Main Beach Queensland, is a virtual island at the northern tip of the Gold Coast, Australia's holiday playground.It is well known for its high-rise apartment blocks and the upmarket restaurants and boutiques that line its high street, Tedder Avenue. Yet once you venture to its fringes, to the golden sands of its beaches to the east and tranquility of MacIntosh Island to the south, to the bustling Broadwater to the west and the rejuvenated Spit to its north, you will be struck by it...

In 1824 Captain Patrick Logan of the British Army's 57th Regiment of Foot was chosen to be the commandant of the harsh new penal colony of Moreton Bay, the forerunner of Brisbane, the capital of the Australian state of Queensland, because he was thought to be of strong character and impeccable credentials. He was by official reports, a very successful overseer of the fledgling settlement, and may be said to be the father of Brisbane. Yet his charges, the incorrigible old lags - convicts wi...

Great Zimbabwe is an enigma. We know so little about central and southern Africa before 1500. Archaeologists have had to pore over scraps of old pots, glass beads, iron tools and carbon date old bits of wood. Some have searched for hints in rock paintings. Anthropologists have sought a window into a past that is more than 600 years old through wondering how modern day cultural practices have evolved from the Iron Age. Historians have sifted through oral stories, myths and legends for threa...

Stock exchanges were crucial in developing Australia by greasing the often-creaking wheels of investment. Their spluttering into life in the 1880s was fractious and disorganized, but fledgling stockbrokers couldn’t ignore the need for marketplaces to trade stocks and shares in the burgeoning mining industry. They struggled through the great economic distress of the Federation Drought in the 1890s and emerged as coherent, collegiate markets based in state capitals that endured for 80 years....

Times have changed for regional economic development. Back in the not-so-far-ff good old days, announcements of a new factory setting up in town of the approval granted for a new large apartment block would have been widely accepted and even applauded by communities.Now mostly they are not.NIMBY has become the standard cry. Not in my backyard now extends to so many areas beyond nuclear plants, mines and waste dumps, including to some that at first sight seem just plain puzz...

Journalist John Tilston often got tongue tied when trying to explain to dinner guests why he was vegetarian. He decided he'd better find out whether his gut feelings about vegetarianism were right, so he embarked on an exploration of the reasons for not eating meat and whether they stacked up.He casts his eye over the environmental, health and ethical reasons most often cited by vegetarians as reasons for not eating meat, and he sprinkles the exploration with personal experiences a...

In just one generation Brisbane has changed beyond recognition; it has grown from country town to vibrant modern metropolis. Yet it had a tough start. Until the last decade of the 20th Century it was a blue collar town, struggling under the weight of its history.Prior to European settlement - as Meanjin - it was a busy meeting place for the many indigenous clans in the Moreton Bay region. Almost 200 years ago newly-named Brisbane had an inauspicious start as a penal settlement poor...

Winston Churchill, reappointed as First Lord of the Admiralty in September 1939, suspected there was a mole operating at the heart of the Admiralty during the first months of World War II. Did he leak critical information about naval defenses at the Royal Navy’s British base at Scapa Flow that lead to the sinking of the Royal Oak and the loss of 836 men in an audacious raid by a German U-Boat?And how was this German spy linked with US Embassy spy Tyler Kent and Anna Wolkoff, an fan...