AustLit

'The bunya pine has a special meaning for Queenslanders, being endemic to the Bunya Mountains and Blackall Ranges in the South-East corner of the state, with a small stand in North Queensland. The bunya holds particular significance for local Indigenous peoples. They are bound to the tree through custodial rights and obligations and systems of traditional environmental knowledge that incorporate ‘classification …empirical observations of the local environment… [and] self-management that governs resource use’, built up through generations of interaction with the bunya forests. Indigenous groups celebrated their spiritual links to the bunya pine in large seasonal gatherings where they feasted on its edible nuts and performed ceremonies, adjudicated disputes and traded goods. The bunya's majestic height, striking unique silhouette, dark green foliage, unique botanical features and Indigenous associations held a fascination for colonial artists, natural scientists, entrepreneurs and gardeners. Over the years they assumed custodianship of the bunya pine, assimilating it into Western scientific, economic, legal, horticultural, environmental and symbolic systems, which replaced Indigenous custodial rights, obligations and knowledge. The spectacular bunya gatherings were mythologised in colonial writings as mystical, primeval ceremonies and barbaric rituals. Despite ‘fierce and actively hostile tribal resistance’ to colonisation of their lands, Indigenous groups were progressively driven out of the bunya forests. Empty landscapes left by the retreating forests – victims of timber felling and land clearing – came to symbolise the vanishing ceremonies and dwindling Aboriginal populations of South-East Queensland. While surviving Indigenous groups were swept into centralised reserves and settlements from the late nineteenth century, so too the bunya trees were cordoned off in 1908, for their own protection, in Queensland's second national park at the Bunya Mountains, where they stood ‘like the spirits of the departed original Queenslanders, mourning over the days which are forever gone’.' (Extract)

'The gardens at Gracemere homestead established by the Archer family in the mid nineteenth century represent an extant example of historical subtropical gardens in Queensland. They are, for this reason, highly significant gardens within the Queensland context. However, this paper sets out to describe and appreciate their form, not within this context, but as a unique statement of identity. The gardens at Gracemere can in one sense be seen as embodying a dialogue with the past – they are at this level a cultural artefact created consciously in emulation of the Archer family home, Tolderodden, in Norway, and consciously or unconsciously as an expression of nineteenth century European middle class notions of the genteel domestic garden. This proposition rests on notions theorized in the literature on landscape and memory/landscape and identity; that identity – personal, class, national – is often inextricably bound up with nostalgic memories or histories of a homeland landscape.' (Extract)

'Webster's account of the 1918 Rockhampton flood, the greatest local inundation of its kind in the twentieth century, is a well-researched and well-written account of an eminently local event. At first perusal, it is an essentially visual history, well produced and amplified through the use of close-ups of the city and its inhabitants. Such was the historic obsession with flooding and flood photographs that both local press and cinema profited by recycling available footage as a spectacle for consumption. To be sure, the visual narrative reflects photographic conventions of the day but is also a quintessentially Queensland experience, one which provides a local point of reference and an abundance of anecdotes, some of which have been recounted here.' (Introduction)

'In Death of a Slaughterman, Dr Brian 0'Sullivan records his memories of working in the medical and hospital systems of Queensland's Monto District during the 1950s and 1960s prior to taking on a suburban general practice in Sherwood, Brisbane,; There is much to reveal in the life journey of this enthusiastic and energetic doctor who fervently pursued a diversity of medical and community involvements over his long career.' (Introduction)