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In 1900, the Westbrook Reformatory for Boys, an institution holding both young people convicted of criminal offences and those deemed to be neglected children, was established in a farming region in Queensland, Australia. The institution would remain in the same location until 1994. By then, it had been rebranded as a Youth Detention Centre, housing teenagers convicted of crimes or on remand rather than the original mix of neglected and offending children and young people. In the institution's earliest stages, rurality and agricultural labour, were central to its work. By the century's end, Westbrook's rural setting, its distance from the capital city, and its inclusion of a working farm were key contributing factors to its closure. Drawing on archival data, newspaper records, memoirs of former inmates, and the findings of three inquiries into the institution, this essay seeks to explain how and why rurality, perceived as central to projects of moral reform in 1900, became understood primarily through the lens of inconvenience and danger by 1994. In doing so, it argues that the moral and rehabilitative discourses associated with rurality did not necessarily become obsolete or irrelevant by the end of the twentieth century. Instead, they interacted with shifting cultural expectations about the treatment of institutionalised children, as well as changing economic circumstances, creating a situation in which the perceived value of rurality alone was insufficient to justify the continued presence of a youth justice institution at Westbrook.

This article uses critical discourse analysis to interrogate government documents associated with the passing of the "Education (Strengthening Discipline in State Schools) Act 2013" in Queensland, Australia. It uses these documents to demonstrate the way in which the discourse of discipline has been constructed in order to legitimate the removal of legislative safeguards intended to curtail the disciplinary power of school officials.

This paper examines the way in which narratives, including stories and poetry, have been used in school texts relating to moral instruction. The paper will draw on texts used in Queensland classrooms in the early part of the twentieth century to demonstrate the ways in which description of sights and the experiences of the senses, and of exaggerated consequences, are used in narratives and poems with the intention of imparting moral lessons. The texts analysed include both those used in "Civics and Morals" lessons and the Queensland School Readers, a long-running series of classroom readers designed to suit the unique needs of the state's children.