Please forget the past.
The future looks bright ahead.[i]
– Otis Blackwell, ‘Don’t Be Cruel’

FOR MY SINS, I was educated entirely in Queensland – or, as the authorities in my day preferred to call it, publicly instructed. This went on for seventeen years – from 1949 until 1965 – and I have beautiful handwriting to show for it. But not once in all that time, as far as I can recall, was I taught anything substantive about Queensland itself. Now doesn’t that seem strange? In more than three thousand hands-on days of intense institutional instruction, nothing particularly penetrative or self-referential was ever said about the place, the state or the society that was, at the same time, busily intent on moulding me into one of it citizens.