Imagination

How people have imagined Queensland.

Imagination: how people have imagined Queensland

As essayist and literary critic Nettie Palmer put it, in 1927, ‘Queensland is notoriously huge: most parts of it are still unknown, except to the people who live in them’.

Brisbane River and Moreton Bay: Thomas Welsby

Writer Thomas Welsby fell in love with Moreton Bay from his first sighting of it at age nineteen. Thus began, too, his love of the water, of sailing and of fishing and from that time accordin

Imagining Queensland in film and television production

There is a certain frisson of recognition when places entwined in one’s personal life are suddenly there on the screen as story settings in features or television dramas.

Literary mapping of Brisbane in the 1990s

The literary mapping of Brisbane underwent a major shift in the 1990s.

Looking at Mount Coot-tha

Mount Coot-tha is one of the dominant visual landmarks of Brisbane.

Mapping the Macqueen farm

In Adventure in watercolour: an artist’s story (1948), Queensland painter Kenneth Macqueen (1897-1960) called for art that walked ‘steadily and simply and, by its very truth to the environ

Mapping the mythic: Hugh Sawrey's ‘outback’

Hugh Sawrey became one of the best known painters of the Australian outback. Inspired by bush poets and his own outback experiences, his first major works were murals in Queensland pubs.

People’s Republic of Woodford

The Woodford Folk Festival is an annual celebration of culture: the arts, the environment and the carnivalesque. According to Neil Cameron in 1995,

The Pineapple Girl

Sometime in 1924 in London, a little girl, of no more than five years old, I fancy, sat down in a crate of Queensland pineapples and smiled.

The writers of Tamborine Mountain

Since the novelist, poet and essayist, Mabel Forrest, first made her home there in 1929, writers and artists have been attracted by the beauty, peace and mild climate of the Tamborine Mountain area

Vance and Nettie Palmer

'Queensland is notoriously huge: most parts of it are still unknown, except to the people who live in them', found Nettie Palmer in 'Southern Queensland: an emerging picture' in 1927.