Imagining the Hinterland
Literary Representations of Southeast Queensland Beyond the Brisbane Line
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1321816600003913Keywords:
Southeast Queensland, literary landscape, stories, the bunya festival, Aboriginal oral traditionAbstract
Southeast Queensland — the region encompassing Coolangatta and the McPherson Range to the south, Cooloola and the Blackall Range to the north, and the Great Dividing Range to the west — represents one of Queensland's most significant literary landscapes. For millennia, this area — defined by mountains and waterways — contained important gathering places for ceremonies and trade, and its inhabitants elaborated the meaning of the landscape in a rich complex of stories and other cultural practices such as the bunya festivals. Colonisation disrupted but did not obliterate these cultural associations, which remain alive in the oral traditions of local Aboriginal people and, in more recent times, have surfaced in the work of writers like Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Sam Watson.
References
See, for example, Flannery, Tim, ed., Terra Austral is: Matthew Flinders’ Great Adventures in the Circumnavigation of Australia (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2000); John Oxley, Report of an Expedition to Survey Port Curtis, Moreton Bay, and Port Bowen (London, 1825); F.W. Ludwig Leichhardt, The Letters of F.W. Ludwig Leichhardt, collected and newly translated by M. Aurousseau, 3 vols (London: published for the Hakluyt Society by Cambridge University Press, 1968).
Petrie, Tom, Tom Petrie's Reminiscences of Early Queensland, recorded by Constance Campbell Petrie (Brisbane: Watson Ferguson, 1904): 12.
Bell, Enid, Legends of the Coochin Valley (Brisbane: Bunyip Press, 1946); Thomas Welsby, The Collected Works of Thomas Welsby, ed. A.K. Thomson, 2 vols (Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1967). Welsby's seven books on Moreton Bay were originally published between 1905 and 1937.
Quoted in Brady, Veronica, South of My Days: A Biography of Judith Wright (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1998): 192.
Walker, Kath [Oodgeroo Noonuccal], Stradbroke Dreamtime (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1972).
Corkling, F., ‘Moreton Bay’ in Steele Rudd's Magazine, October 1905: 867–72.
Moynihan, Cornelius, The Feast of the Bunya: An Aboriginal Ballad (Brisbane: Gordon and Gotch, 1901): 14, 31–33, 23, 22. Connolly, Roy, Southern Saga (London: Grayson and Grayson, 1940). See also Belinda McKay and Patrick Buckridge, ‘Literary Imaginings of the Bunya’, Queensland Review, 9(2) (2002): 65–79.
Praed, Rosa, Policy and Passion: A Novel of Australian Life, 3 vols (London: Richard Bentley and Sons, 1881). Rosa Praed, The Head Station: A Novel of Australian Life, London: Chapman and Hall, 1885. Rosa Praed, Outlaw and Lawmaker, 1893; London: Pandora, 1987.
Praed, , Outlaw and Lawmaker: 254, 2. The mountains in Praed's Logan Valley novels are fictionalised and sometimes conflated representations of Mt Lindesay, Mt Barney, Mt Ernest and Mt Maroon, the mountains near her father's property, ‘Maroon’, where she spent part of her teenage years.
Stable, J.J. and Kirwood, A.E.M., A Book of Queensland Verse (Brisbane: Queensland Book Depot, 1924): xii.
Kenna, Francis, Songs of a Season (Melbourne: Melville, Mullen and Slade, 1895): 40–42.
Coungeau, Emily, ‘The Glasshouse Mountains, Queensland’, Stella Australis: Poems, Verses and Prose Fragments (Brisbane: Gordon and Gotch, 1914): 30.
Ham, Alice, Coward or Hero? Being a Collection of Poetical Works by Alice Ham (Brisbane: Brisbane Printers Ltd, 1928): 21.
Emily Hemans Bulcock, Jacaranda Blooms and Other Poems (Brisbane: Queensland Book Depot, c. 1923): 23–24, 46.
Emily Hemans Bulcock, From Quenchless Springs (Brisbane: privately published, 1945).
