I found Edwina Shaw’s short story on the ‘corrupt’ Queensland police force during the 1980s to be the strongest contribution to ‘Hidden Queensland’. Shaw creates a vision of a police state that is both nightmarish and totally believable. I was deeply moved by Kristina Olsson’s memoir piece entitled ‘A War, An Attic, A Gun’, in which Olsson reflects on the heartache her mother faced when her son (Olsson’s brother) went missing around the time of Australia’s participation in Vietnam. As Olsson observes, her brother was ‘of a conscriptable age’ and their mother ‘must have felt the terrible irony of losing him not once but twice. The possibility.’

There are some prominent Queenslanders who are given surprisingly little attention throughout the journal. I am thinking specifically of Pauline Hanson and Schapelle Corby, both of whom have been famously held up by the Australian media as examples of a ‘white trash’ underclass. As a whole, though, ‘Hidden Queensland’ offers a fascinating insight into the darker and more complex side of the so-called ‘Sunshine State’.