Queensland

Dolphin Oval, based on the corner of Ashmole and Klingner Roads in Kippa-Ring, north of Brisbane, is the home ground for the Redcliffe Dolphins rugby... league football club, who play in the Queensland Wizard Cup. The ground regularly hosts pre-season NRL trials, and hosted the 2001, 2002 and 2003 Queensland Cup Grand Finals. The creation of the Dolphin Oval began when the Redcliffe City Council made re-claimed land available for sporting fields in the 1970s. The Redcliffe Dolphins, who at the time were based at the Redcliffe Showgrounds, showed immediate interest and applied for the maximum area available. Redcliffe City Council engineer Kevin Tibbets took to the construction of the ground with the utmost enthusiasm, with the football club even hosting a trip interstate for him to study playing arenas in New South Wales. The transition from the Redcliffe Showgrounds to Dolphin Oval presented some major problems. Due to the isolation of the area at the time of construction, normal services were not readily available and therefore had to be brought in.
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Indooroopilly Shopping Centre is a major regional shopping centre in the western suburb of Indooroopilly, which is located in the city of Brisbane,... Queensland, Australia. It is the largest shopping centre in the western suburbs of Brisbane, by gross lettable area, and contains the only Myer store in that region. The centre was constructed and opened in 1970 by The Westfield Group. At its opening, it was reputedly the largest shopping mall in the Southern Hemisphere. This title has since been overtaken by newer centres. The centre has undergone extensive renovations since its opening. Some of these include an 8 screen cinema complex operated by Birch Carroll and Coyle in 1987, the addition of a third level in 1995 and the extension and upgrade of the cinema complex into a 16 screen Megaplex in 1998. Until 2000, Indooroopilly Shopping Centre was known as Westfield Shoppingtown Indooroopilly. In 2000, The Westfield Group sold its 50% joint venture stake in the centre to Commonwealth Funds Management for $300 million.
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Cairns Central Shopping Centre in north Queensland, Australia and is Cairns' biggest shopping centre. The centre was opened in late 1997 and is the... second multi-story shopping centre in northern Queensland. The shopping centre is built over the Cairns Railway Station, which is incorporated with the centre. Pedestrian access to the station is through the car park on the bottom floor, or a pedestrian walkway on the second floor. Construction of the shopping centre was delayed temporarily due to damage suffered from Tropical Cyclone Justin in early 1997. Cairns Central contains two department stores , two supermarkets and a six cinema complex. The Bi-Lo Mega Fresh supermarket in Cairns Central is the largest in Australia. There is also a 700-seat foodcourt with stores such as Sushi Train, Noodle Box, Bucking Bull, Sumo Salad and common stores such as McDonalds, KFC, Subway and Hungry Jacks. The centre is jointly owned by Lend Lease, owners of other Australian shopping centres such as Sunshine Plaza and Canelands Central and The Westfield Group.
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The Willows Sports Complex, currently known as Dairy Farmers Stadium due to sponsorship rights, is a grass football stadium situated in Townsville,... Queensland, Australia. It has historically been used mainly for rugby league, and is the home ground of the National Rugby League club the North Queensland Cowboys. It has also been used for rugby union. For sponsorship reasons, the stadium was previously known as Stockland Stadium and Malanda Stadium . Prior to 1995, the stadium site was occupied by the Willows Sporting Complex. It hosted trotting paceway nights, and was the main pacing venue for the Townsville District. With the admission of the North Queensland Cowboys to the Australian Rugby League competition in 1995, the Willows site was transformed into a basic rugby league venue with a western grandstand as well as eastern side terraces. The northern and southern ends were sloped grass hills. The Willows Sports Complex was renamed 'Stockland Stadium' in 1995 through sponsorship linked with the North Queensland Cowboys. A contract was signed by the Stockland Trust Group for three years giving them the naming rights of the venue.
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The Qantas Founders Outback Museum is a transport museum at Longreach, Queensland, Australia. The museum is home to a decommissioned Qantas Boeing... 747-200, which can be observed by the general public. It also holds the airline's first jet, a Boeing 707-138. The Boeing 707 was restored at Southend Airport in England in mid 2006 and returned to Australia in December 2006. It was flown to Longreach on 10 June 2007. It had previously been owned by a Saudi prince, but had not been flown for 6 years before its restoration.
