Most of the histories were optimistic about Queensland’s future, none more so than John Knight and Reginald Spencer Browne’s Queensland, 1900 (1900), where they wax lyrical in a utopian vein: ‘Potentially the state is one of the richest on earth. It is quite conceivable that within a few years … the residents of the Colony will be able to carry on their Government with but few of the usual monetary burdens of civilisation. With an ideal system of administration of the vast areas of Crown lands … the fuller realisation of the possibilities of the land will bring about a condition … of Henry George’s theorising in “Progress and Poverty”.’

Fitzgerald, Megarrity and Symons’s Made in Queensland has had a difficult reception into this Queensland history genre, mainly because of issues around its inception. The book was commissioned by ex-Premier Peter Beatty, who, in classic Queensland style, did not bother to seek tenders or advice from professional historians, but, in December 2005, offered the work directly to Professor Fitzgerald, with a reported budget of $900,000. Brisbane’s Courier Mail, smelling a scandal, ran headlines such as ‘History repeats $900,000 book “not justified”’ and ‘State to Pay $1m for book Opposition accuses Beattie of cronyism’, interspersed with angry comments from Queensland historians. Matters were not helped by the fact that, while Fitzgerald is an emeritus professor at Griffith University and formerly lived in Brisbane, he has resided in Sydney for some years.

The manner of commissioning Made in Queensland led to a formal enquiry by the Queensland ombudsman, as well as referral to the Queensland Crime and Misconduct Commission. The ombudsman’s report (2008) quoted one bureaucrat who, having had to accommodate this project, admitted being ‘concerned with the entire situation’, while another ‘thought from memory that Professor Fitzgerald had written some books previously about the history of Queensland and that it wouldn’t take that much more to rehash a new style of book’. Matters were not helped when Beattie, using language and logic reminiscent of Bjelke-Petersen, justified circumventing the tendering process: ‘I always knew there would be a hen’s scratch among the tiny number of historians writing about Queensland history when it was announced such a history would be written. They all wanted to write it.’ In addition, the widely respected Brisbane historian Professor Raymond Evans had published A History of Queensland in 2007, and this well-received work led many people to question the need for yet another history of Queensland.

Nevertheless, approaching Made in Queensland with an open mind reveals excellent writing, editing, layout and a liberal use of photographs and captions, all aimed at a general readership. Unfortunately, pre-contact Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history only merits six pages, and everything pre-separation (1859) only seventeen pages, compared to Evans’s A History of Queensland, which devotes seventy-seven pages to the pre-separation era, including twenty-four specific to pre-contact. Made in Queensland gives readers insufficient information about the racial, cultural, economic and social context that determined why separation occurred in 1859, and what followed.

Made in Queensland follows a chronological approach, divided into roughly twenty-year periods. The writing style, whereby one’s focus is drawn from macro processes to detailed examples, works well. Fortunately, this book does not look at only politicians, businessmen and financiers but also discusses artists, writers and poets, and how they helped shape cultural reality. It would have been improved by paying even more attention to social and cultural movements. For example, the extraordinary impacts of William Lane’s socialist and communal dreams, and Henry George’s utopian single tax theories in the 1890s, rate not a mention, even though thousands of Queenslanders, across all religious, social and economic divides, were involved. In 1894–95, for example, more Queenslanders were living in rural communes than were in the nascent Labor Party but of this Made in Queensland remains silent.

Writing about the conscription referenda of 1916 and 1917, the authors offer a farce worthy of Gilbert and Sullivan.

Prime Minister Hughes decided to hold another referendum on conscription in December 1917. Obsessed with gaining a ‘YES’ vote, Hughes tried to stifle the anti-conscription campaign being run by the Ryan Labor government [in Queensland]. When Ryan published a parliamentary debate on conscription, intended for free distribution, representatives of the federal government raided the government printer and confiscated all copies of the offending Hansard No. 27. Undaunted, Ryan printed 50,000 copies of a four page Government Gazette Extraordinary, which explained the government’s anti-conscription, anti-censorship views. Hughes then threatened legal action against Ryan if he read this speech outside parliament. Ryan promptly read the speech at an open-air gathering. The federal government then initiated legal action against the premier, who then took out a writ against the prime minister: both charges were later dropped.

Meanwhile, thousands of young Australians were dying on French battlefields.

Made in Queensland offers surprising statistics to back up the parochial, rural-based image of early twentieth-century Queenslanders. The authors write that in 1921 seventeen per cent of Queenslanders of secondary school age attended school but that by 1939 this had fallen to thirteen per cent. The authors could have made more out of how this anti-intellectualism, promoted by both sides of politics, established the culture which allowed Queensland’s most (in)famous politicians, Johannes Bjelke-Petersen and Pauline Hanson to thrive. Germane to Queensland’s image, Fitzgerald, Megarrity and Symons offer amusing doggerel:

The People of Melbourne
Are frightfully well-born;
Of much the same kidney
Is the beau monde of Sydney
Hobart’s all convicts and seamen,
History, ruins, Van Diemen.
Adelaide’s forte is culture –
But in Brisbane the locals insult yer
And don’t ‘ardly know they’ve been rude
They’re that ignorant common and crude

In any macro-history book, errors inevitably arise, but few are obvious in Made in Queensland. On page 137, Queensland’s population of 751,000 in 1920 is said to have ‘leapt’ to 1,401,000 by 1957, but this annual increase of 1.7 per cent is hardly a ‘leap’ compared to the 2.5 per cent Queensland now experiences. Also, one can question this book’s relative coverage of Queensland’s history with thirty-six pages devoted to the last seven years wherein the Beattie and Bligh governments are treated very favourably.

Made in Queensland is reader-friendly and well organised, and will be popular with those readers who are seeking an overview of significant people and events in Queensland’s history, without a great deal of analysis. Those seriously interested in a deeper understanding of Queensland history will prefer Evans’s history. But frankly, to a visitor to Queensland I would recommend Fitzgerald’s book ahead of Evans’s, simply because of its easier, less analytical style. Meanwhile, Queensland Historical Atlas, the twenty-first history of Queensland, will be published later this year.