Cirrus@Austlit

'Brisbane was wiped off the face of the Earth and Queensland ceased to exist as a political entity under the combined military forces of Victoria and New South Wales during violent conflict at the end of the twentieth century. Brisbane was annihilated because of the un-Christian sins of its people, and the moral corruption of its leaders. The Queensland Defence Force was incapable of defending even itself, let alone defeating the invading troops. The pivotal event in this collapse concerned the alluring performances by a group of ‘lady parachutists’ who entertained the Queensland military forces, thereby distracting them and allowing the opposing forces to easily defeat them at the Battle of Fort Lytton.

That, at least, is the key to the plot of Dr Thomas Pennington Lucas's 1894 dystopian novel The Ruins of Brisbane in the Year 2000. The origin of this ‘lady parachutists’ myth, and the connections between this myth and the end of Queensland civilisation, led me to research a fascinating episode in Queensland's cultural history, and in particular Victorian notions of sexual propriety, ‘true manhood’ and the combined — albeit veiled — threats posed by unfettered female sexuality and male masturbation.'

'Reflecting on the process of writing history, Tom Griffiths argues that it is ‘the product of a fascinating struggle between imagination and evidence’. He adds that ‘it is our job to release reality, enable it to be seen, enable voices and silences to be heard’. Many Australian historians have expended considerable effort in seeking to understand the reality of the Great Depression of the 1930s, analysing its political, economic, social and cultural dimensions. There are still, however, ‘voices and silences to be heard’, including those of Brisbane women who suffered financial hardships in this period and who actively responded to those hardships by accessing government relief, generating income and reducing their and their families' expenditure. Attempting to retrieve and evaluate those responses suggests that the ‘voices’ are inevitably accompanied by ‘silences’ — that the pictorial, documentary and oral sources which offer valuable insights into Brisbane women's lives also prompt questions that cannot be answered from those sources. In addition to providing an overview of how Brisbane women ‘made ends meet’ during the Depression, this article emphasises the limits of historical knowledge. Those limits are especially apparent in my attempt to reconstruct — or imagine — the experiences of one of the hundreds of unemployed women who visited the Female Labour Exchange during the 1930s.' (Introduction)

'A few years ago, on a research trip to East Africa, I met a young man from my home town of Brisbane. Slightly sheepish at the implausible coincidence of our meeting, I struggled to say something that would be of relevance to both of us. ‘Nice place,’ I hesitantly opined of Brisbane. ‘Nah, shithole,’ he tersely said and, sensing that the conversation was at an end, I turned back to my Kenyan delicacy, spaghetti. The interchange reminded me of two things: first, it is always more difficult to leave home behind you than you think; and second, your home is not the same home as anybody else's.' (Extract)

'The Brisbane of my childhood was monocultural and ethnocentric, a very white affair. Like most Queenslanders of my generation, I had virtually nothing to do with Aborigines and was given little reason to understand their culture or to see the history of the European conquest of this country from their point of view. I certainly had no knowledge of the relationship between Aborigines and police, poisoned as it was by decades of policing which intimidated, imprisoned and eliminated Aboriginal ‘troublemakers’. Nor did I know of the confiscation of children of mixed descent from their Aboriginal mothers. Similarly, I was ignorant of how Queensland's paternalistic protectionist policies had compulsorily detained tens of thousands of Aborigines on ‘missions’ scattered throughout Queensland, an injustice compounded by the practice of quarantining their miserable wages into a ‘welfare fund’ which was used in ways that suited the government bureaucrats of the day.' (Extract) 

'This is a beautifully produced piece of 'community writing', published by the State Library of Queensland to celebrate a century of (white) women's suffrage, and the scant 40 years of Indigenous suffrage.

The book comprises two threads. One is a series of five commissioned essays; the other is a daisy chain of quotes from short pieces that a variety of Queensland women wrote in response to a call to imagine what life would be like for women. in 50 years' time. There are some engaging cartoons on women's suffrage from The Worker and The Australian Women's Sphere. The book is beautifully designed, with a dreamlike cover based on an artwork by Caitlin Reid.' (Introduction)