Cirrus@Austlit

'I am honoured and delighted to have been invited, along with Associate Professor Jessica Gildersleeve, to edit this special issue of Queensland Review on the work of Thea Astley. I owe Jessica heartfelt thanks for her hard work and easy collegiality.

'Fifteen years since Astley’s death, the appearance of this collection of essays marks the development of a growing body of biographical and critical studies of her work. The essays complement Karen Lamb’s 2015 biography, Inventing Her Own Weather, and my critical monograph, The Fiction of Thea Astley (2016), as well as the collection of essays edited by myself and Paul Genoni, Thea Astley’s Fictional Worlds (2006). Most recently, Thea Astley: Selected Poems appeared in 2017, edited by Cheryl Taylor (who has an essay in this issue) and published by the University of Queensland Press (Astley’s publisher for many years).' (Susan Sheridan Introduction)

'This issue of Queensland Review takes as its focus the literature of the Sunshine Coast and its hinterland. Under a conceptually rigorous regime, it might be deemed necessary to interrogate some of these terms closely: both ‘literature’ and ‘the Sunshine Coast’ are both, for different reasons, potentially contestable notions — as also, in this context, is the word ‘of’: does it mean ‘from’ or ‘about’ or both? Our authors have elected not to contest these matters in the abstract, but rather to adopt broadly inclusive definitions of all three terms — and, for that matter, of ‘the hinterland’. Our cover image does something similar. An unattributed colour photograph taken nearly half a century ago, looking westward from the northern tip of Bribie Island (or thereabouts) to the Glasshouse Mountains, it captures — rather cunningly given the proximity of human habitation just outside the frame — something of the primeval beauty of both the littoral and the hinterland, a recurrent theme in this collection.' (Editorial)

'To posit Queensland's modernism may seem like an oxymoron. Queensland is often the butt of the southern states’ jokes. North of its more cultured and intellectual sibling-states (or so popular perception would have it), Queensland is ‘backward’, naïve, behind the times, provincial. According to this mythology, Brisbane is a glorified country town, Queenslanders refuse daylight saving for the sake of their very sensitive cows and curtains, and there is very little ‘culture’ to mention.' (Editorial introduction)

'This issue's cover image, ‘Parallel Universe: Stones Corner’, comes from the Museum of Brisbane exhibition, Navigating Norman Creek. Trish FitzSimons created a series of short documentaries that reveal the natural and social ecosystems sustained by Norman Creek, even as the city encroaches ever closer and more densely. The overhanging branches of her arresting image form a barrier that protects the stream, its wildlife and the local people who use the creek for recreation and dreaming. It also suggests that this place has survived because there is something impenetrable about it. This image sets up a theme about habitat and dwelling that loosely links the essays in this issue.' (Editorial introduction)

'Alfred Elliot's photograph on the cover of this themed issue is one of a series of images that captured Brisbane's reception for the Duke of York in 1927. The Duke, later King George VI, was in Australia to open the new Parliament House in Canberra. On glass plate, Elliot documented the decorated route of the royal procession. The cover image shows the centrepiece — an archway spanning Queen Street, which proclaims a ‘Citizen's Welcome’. Two decades earlier, this young immigrant had also photographed the crowd assembled in South Brisbane to vote in the 1899 Federation Referendum. Despite the establishment of the new Commonwealth of Australia in 1901, the citizens welcoming the Duke were still British. Modernity may have arrived in the shape of the automobile, but modern Australian citizenship was, and continues to be, a work in progress.'  (Editorial introduction)