Ross Fitzgerald

By the time I was 35, I’d spent fifteen years as a student and teacher in universities. I was scornful of those who sneered at ‘Sheltered Workshops’ – a fashionable putdown in the early 70s; at the same time, I mocked Zelman Cowan’s observation – when playing stag at bay and asserting that he really was au fait with academia – that ‘I have spent all my adult life in universities’. But they are real places.

The major problem with this approach to history, as Fitzgerald treads it, is that he takes the preoccupations and perspectives of the twentieth century Sunshine State and implants them in a colonial Queensland context. This achieved, Fitzgerald can point to the continuities of Queensland history. I am reminded of my dog, who buries his bones and considers himself smart when he succeeds in digging them up.