Writers of Tropical Queensland

Abstract

[Extract] This bibliography records Australian writing associated with tropical Queensland from the beginnings of European settlement in the 1860s to the present. The genres covered are poetry, short stories, novels, plays, travel and life writing, articles, essays, reviews and literary criticism. Published as they often were in the popular venues of newspapers and magazines, the works listed were the region's most important source of cultural definition before the 1950s, when television and other electronic technologies widened the options for communication. From the beginning, regional writers were often driven to reinvent colonial customs and ideas, mostly British, that had been transplanted to the unfamiliar climates and landscapes of the tropical northeast. However since the 1980s life writings, fiction, essays and poetry by Indigenous mainland and Islander peoples have begun encouragingly to reclaim the imaginative construction of the region.