Queensland will pay you $20k to uncover queer history nobody's written yet

The State Library's Rainbow Research Fellowship funds a year of archival work, and applications close 15 October.

Told by Paige Turner · 6 October 2026

The State Library of Queensland wants to pay someone twenty thousand dollars to dig through the John Oxley Library and tell Queensland's queer stories, and applications close 15 October.

The Rainbow Research Fellowship—now in its sixth year—funds a year of archival work using the library's collections, with a $20,000 stipend, a shared workspace in the Neil Roberts Research Lounge, and direct access to staff who know where the bodies are buried, metaphorically and occasionally literally. Applications are open to anyone over eighteen who is an Australian citizen or permanent resident, from any discipline or professional background: researchers, artists, filmmakers, digital media practitioners, musicians, curators, writers, independent scholars. Projects already underway or with other funding are eligible, but you have to disclose it.

The fellowship is supported by Lyn Valentine, and it has already uncovered material that would otherwise have stayed in boxes: Bianca Martin's 2022 project on LGBTQIA+ zines in contemporary Queensland established an alternative history of self-publishing in opposition to mainstream media, focussing on post-2000s zines and the implicit or explicit community building within them. Dr Marion Stell and Professor Celmara Pocock's 2025 project, Queering the Lens: Cross-Dressing in Family Photograph Albums, unearthed photographs of people joyfully cross-dressing at holiday camps, country dances, hula nights, mock weddings, guesthouse parties, military barracks and charity cricket matches—widespread, popular, socially embraced, and almost entirely uncaptioned, uncatalogued or overlooked. The 2026 fellow, Monika O'Hanlon, is producing Out of the Archives, a mixed-media documentary podcast series that takes a single artefact—photograph, protest flyer, costume, love letter—and unpacks the story behind it, exploring what it reveals about LGBTQIA+ life and what remains hidden.

Applications must be submitted online through SmartyGrants and will need a project title, a short biographical statement and CV (maximum three A4 pages), a description of the project and its relevance, an overview of goals, scope and timelines, anticipated outcomes, and three referees with knowledge of your research capabilities. If you are a Queensland Government employee, you need a letter of support from your manager. Postgraduate study projects and ARC or university research teams are not eligible. Current State Library staff and Library Board members cannot apply.

Fellows enter into a Memorandum of Agreement and are expected to provide two progress reports, compile an annotated bibliography, write at least three articles for the John Oxley Library Blog, deliver a public lecture at the annual Research Reveals event in March 2028, and ensure the outcomes acknowledge State Library of Queensland and donor support. Expenditure of the stipend is at your discretion—there is no budget acquittal—and it is designed to support time to research and complete the project. Successful applicants will be notified in December 2026, inducted at a welcome ceremony in February 2027, and deliver their Research Reveals talk in March 2028.

The work matters because the archive is not neutral—it is what someone decided to keep, and queer lives have historically been what someone decided not to. A fellowship like this does not just fund research; it funds the act of looking for what was left out, written over, or filed under the wrong name, and it puts money and institutional weight behind the argument that those stories are worth preserving. The John Oxley Library holds the material. The fellowship funds the time and the expertise to make it legible, and to make it public.

Twenty thousand dollars will not make you rich, but it will buy you a year to work on something that matters, in a room full of documents nobody else is reading, with people who know how to find them. That is not nothing.