Smith, Vivian, Vance and Nettie Palmer (Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1975): 33.
Palmer, Nettie, 19 January 1929, Nettie Palmer: Her Private Journal Fourteen Years, Poems, Reviews and Literary Essays, ed. Smith, Vivian (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988): 40–41.
Palmer, Vance, The Passage, [1930], 1st Australian edn (Melbourne: Robertson and Mullens, 1944): 279.
Dark, Eleanor, ‘The Quick Return’, in Lantana Lane (London and Sydney: Collins, 1959): 141. Dark and her husband Eric spent every winter, and two summers, farming at Bopplenut, Montville between 1951 and 1957. See Barbara Brooks and Judith Clark, Eleanor Dark: A Writer's Life (Sydney: Macmillan, 1998).
See Meadows, Michael, Thomson, Robert and Stewart, Wendy, ‘Close to the Edge: Imagining Climbing in Southeast Queensland’, Queensland Review 7(2) (2000: 67–83.
Bernard O'Reilly, Green Mountains (Brisbane: W.R. Smith and Paterson, 1940): 23.
Wright, Judith, ‘Conservation as a Concept’, Wildlife Newsletter, 16 August 1968, np; quoted in Veronica Brady, South of My Days: A Biography of Judith Wright (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1998): 299.
Wright, Judith, ‘The Lost Man’, in Collected Poems: 1942–1985 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994): 112.
Wright, Judith, ‘At Cooloolah’, in Collected Poems: 1942–1985 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994): 140–41.
Wright, Judith, ‘The Morning of the Dead’, in Collected Poems: 1942–1985 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994): 209.
Walker, Kath [Oodgeroo Noonuccal], ‘The Dispossessed’, in We are Going (Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1964): 16. The title poem, ‘We are Going’ (p. 25) is dedicated to Grannie Coolwell.
Walker, ‘Gooboora, the Silent Pool’, in We Are Going, p 29.
Walker, ‘The Past’, in The Dawn is at Hand: Poems by Kath Walker (Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1966): 25.
Walker, Stradbroke Dreamtime: 14.
Walker, Stradbroke Dreamtime: 100–103.
Sariban, Michael, Facing the Pacific (Brisbane: Interactive Press, 1999). Malouf, David, ‘Glasshouse Mountains’, in The Year of the Foxes and Other Poems (New York: George Braziller, 1979): 28–29; ‘Deception Bay’ and ‘The Crab Feast’, in First Things Last: Poems (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1980): 16–23, 28–37.
Moorhouse, Frank, keynote address, ‘Imagining the Gold Coast’ conference, Gold Coast Campus of Griffith University, 24 October 1998.
Leopold, Keith, My Brow is Wet (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1969): 29, 31. Thea Astley, The Acolyte (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1980): 95. David Malouf, Johnno: A Novel (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1975): 55. Peter Goldsworthy, Honk if You are Jesus (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1992); Matthew Condon, A Night at the Pink Poodle (Sydney: Arrow, 1995): 309.
Webb, Elizabeth, Into the Morning (London: Heinemann, 1958): 153, 219.
Astley, Thea, The Acolyte: 15; Georgia Savage, The Estuary (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1987): 181.
Malouf, David, Fly Away Peter (London: Vintage, 1999): 113, 132–33.
Garner, Helen, ‘Postcards from Surfers’, in Postcards from Surfers (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble/Penguin, 1985): 5.
Condon, Matthew, A Night at the Pink Poodle: 23, 102.
Malouf, David, ‘Glasshouse Mountains’, in The Year of the Foxes and Other Poems: 28–29.
Dark, Eleanor, ‘The Blackall Range Country’, Walkabout, 1 November 1955: 20.
Lucashenko, Melissa, Steam Pigs (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1997): 244; Thea Astley, The Slow Natives (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1965).
Carey, Peter, War Crimes (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1979).
Cato, Nancy, The Noosa Story: A Study in Unplanned Development (Milton: Jacaranda Press, 1979).
Condon, Matthew, A Night at the Pink Poodle.
