Brisbane: Corridors of Power

Brisbane History Group

This volume comprises seventeen papers which deal with aspects of local and state government in Brisbane, the constitutional debates of the 1890s and feminist issues at the turn of the century.
An overriding theme is the struggle to achieve against many odds, whether in the building of Brisbane’s first Town Hall or the renovation of Parliament House or the efforts of two ‘slaves to public duty’ in vastly different arenas: Samuel Griffith and William Jolly.

The volume examines a multitude of issues including:
• the undulating historical course of the Queensland Parliament from its inception to the present
• the personal and altruistic motivations behind the erection of Brisbane’s first Town Hall
• the ‘battle of the sites’ for a city hall, the tortuous course leading to its ultimate construction and the unseemly haste of incumbent mayors to lay the foundation stone
• the trials and tribulations in renovating the Parliament House and Brisbane’s City Hall
• the constitutional debates of the 1890s, the role of Samuel Griffith and the future for our system of government
• the Queensland provincial press of the 1890s and the emergence of the labour movement
• the historical significance of the location and design of Old Government House
• the design competition controversy and the eventual construction of the Queensland Houses of Parliament
• the role of women’s journals, the labour press and William Lane in the emergence of a feminist consciousness in Queensland during the 1890s
• contrasting political biographies of four of Brisbane’s civic administrators, the lord mayors William Alfred Jolly, Alfred James Jones and John Beals Chandler, and one of the city’s most important, influential and formidable town clerks, J.C. Slaughter

This attractive and informative volume is for everyone interested in government, both local and state, the issues of federation and feminism in the 1890s, and the role of key individuals in our historical development.