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The Cobb and Co Museum is located in Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia. The museum was opened in 1987 when the Queensland Museum was looking for space... to display its catalogue of horse drawn vehicles. Instead of taking up the huge amount of space required to display the collection properly at its Brisbane campus, the museum decided to open up a new campus in Toowoomba. In 2001, a second stage was built onto the existing museum to create a space to display the history of Toowoomba and the Darling Downs. This extension brought the entire museum space to over 2000 square metres. The refurbished Cobb & Co Museum also allowed space to house the Museum Resource Centre for Southern Queensland. An $8 million redevelopment of the Museum was undertaken in 2010. This included the construction of a custom designed 'Factory' area to house facilities for a range of heritage trades. Several additional galleries were also added at this point. The museum now houses over fifty horse drawn vehicles, including sturdy drays and farm wagons, that tell the story of European settlement on the Darling Downs, while sulkies and buggies demonstrate transportation imported to Australia during the 1880s.
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The Australian Stockman's Hall of Fame is a museum located in Longreach, Queensland, Australia, which pays tribute to pioneers of the Australian... outback. The centre is also dedicated to Australian stockmen and Aborigines who have shown bravery and courage. The founder of the Hall of Fame was artist Hugh Sawrey, a well known painter and former stockman, who had the name registered in 1974, put up the initial funding, and enlisted supporters. His vision was to create a memorial to the explorers, overlanders, pioneers and settlers of outback Australia. This dream was shared by other outstanding Australians, including the legendary R. M. Williams. The original information centre, a sandstone cottage built by R. M. Williams, complete with hand adzed timber and black marble floors, was restored to its original character and now houses the Hall of Fame’s growing library collection. The Australian Stockman's Hall of Fame was opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 29 April 1988.
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Brisbane Tramway Museum is a transport museum which preserves and displays trams and trolley-buses, most of which operated in Brisbane, Queensland,... Australia. The museum also has a collection of vehicles and other equipment used in maintaining Brisbane's electric street transport system which operated from 1897 to 1969. The Museum is located at Ferny Grove, a north-west suburb of Brisbane. The museum is operated by the Brisbane Tramway Museum Society, a not-for-profit public company. It is run entirely by volunteers. The society was established in 1968, when it became apparent that the Brisbane City Council was preparing to close Brisbane's tram system. As at 10 November 2005, the museum has a collection of 25 trams, 24 of which formerly operated on the Brisbane tram network. The 25th tram in the museum's collection ran in Sydney. The museum also has two Brisbane trolley-buses built on Sunbeam MF2B chassis. These are on static display. A number of trams in the museum's collection are operated on a short length of demonstration track 250 metres in length. The oldest operational tram in the museum's collection is No. 47, a "California Combination" or "Matchbox" tram, built in 1901.
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Catherine Astrid Salome "Cathy" Freeman, OAM is a former Australian sprinter, who specialised in the 400 metres event. She became the Olympic... champion for the women's 400 metres at the 2000 Summer Olympics, at which she lit the Olympic Flame. Freeman was the first ever Aboriginal Commonwealth Games gold medalist at age 16. 1994 was Freeman's breakthrough season. At the 1994 Commonwealth Games in Canada, Freeman won gold in both the 200 m and 400 m. She also won the silver medal in the 1996 Olympics and came first at the 1997 World Champion in the 400 m event. 1998 saw Freeman taking a break from running due to injury. She returned to form with a first place in the 400 m at the 1999 World Championships. She announced her retirement from athletics in 2003. Freeman was born in Slade Point, Mackay, Queensland, where the local athletics track is now named after her. Her coach throughout her athletic career was Peter Fortune. In 1999, she married Sandy Bodecker, separating in February 2003. In 2009, she married James Murch, with whom she gave birth to a girl in 2011.
