Too often my Sydney and Melbourne colleagues struggle with Queensland parochialism, forgetting that, because the States of Queensland and Western Australia are geographically enormous, the political attitudes there can be very different from those in southern and eastern Australia. When tourists arrive in Cairns they are often stunned to find that from Cairns to where Queensland touches the Papua New Guinea border, there is enough room to fit in the whole state of Victoria.
Growing up in Atherton, in Far North Queensland, I was very familiar with the popular saying of “bloody southerners,…
