Queensland’s history is different in many respects from the older states, and similar only to Western Australia in features such as its vastness, its relative emptiness and its history as the last of the ‘frontier’ states. It is easy to caricature Queensland as historically and naturally conservative, even reactionary, by comparison to its more cosmopolitan, liberal and tolerant counterparts in the south-eastern corner of Australia. This is the state in which, if Henry Reynolds’s estimates are accepted (as they still generally are, despite the notorious efforts of Keith Windschuttle), half of the 20,000 Aborigines killed in violent conflicts with European settlers in Australia met their deaths. This is the state that gave us Joh Bjelke-Petersen and all the corruption that went with his government. And this is the state that was home to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party, and that gave it twenty-three per cent of the vote and ten seats in the 1998 state election.
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