'Patrick Buckridge reveals the extraordinary number of literary and cultural societies that flourished in Brisbane in the 1920s, contributing to what he describes as 'the active creation of a liberal polity' during the otherwise turbulent interwar period. Despite this apparently local focus, many, indeed most, of these societies, as their names indicate, were affiliated with wider forms of imagined community : L'Alliance Francaise, the Brisbane Shakespeare Society, Der Brisbane Goeth Bund.' (Kirkpatrick, Peter and Dixon, Robert: Introduction
xiii)