Oodgeroo Noonuccal of the Noonuccal tribe of North Stradbroke Island near Brisbane, was a poet and Aboriginal activist. She was born Kathleen Jean Mary Ruska on 3 November 1920 at Bulimba (then in the Shire of Balmoral and from 1925 a suburb of Brisbane). Her parents were Edward (Ted) Ruska, and Lucy, nee McCullough. She was the second youngest of seven children. Her father was a Noonuccal descendant. Ruska's childhood home was One Mile on North Stradbroke Island on the outskirts of Dunwich. She completed her education at Dunwich State school in 1934, at the age of thirteen, and left home to work in Brisbane. In 1941 she enlisted in the Australian Women's Army Service and was discharged in 1944. She married Bruce Walker, a childhood friend, on 8 May 1943. The couple had one son, but later separated. Kath Walker later worked for Raphael and Phyllis Cilento. In 1953, she had a son with the Cilentos' son, Raphael junior.

Kath Walker was involved in numerous organisations. From 1961 to 1970 she was the Queensland State Secretary of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders as well as an Executive of the Queensland Aboriginal Advancement League and Secretary of the Queensland State Council for the Advancement of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders. She was a member of the Aboriginal Arts Board, the Aboriginal Housing Committee, the Australian-American Bicentennial Committee. She was also the Chairperson of the Cultural Committee of the Queensland Multicultural Task Force in 1978 and later the Managing Director of the Noonuccal-Nughie Education and Cultural Centre.

During her lifetime Kath Walker filled several lecturing and artistic positions. These included Adult Education Lecturer; Delegate to the World Council of Churches Consultation on Racism; Guest Lecturer at the University of South Pacific; Official Australian Envoy on a Diplomatic Passport to International Writers' Conference in Malaysia; Senior Advisor to the Australian Aboriginal Contingent to the First World Black Festival of Arts in Nigeria; Guest of the Government of Papua New Guinea for the PNG Festival of Arts; Delegate to the Second World Black Festival of Arts; Lecturer and assistant to Professor P. Edwards, Camp Jungai pre-tertiary Aboriginal students summer camp; Remedial Tutor at the Dunwich State Primary School. She toured the United States on a Fullbright Scholarship and Myers travel grant lecturing on Australian Indigenous culture.

In 1981 Kath Walker launched her new career as a painter and fabric designer. Her first exhibition was in July 1981. In an article by Bruce Dickson, Kath Walker says that "painting has always been her first love [as] it communicates more effectively than the written word".

In protest at the 1988 Australian Bicentenary celebrations, in 1987 Kath Walker changed her name to Oodgeroo of the Noonuccal tribe. In the same year she returned the MBE (awarded in 1970) to the Governor of Queensland.

She died of cancer on 16 September 1993.

Ernestine Hill was born in 1899 in Rockhampton, Queensland. She was educated at All Hallows School and Stott & Hoare's Business College, Brisbane. After working briefly in the public service she joined the staff of Smith's Weekly, Sydney, in 1919, as secretary to its literary editor J F Archibald. Hill subsequently became sub-editor of the paper and consolidated her career as a journalist during the 1930s when she travelled extensively across Australia writing articles for Associated Newspapers and other publications such as Walkabout. Her articles were widely read and sometimes controversial: her reporting of a gold strike in the Northern Territory in 1931 contributed to financial ruin for some and was branded irresponsible; another, a front page story for the Sunday Sun, 19 June 1932, marked the beginning of a long and sometimes turbulent association with Daisy Bates. Hill's major published works arose out of her travels during this period - The Great Australian Loneliness (1937), Water into Gold (1937), Flying Doctor Calling (1947), The Territory (1951) and Kabbarli, a personal memoir of Daisy Bates, published posthumously in 1973. Her only published novel was the immensely successful My Love Must Wait (1941), based on the life of Matthew Flinders Between 1940 and 1942. Hill was editor of the women's pages of the A.B.C. Weekly and from 1941 to 1944 she was a commissioner of the A.B.C. After her resignation from this position she resumed her travels, working constantly on ideas for future novels, plays, travel and historical books and radio and film scripts. Apart from The Territory (1951) and a few articles none of these were ever published. Hill was awarded a Commonwealth Literary Fund fellowship in 1959, which provided her with a small pension but the last years of her life were dominated by financial hardship and ill-health. She returned to Brisbane in 1970 and died there on 21 August 1972.

Arthur Power Lyons was born on 30 December 1879. Colonial administrator and amateur anthropologist Arthur Power Lyons was born in Bundaberg in 1879. He became Assistant Resident Magistrate in Papua in 1906, and the Resident Magistrate in the Western Division of Papua and Warden of Gold and Mineral Fields in 1909. From 1930 to 1943, Lyons was Director of Public Works for Papua, and a member of the Papuan Executive and Legislative Council. He was also Chairman of the Building and Petroleum Advisory Boards in Papua during this period. He wrote a number of anthropological reports about the people of Western Papua. He died on 30 December 1961.

Mary Ann Haig was the second daughter of Captain Andrew Haig. She married Charles Tiffin on 1 January 1857 in Hobart. She died on 31 October 1923.

Garnet Walters Lyle was born on 7 October 1918 in Lowood, Queensland. He worked as a teacher before enlisting in the second A.I.F in 1940. Upon discharge from the army he worked as an educational officer for the Workers' Educational Association in Sydney from 1946 to 1948. His first book of verse, 18 Poems was published in late 1940 and his work appears in anthologies through most of the 1940s. He died in 1984.

Ian Scott McDowall was born on 5 June 1922. He was a public servant, member of the Communist Party, who served in New Guinea during World War Two. He died in an aircraft accident in the New Guinea on 18 September 1945.

Manfred Douglas Cross was born on 12 August 1929 in Brisbane. He studied at the University of Queensland before becoming a Queensland state public servant. He was elected to the Australian House of Representatives as a Labor member for the federal parliamentary seat of Brisbane in 1961. Retired in February 1990. He died in 2024.

Lilla Watson (Gangulu), visual artist, activist and educator, was born in 1940 and grew up on the Dawson River in Queensland. In 1979 she became the first Aboriginal person to be appointed as a tutor by The University of Queensland Watson also worked for UQ as a lecturer in Aboriginal Welfare Studies and later served as an appointed member of the University Senate. She was also the Inaugural President of the Aboriginal and Islander Child Care Agency, a founding member of the Brisbane Indigenous Media Association and Vice President of the Aboriginal and Islander Independent School Board, Acacia Ridge. She has acted as a consultant and a member of working groups, Panels and selection committees for many Government and non-Government organisations.

Rosa Caroline Murray-Prior was born on 27 March 1851 at Bromelton on the Logan River, Queensland. Daughter of Thomas Lodge Murray Prior and Matilda, nee Harpur. She began writing poems and short stories as a child. She married Arthur Campbell Bulkley Praed on 29 October 1872. She moved to Torquay, Devon, in the 1920s. Her original title Logleat of Kooralbyn was used for the later Australian edition but Bentley published her novel in 1881 as Policy and Passion. Rosa died on 10 April 1935.