Mt Lindesay lies in the McPherson Range on the border between New South Wales and Queensland. Described by one early twentieth century writer as resembling ‘a crown pumpkin or a huge pudding mould’, its remarkable tiered upper section has long captured the imagination of those who care to gaze upon its vertical cliffs and dramatic lines.

Late in 1997 the Anglican Church in Torres Strait, for more than eighty years the bastion of Torres Strait Christianity, split, and in the following year the new Church of Torres Strait came into being, its congregations aligned with the traditional Anglican communion. What follows is an attempt to unravel the complex political, communal and doctrinal issues that caused the split, considering them in the light of an ongoing assertion of indigenous self-determination which can be traced back to the colonial era. The article also briefly traces the emergence since the early 1980s of a potentially liberating syncretic theology in the Torres Strait Anglican tradition which may hold within it the possibility of a reconciliation between bipotaim and pastaim, darkness and light, and tries to assess the implications of the split for this nascent theology.

The literary production of women in Queensland from Separation to World War II records and reflects on various aspects of colonial life and Australian nationhood in a period when white women's participation in public life and letters was steadily increasing. Unease with the colonial experience underpins many of the key themes of this body of work: the difficulty of finding a literary voice in a new land, a conflicted sense ofplace, the linking of masculinity with violence, and the promotion of racial purity. This chapter will explore how white women writers – for there were no published Indigenous women writers in this era – responded to the conditions of living and writing in Queensland prior to the social and cultural changes initiated by World War II.

This article derives from an ongoing project to map regional print culture in twentieth-century Queensland. An essentially qualitative methodology combined survey questionnaires with selected follow-up interviews. Conscious of the focus on metropolitan reading within existing Australia Council studies (1990, 1995), we were keen to explore issues of cultural consumption, distribution, exchange and community identity in a regional context. Subsequently, however, we interrogated the notion of regionality itself and identified a reading sub-group within the larger sample of fifty responses, living outside larger regional centres like Rockhampton and Townsville. The study documents and explores reading patterns of this rural group whose experiences can all too easily be subsumed within the broader ‘regional’ category. Lyons' and Taksa's valuable study of New South Wales, Australian Readers Remember, makes this assumption, admitting to ‘a definite bias in favour of Sydney at the expense of country districts’ while acknowledging that ‘cultural attitudes differ in rural environments’ (1992: 22–23).

Parades and processions were a major feature of life in Brisbane during World War I. Parades typically passed through the central business district turning the entire city into an urban backdrop for a public perfonnance. Recruitment was a major issue for Australia during World War I and military parades featured prominently in the life of the city. The Brisbane Courier described the recruiting marches as ‘long columns of robust, khaki-clad manhood’ which ‘have swung down the street, with soldierly gait, setting a bright, sturdy example to shirkers to “go and get their dungarees on”’. By positioning the soldiers as heroic, well-built, and positive, processions helped to generate public enthusiasm for the war and to convince prospective recruits to join up. The message to the community is clear: if our soldiers are fit and spirited, then the Allies will win the war. But the marches were not only a way to rally new recruits, they also acted as public displays of civic solidarity. Parades gave citizens the opportunity to demonstrate their patriotic feelings. ‘Patriotism’, whether for King, country, or for ‘our boys’, was the dominant performative concept. In this way, governments, community organisations, theatrical managements, and the residents themselves contributed to the establishment of certain war-time traditions for the representation of civic patriotism on the streets in Australia.

I am writing this paper on 26 January 2001 in the Queensland regional city Rockhampton. This is a public holiday for most Australians, Australia Day in the year of the centenary of Federation for many Australians, and Invasion Day for some Australians. This complex variety of attitudes to a single date encapsulates some of the themes to be explored in this paper.