AustLit

'To date, histories of literary culture in Queensland have not paid particular attention to newspapers, despite the fact that metropolitan and regional publications carried considerable material that allows us insight into the ways in which books were circulated and evaluated. Reviews and essays sat alongside advertisements run by department stores, specialist retailers, large distributors and newsagents, in turn jostling for attention with interviews with authors, poems, reports of literary gatherings and substantial critical essays. This article offers a ‘case study’ of literary materials in The Brisbane Courier, part of a project on the representation of literature (broadly conceived) in Australian newspapers from 1930. The year 1930 was chosen because the interwar years are so frequently characterised, in discussion of the critical study of Australian literature in particular, as a time of neglect, and the Depression as a catalyst for the gradual narrowing of literary horizons. Our larger aim is to understand this historical period better, as well as to calibrate the discussion of Australian literature against the discussion of literature generally. By focusing on a single year for data collection, we have been able to assemble a rich and detailed picture of ‘talk about books’. This, in turn, has enabled us to analyse the significant differences between, for example, the ways in which books are discussed and represented as commercial and aesthetic objects in regional and metropolitan newspapers (see Dale and Thomson 2010).' [Source : Queensland Review, vol. 19, no. 2, p. 190]

'The cultural association of Queensland with a condition of imagination or unreality has a strong history. Queensland has always ‘retained much of its quality as an abstraction, an idea’, asserts Thea Astley in her famous essay on the state's identity (Astley 1976: 263). In one of the most quoted descriptions of Queensland's literary representation, Pat Buckridge draws attention to its ‘othering’, suggesting that Queensland possesses ‘a different sense of distance, different architecture, a different apprehension of time, a distinctive preoccupation with personal eccentricity, and . . . a strong sense of cultural antitheses’ (1976: 30). Rosie Scott comes closest to the concerns of this present article when she asserts that this so-called difference ‘is definitely partly to do with the landscape. In Brisbane, for instance, the rickety old wooden Queenslanders drenched in bougainvillea, the palms, the astounding number of birds even in Red Hill where I lived, the jacarandas, are all unique in Australia’ (quoted in Sheahan-Bright and Glover 2002: xv). For Vivienne Muller, Buckridge's ‘cultural antitheses’ are most clearly expressed in precisely this interpretation of Queensland as a place somewhere between imagined wilderness and paradise (2001: 72). Thus, as Gillian Whitlock suggests, such differences are primarily fictional constructs that feed ‘an image making process founded more on nationalist debates about city and bush, centre and periphery, the Southern states versus the Deep North than on any “real” sense of regionalism’ (quoted in Muller 2001: 80). Queensland, in this reading, is subject to the Orientalist discourse of an Australian national identity in which the so-called civilisation of the south-eastern urban capitals necessitates a dark ‘other’. I want to draw out this understanding of the landscape as it is imagined in Queensland women's writing. Gail Reekie (1994: 8) suggests that, ‘Women's sense of place, of region, is powerfully constructed by their marginality to History.’ These narratives do assert Queensland's ‘difference’, but as part of an articulation of psychological extremity experienced by those living on the edges of a simultaneously ideological and geographically limited space. The Queensland landscape, I argue, is thus used as both setting for and symbol of traumatic experience.' (Publication abstract)