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George Miller is an Australian film director, screenwriter, producer, and former medical doctor. He is most well known for his cult Mad Max trilogy,... but has been involved in a wide range of projects, including the Oscar-winning Happy Feet and Babe film series. Miller is the older brother of producer Bill Miller. He is also co-founder of the production houses Dr. D Studios and Kennedy Miller Mitchell, formerly known as Kennedy Miller. Miller was born in Brisbane, Queensland, to Greek immigrant parents: Dimitri Castrisios Miliotis and Angela Balson. Dimitri Miliotis was from the Greek island of Kythira and he anglicised his surname to Miller when he emigrated to Australia; the Balson family were Greek refugees from Anatolia. The couple married and settled in Chinchilla and had four sons. The first two were the non-identical twins George and John, and later, Chris and Bill Miller arrived. George attended Ipswich Grammar School and later Sydney Boys High School, then studied medicine at the University of New South Wales with his twin brother John.
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Geoffrey Roy Rush is an Australian actor and film producer. He is one of the few people who has won the "Triple Crown of Acting": an Academy Award,... a Tony Award and an Emmy Award. He has won one Academy Award for acting , three British Academy Film Awards , two Golden Globe Awards and four Screen Actors Guild Awards. He is the foundation President of the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts. He is the 2012 Australian of the Year. Rush was born in Toowoomba, Queensland, to Merle , a department store sales assistant, and Roy Baden Rush, an accountant for the Royal Australian Air Force. His parents divorced when he was five and his mother subsequently took him to live with her parents in suburban Brisbane. Before he began his acting career, Rush attended Everton Park State High School. He also has an arts degree from the University of Queensland. While at university, he was talent-spotted by Queensland Theatre Company in Brisbane. Rush began his career with QTC in 1971, appearing in 17 productions.
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Andy Gibb was an English singer and teen idol, and the younger brother of Bee Gees Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb. Andrew Roy Gibb was born in... Manchester, England, to Barbara and Hugh Gibb. At the age of six months, Gibb emigrated with his family to Queensland, Australia, settling on Cribb Island just north of Brisbane. He was the youngest boy of five children and had one older sister, Lesley , and three older brothers, Barry and fraternal twins Robin and Maurice . After moving several times around Brisbane and Sydney, Gibb returned to the United Kingdom in January 1967 as his three older brothers began to gain international fame as the Bee Gees. As a young teenager, Andy began playing at tourist clubs around Spain's coastal Island of Ibiza, and later on the Isle of Man, the birth place of his older brothers, where his parents were living at the time. Andy formed his first group, Melody Fayre which included local island musicians John Alderson and John Stringer .
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József Kreul "Joe" Bugner is a Hungarian-born British-Australian former heavyweight boxer. He holds triple nationality, being a citizen of... Hungary and a naturalized citizen of both Australia and the United Kingdom. Born in Szőreg, a southeastern suburb of Szeged in southern Hungary, Bugner and his family fled after the 1956 Soviet invasion and settled in England. Standing at 6'4" with a prime weight of around 220 lb , Bugner twice held the British and British Commonwealth heavyweight titles and was a three time European heavyweight champion. He was ranked among the world's top ten heavyweights in the 1970s, fighting such opponents as Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, Ron Lyle, Jimmy Ellis, Manuel Ramos, Chuck Wepner, Earnie Shavers, Henry Cooper, Brian London, Mac Foster, Rudi Lubbers, Eduardo Corletti, Jurgen Blin, George Johnson and Jose Luis Garcia. He fought for the world heavyweight championship in 1975, losing on points in a second bout with Ali. Bugner retired from boxing in 1976, but over the next two decades he made sporadic comebacks with varying success.
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Graeme "Shirley" Strachan was the lead singer of Australian 1970s rock group Skyhooks. Born in the Melbourne suburb of Malvern, he was an avid... surfer, and his nickname "Shirley" was given to him by his surfer friends because of his long, sunbleached and very curly hair, referring to Shirley Temple. Strachan pursued a solo singing career during his time with Skyhooks and released a number of records, the most successful of which was his cover of "Every Little Bit Hurts" in 1976. He left Skyhooks in 1978 and then worked as a radio and television presenter. He became known to a new generation as the host of children's television series Shirl's Neighbourhood in the early 1980s. In the 1990s he was a regular presenter on home makeover program Our House where he resurrected skills from his pre-Skyhooks carpentry trade. He was also instrumental in several Skyhook reformations during the 1980s and 1990s. Strachan presented a breakfast radio show with Gary Belcher and Dean Miller on the Brisbane radio station Triple M in the 1990s. Strachan left Triple M in 1999 following a pay dispute.
