A Queensland Reader

Abstract

An old friend, Jim Cleary, working on the monumentalBibliography of Australian Literatureat the University of Queensland, recently rang to tell me about the elusive modernist poet Anna Wickham. ‘Wickham’ is the pen-name of Edith Alice Mary Harper, ‘one of the most significant feminist poets of modernism’, who published between the 1910s and the 1930s. The author of over one thousand poems, covering a remarkable diversity of forms, Wickham was described in the memoir of American publisher Louis Untermeyer as ‘a remarkable gypsy of a woman’. During her tempestuous life, she mixed with members of the London Chelsea and Bloomsbury sets, plunged into the literary and artistic circles of the Parisiandemi-monde, had a brief sexual relationship with pioneer American modernist poet H.D. (Hilda Dolittle), was sexually spurned by lesbian heiress and literary patron Natalie Clifford Barney, and became closely aligned with D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda von Richthofen, as well as Dylan Thomas and Caitlin MacNamara, falling out with the latter couple after throwing a drunken ‘Thomas and fellow writer Lawrence Durrell out of the house’. She was also close friends with the erratic novelist Malcolm Lowry, whetted the appetites of Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, and helped to mentor the young Stephen Spender. Somewhat like T.S. Eliot's wife Vivien Haigh-Wood, she was incarcerated at one point in a mental institution by her husband, solicitor Patrick Hepburn, And, like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. she died by her own hand, hanging herself in her decaying home on Parliament Hill, London, following the freezing winter of 1947.

Diversifying the early history of the prefabricated colonial house in Moreton Bay

“…Thirty convicts, of whom two-thirds had volunteered, seeking to be granted tickets-of-leave after eighteen months' service, provided the labour force. 48 The prefabricated colonial house in Moreton Bay Civilians included the excursion leader, Surveyor-General John Oxley; Government Botanist Allan Cunningham; assistant surveyor Robert Hoddle and storekeeper and surgeon Walter Scott. 49 Convict sawyers, carpenters, joiners, plasterers, shingle makers, cabinetmakers, brickmakers, bricklayers, quarrymen, stonecutters, stonemasons, and lime burners made up the labour force.…”

“…61 What the Undambi Aboriginal people thought of the occupation on their lands in 1824 remains undocumented, but fevers, starvation and violent interactions with Aboriginal inhabitants contributed to the total abandonment of this settlement nine months later under the orders of Governor Sir Thomas Brisbane. 62 The establishment of a military garrison at Red Cliffe Point on the bayside of the northern entrance to Moreton Bay had been considered part of the British ring-fence strategy of defence against foreign invasion. 63 On finding an alternative, shorter and more defendable passage into Moreton Bay between Stradbroke and Moreton Islands, the military justification for the settlement disappeared.…”

Leaders and Political Culture

“…For a state reliant upon a frontier economy where growth was the principal measure of success, pragmatism ultimately meant that, until the 1990s, 'parliamentary procedures were little understood'. 52 From the first days after separation, Queensland politics fell into a pattern of pragmatism when Governor Bowen assumed a close working relationship that defied Westminster conventions. Instead of assuming the role of silent regal representative, Bowen instead took the lead, and at first excluded inaugural Premier Herbert from decision-making.…”

Topographies of reception

“…More than any other Australian state, Queensland lived through the latter war years in a condition of hyper-reality-an exaggerated social atmosphere of heroism and foreboding. 26 Here is Astley, uncannily similar, albeit writing of a peacetime moment (in The Slow Natives):…”