Queensland (the sunbelt)

The tropical north-east, settled late, developed differently, and politically distinct from the rest of the country ever since. Moreton Bay began as a penal station in 1824 and the colony separated from New South Wales in 1859. Its climate ruled out the pastoral and wheat model of the south, so the economy was built on sugar, cattle, mining and, later, tourism. Sugar was the decisive one. From the 1860s planters recruited some sixty thousand Pacific Islanders, mostly from Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, under indenture and often by outright kidnapping - the practice called blackbirding. Their descendants, the Australian South Sea Islanders, were mostly deported after federation under the White Australia policy, and remained unrecognised as a distinct community until 1994. The frontier here was the most violent in the country: the Native Police, a force of Aboriginal troopers under white officers, operated as a killing instrument across the north for half a century. Queensland is also the most decentralised state, with a majority of its people outside the capital, which gives regional grievance more political weight than elsewhere. It abolished its upper house in 1922 and has never restored it. The Bjelke-Petersen government of 1968 to 1987 ran a gerrymandered electorate and ended in a corruption inquiry that jailed a police commissioner. The Great Barrier Reef lies along its coast. It remains Australia's fastest-growing large state. Brisbane is the capital and the third-largest Australian city. The state has its own time zone practice, refusing daylight saving after a 1992 referendum. Mount Isa and the Bowen Basin carry the mining economy. Cyclones strike the coast most summers.

• Existed: 1859 CE – present
• Type: Entity