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Brian Blain was an Australian film and television actor. He is best remembered for his role as wealthy businessman Gordon Hamilton in the Seven... Network soap opera Sons and Daughters from 1981 to 1987 when the series was cancelled, and his role as Captain Jacob Hilliard in the film sequel Return to the Blue Lagoon . In that same year, he also starred opposite Anne Haddy playing Michael Daniels, a love interest of her character Helen Daniels in the Network Ten soap opera Neighbours. Only a few years previously Haddy had played his housekeeper Rosie in Sons and Daughters. He died of a heart attack in 1994, at the age of 57.
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Adrienne Pickering is an Australian actress. Pickering stars in one of the female lead roles of the Australian natural drama-thriller film The Reef.... She also played the recurring role of Detective Christine Taylor in the BBC-commissioned soap opera Out of the Blue. She appears on Home And Away as Natalie Franklin, Nicole's mother. Nicole is portrayed by Tessa James. Pickering portrayed Elly Tate on the drama headLand. In 2010, Pickering played the role of Melissa "Missy" Partridge in the ABC Drama Rake.
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Trevor Kent was an Australian theatre and television actor who achieved a level of public recognition in the 1980s. Kent initially worked as a... primary-school teacher, teaching for three years in Nambour and Buderim in Queensland while acting in amateur theatre groups. Kent moved to Sydney to train as an actor with the Independent Drama School in the early 1960s, supporting himself during this time with teaching. In Sydney he understudied the role of Rolfe in the Tivoli Theatre's production of The Sound of Music, and acted in Beckett and Oh Dad Poor Dad Momma's Locked You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad with the Independent. After two years in Sydney he emigrated to the UK. He spent ten years there, during which time he worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company. On returning to Sydney in 1974, Kent played Frank'N'Furter in a stage production of The Rocky Horror Show. Several appearances on Australian television followed, including roles in Rush, The Sullivans, Cop Shop and Carson's Law. He moved to Melbourne in 1984 and in 1984–1985 appeared in television soap opera Prisoner as the villainous Frank Burke for several months.
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Peter Lochran is an actor, who remains best known for his role as Dr. Peter Holland in the television soap opera The Young Doctors. He also worked... prior to acting as a radio station panel operator at 3AW in Melbourne, Australia. After appearing in the series from 1979 to 1982, he moved to the United States where he continued his soap career with roles in Another World and Capitol.
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Penny Downie is an Australian actress, noted for her appearances on British television. She began her career in Australia, initially in Brisbane at... Twelfth Night Theatre and Brisbane Arts Theatre. She trained at the National Institute of Dramatic Art , Sydney. After graduation she appeared in TV series such as The Box, Bellbird, The Sullivans, Prisoner and Learned Friends. She moved to the United Kingdom during the early 1980s. Her UK TV credits include: Minder, Inspector Morse, Kavanagh QC, The Cazalets, The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, Spooks, Trial and Retribution, New Street Law, Poirot,The Ice House, Lost for Words and New Tricks. She also appeared in The Girl in the Cafe, alongside Bill Nighy, Kelly Macdonald and Anton Lesser. She is also an accomplished stage actress. She is an associate artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company where she has played roles such as Lady Anne in Richard III alongside Antony Sher, and Hermione and Perdita in The Winter's Tale.
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Mary Schneider is an Australian performer, renowned for yodelling works of classic composers. Her daughter Melinda Schneider is also an Australian... country music singer and yodeller. She mainly appears in club and pub venues around Australia,as well as overseas. She has appeared on the Don and Mike Show, the The Howard Stern Show and National Public Radio in the USA, Spicks and Specks and Enough Rope on ABC TV and Eurotrash in the UK.
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