What a ledger is for

There is a ledger on the front page of this site. It is short at the moment and it will grow as the essays are written. It is worth explaining what it is doing there, because it is not a memorial and it is not a list of grievances.

A ledger is a record kept in two columns so that the totals can be compared. It is a bookkeeping instrument, and the reason I have borrowed it is that the argument of this collection is an arithmetical one. Queensland believes it lost its heritage to a particular government, in a particular decade, in the dark. The belief is sincere and it is held by people who were there. It is also, when you add the entries up, not what the record shows.

So the entries are set in two weights of type. The heavy ones are the losses this state remembers fighting: the Belle Vue, Cloudland, the Regent. The lighter ones went quietly, or the fight has been forgotten, or there was no fight at all. The Gympie Hospital nurses' quarters, a century old, cleared by a state health service in 2024 to make a temporary car park, is a light entry. Nobody who does not live in Gympie has heard of it.

The point of setting them in one column is that the light entries outnumber the heavy ones, and they always have. That is the whole argument, and it does not need any adjectives to make it.

I have also included buildings that are still standing, which may look like a category error in a book about demolition. It is deliberate. The Commissariat Store, the Old Windmill, Customs House and the Treasury did not survive because they were lucky or because they were loved more than the rest. Each one is the residue of a decision that somebody made and could have made differently. If the losses were choices, so were the survivals, and a ledger that recorded only the losses would be making the same mistake as the memory it is trying to correct.

Some of the entries are marked as contested and some are not. That marking is a judgement rather than a fact, and it is mine. I expect to be argued with about several of them. That is a reasonable thing to argue about, and it is a better argument than the one Queensland usually has.