Right-wing Queensland: a self-fulfilling prophecy?


Click on the image to enlarge

Click on the image to enlarge

Sam Wallman

Sam Wallman is a unionist and cartoonist based on unceded Wurundjeri country. He is a member of the Workers Art Collective and the Maritime Union of Australia. His new book 12 Rules for Strife was produced in collaboration with Jeff Sparrow and will be published by Scribe Publications on May Day 2024. You can follow his work here.

More by Sam Wallman ›

Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places.

If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate.


Related articles & Essays


Contribute to the conversation

  1. Nice work Sam.
    Queensland has always had pockets of radicalism, but they are far and few between.
    Is it the weather, all the southern state retirees or a throwback to the Joh Bjelke days?
    It’s bloody frightening, whatever it is.

  2. Thanks for the reminder, Sam. I was born in QLD, at the Mater hospital, Brisbane, brought into the world by my mother, some nuns, and an ex-SS doctor brought out here secretly under operation paperclip. My grandfather was a member of the communist party and of the international brigade, my dad was an anarcho-syndicalist; he always talked about how QLD had been the red north until the ALP – DLP split. He loved the place, even with Bjelke Peterson and all the rest. QLD’s a complex story, and you’re right, there’s nothing written in stone saying it couldn’t swing back to a more recognisably human politic. But Labor needs to present a more consistent, convincing, nuanced narrative. There are some powerful dinosaurs up there, and as we saw last federal election, they’ll spend real money getting their bullshit out there.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.