Literature in North Queensland - The Literary Journals

Abstract

For the past ten years or so, the cultural elite of North Queensland (of which the writer and any chance readers of this are inevitable members) has been wondering if there is any culture in North Queensland. Any indigenous culture, that is. In 1966 Mr. Ron Kenny wrote an essay asking, "Is there a North Queensland School of Painting?".¹ The answer he gave was, in effect, "no". In 1964 Mrs. Suzy Dickson, in presenting a survey of North Queensland writers, listed, in addition to E. J. Banfield, Henry Lamond, John Ashe, and Xavier Herbert, who both lived in and wrote about North Queensland, writers such as Clem Christesen and Val Vallis, who had merely been born here (or near here), and Vance Palmer and Emestine Hill, who had done no more than visit.² Even so, the list was not such as to inspire faith in the existence of a North Queensland regional literature. In 1968, Mr. John Heuzenroeder touched entertainingly on the some subject when he "discovered" the novelist Sarah Campion who, he said, "made a substantial, serious, and unique contribution to the literature of the region".³ The article which follows is the latest, and, it is probably to be hoped, the lost, attempt to introvert on the literature of North Queensland. It deals, not with the independent Greats, but with the little magazines and their contributors. The time has now came when, if possible, cultural introversion in North Queensland should give place to production.