydney and Maryborough. This brief biography outlines Bidwill's time in Australasia and Queensland.

Entering Brisbane's South Bank from the Victoria Bridge, we walk past the concrete 1980s Queensland Performing Arts Complex, the brick Queensland Conservatorium and the modern, glass-fronted ABC Broadcasting buildings, then past assorted cafes and pseudo-beaches until reaching the Ship Inn. Here, we enter an enclave of mid- to late-nineteenth-century architectural gems, surrounding and focusing on the small but tranquil South Brisbane Memorial Park (1923). Opposite the Ship Inn (1865), Cumbooquepa (1891) and South Brisbane Town Hall (1891–92), and adjoining the Maritime Museum (1881), at the eastern edge of South Bank Parklands stands a magnificent old building now known as the Griffith Film School. This building has been the cultural hub of South Brisbane for 130 years, and provides a stylish, heritage ‘bookend’ to today's South Bank Cultural and Educational Precinct.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, Queensland courts tried, convicted and hanged sixteen men for the crime of rape. Of these, one was Caucasian, three were Pacific Islanders and twelve were Aboriginal. The Indigenous total would have been fourteen but for the fact that two other men convicted and sentenced for this offence evaded the gallows: one died in custody, the other was shot dead while attempting to escape. In each case of execution, the victims were European women or girls.

Brennan & Geraghty's Store Museum, owned by the National Trust, is a museum about itself, interpreting its own place within the community of Maryborough from 1871 to 1972. The museum exhibits its own collection of over 100,000 items, including business letters and trading records from the 1870s, curry powder from the 1890s, soap from the 1920s, and advertising material and other commercial items – all of which are provenanced to the store.

This article examines local publications regarding horticulture, botany and garden design from the first 50 years of Queensland history. The primary aim was to critically review the documentary data with a focus on understanding designed landscapes. A secondary objective was to reveal the major historical figures responsible for writing about design and horticulture in general between 1859 and 1915. This article represents a summary of these sources and their authors, rather than a detailed discussion about the contents of these writings. Apart from newspapers, which devoted columns to horticultural and on occasion aesthetic matters, there were various other types of relevant publications on designed landscapes in early Queensland, including books, almanacs, nursery catalogues, gardening guides, essays, annual reports, journals and bulletins. The following review is arranged chronologically by publication date, and divided across two major eras: 1850s–1870s and 1880s–1910s. The biographical information provided with each author emphasises their design experiences and influence as part of the evaluation of the significance of these sources for the research.

Reflecting on the first nine months of his role as Queensland's first State Ombudsman (then titled Parliamentary Commissioner for Administrative Investigations), David Longland noted that support for this independent watchdog of local and state government administration had not always been forthcoming:

Before I tell you the story of the Secret Park, I will give you some personal background. I am a baby boomer, born in Mackay when the sugar industry was ‘king’. My father was the Chief Cane Inspector for Farleigh Mill, which is situated about 8 miles north of Mackay. Thus my early childhood was spent in a large colonial-style house that sat in an acre of grounds. This was my first park. Until I went to school, I used to follow the Mill gardener, Mr Wagner, while he worked, and as I ate his morning tea, he ate mine. He capably mowed our large front lawn of quarter of an acre with a scythe. My eldest brother remembers my father's passion for large-scale planting ― the whole front yard planted once with tomatoes and once with pansies.