Australian Studies Journal | Zeitschrift für Australienstudien 44/2025
HISTORIES OF NORTHERN AND REGIONAL AUSTRALIA
guest edited by Lyndon Megarrity, Benjamin T. Jones, and Joe Collins
with contributions by Lyndon Megarrity, Benjamin T. Jones, Joe Collins, John Shield, Julia Russoniello, Amanda Harris, Margaret Strelow, Rebecca Fleming, Paul Turnbull, Celie Forbes, Adele Zubrzycka, and Angela Woollacott
This special issue is intended to be a lasting outcome of the 2025 Australian Historical Association conference hosted by James Cook University (JCU) and Central Queensland University (CQUniversity) between 30 June and 3 July. The event took place in Townsville, Queensland, representing the first time the peak event for Australian historians had taken place in northern Australia for 30 years. One of the conference streams focused on histories of northern and regional Australia and the articles in this special issue come from those papers. While the broad theme is northern and regional Australia, the focus of the articles is generally on Northern Queensland. In this edition, we define ‘Northern Queensland’ as those parts of Queensland which are north of the Tropic of Capricorn. There is just the one article venturing as far south as the Boyne Valley in Central Queensland – still 500 kilometres north of Brisbane.
In addition to nine articles, this special issue contains an essay on the writing of northern Australian history, focusing on a dynamic period of scholarship in the History department of James Cook University. Taken as a whole, the research presented here demonstrates the variety of ways governments and citizens have tried to develop the ‘neglected north’.
– from the introduction