Commentary: The grateful state: The 2020 Queensland election

This article explores the totemic 2020 Queensland state election, at which a two-term government plagued by a deteriorating economy and widely criticised travel restrictions amid the COVID-19 pandemic was returned with an increased majority. The article posits three arguments: that COVID-19 created a new ‘lens’ through which electors evaluated public policy and that allowed voters to frame public health and safety over the more usual measures of economic performance; that Queensland voters drew on their traditional political culture – especially their predilection for strong leadership and state chauvinism – to evaluate the Palaszczuk Labor government’s pandemic management favourably compared with contemporaneous events in Victoria; and that Queensland voters expressed similar confidence in a Labor economic recovery plan that contrasted favourably with the LNP’s economic platform. In sum, this article argues that Queenslanders in 2020 cast a ‘gratitude vote’ for a government they saw as being in control of both public health and economic recovery.

Smoke signalling resistance: Aboriginal use of long-distance communication during Australia’s frontier wars

This essay reconstructs defensive/offensive mechanisms of Aboriginal communication networks and presents historical examples of their application as a means of resistance during Australia’s frontier wars. The principal focus is on smoke-signalling systems, especially in Queensland.

Frank Wesley: The Queensland years

A little-known piece of Queensland’s art history is that the Indian artist Frank Wesley lived and worked in Queensland for nearly thirty years. From Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Wesley completed his art studies in India, Japan and the United States. He won the competition to design the urn that would hold the ashes of Mahatma Gandhi and had paintings exhibited in the Vatican Museum in Rome in 1950. His Blue Madonna painting was reproduced on the first UNICEF Christmas card. Wesley spent the last third of his life in Nambour. While he may chiefly be considered a watercolourist in the Indian Lucknow style, his media and practice were far more diverse. This article seeks to provide a brief overview of the work achieved by Wesley over this time, featuring biblical and Christian themes, and also landscapes and figurative pieces in a wide range of media and styles from various traditions. Among these are styles that emerged in more distinctive ways during his Nambour years, including the incorporation of the human figure or the hand of God in the landscape after seeing Indigenous rock art, and also the contrasting designs for two stained-glass windows.

Divided loyalties: St Joseph’s Nudgee College, the Great War and Anzac Day, 1915–39

St Joseph’s Nudgee College is an Irish Christian Brothers boys’ boarding school in Brisbane. It was established in 1891 to provide the children of Irish Catholics living in regional and remote Queensland and northern New South Wales with access to an education that would act as a vehicle for socio-economic advancement. The first decades of the college’s existence were nevertheless defined by two competing, sometimes contradictory imperatives. An often-belligerent determination to retain an Irish identity existed side by side with an awareness that a ‘ghetto mentality’ would hinder the socio-economic advancement of Queensland’s Catholics. The balancing act that this necessitated was particularly evident in the College’s mixed reaction to the outbreak of war in 1914 and the subsequent reticence to celebrate Anzac Day between 1916 and 1939. This article explores the College’s response through its Annuals (Year Books) and places it in the context of the Australian Irish Catholic experience of war and commemoration.

Sharing the waterways: Shark-proof swimming, penal detention and the early history of St Helena Island, Moreton Bay

This research examines the role that fear of sharks has played in the history of St Helena Island Moreton Bay, Queensland through analysis of historical records, newspapers, photographs and literature. The article begins with Aboriginal histories of St Helena Island, colonial settlement of the region and the building of a quarantine station. An exploration of the ways in which settlers’ fear of sharks supported the detention of prisoners in the St Helena Island Penal Establishment follows. The research finds that the warders’ shark-proof swimming enclosure on St Helena Island (1916) records a time when Queensland communities were first seeking to manage the recreational demands of swimmers in the context of a growing public fear of sharks.

Commentary: ‘Just the tip of the iceberg’: Queensland’s experience of the influenza pandemic of 1918–20

This article provides a synopsis of the spread of epidemic influenza throughout Queensland in 1919–20.1 Statewide the story was, to a greater or lesser extent, the same – regardless of occupation or whether one was from the city or the bush, on the coast or in the far west, no one was immune; even being 300 kilometres from the nearest epicentre of the outbreak was no guarantee of safety. An examination of the state’s newspapers, particularly the Brisbane Courier, makes it evident that outbreaks of influenza erupted almost simultaneously throughout the state. Aided and abetted by Queensland’s network of railways and coastal shipping, together with the crowding of people at country shows, race meetings and celebrations of the formal conclusion of World War I, the disease was swiftly diffused throughout the state. This article hopes to give the reader a sense of how the sheer scale and urgency of the crisis at times overwhelmed authorities and communities.