This year James Cook University celebrates its proud legacy in historical research, writing and publishing through the Studies in North Queensland History Collection. In partnership with the JCU College of Arts, Society and Education (CASE), the Library has made available online, free digital versions of a selection of diverse works – both published books and unpublished theses all originating from the JCU History Department. To complement this showcase a new series of blog posts provides a fresh response to each work through the contemporary lens of a prominent practicing historian. In today’s post, Professor Frank Bongiorno (Australian National University) writes about North Queensland Separatism in the Nineteenth Century by Christine Doran, who completed her PhD thesis in1981 for the JCU History Department.
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| Separation Rally in Flinders Street, Townsville, c.1890, Photographer unknown, NQID 4346, NQ Photographic Collection, JCU Library Special Collections. |
Australian history looks different from the north. Christine Ray Doran’s PhD thesis North Queensland Separatism in the Nineteenth Century (1981) unsettled the spatial and temporal orthodoxies in Australian history. Doran tells the story of the separation movement in its heyday, between about 1866 and 1894, but takes the story up to her own times, for it is an aspiration that endured.
Geoffrey Blainey once imagined an alternative history for Queensland – and Australia – based on the idea that the movement had succeeded in its goals. Doctoral candidates in history (at least back in the early 1980s) were disinclined to such thought experiments, but Doran doesn’t really need to go down this path to challenge us. She shows us that there was nothing settled about the way ‘Australia’ turned out. Six states might have been many more – and would have been if separationists and new staters had their way. She also explains why they failed to achieve their goal. In her hands, that result is contingent, not inevitable. This is a history rich in alternative possibilities.
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| Why North Queensland Wants Separation by A.G. Stephens, 1893. Source: NQ Collection, JCU Library Special Collections. |
Possibly Doran’s most important discovery was that the separation movement was about more than the grievances of North Queenslanders. Yes, northerners had their complaints. Many believed they were getting a raw deal from a government dominated by southern interests. They resented ‘Brisbane government’ and asserted that the colonial capital was too distant to be in tune with their needs.
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| North Queensland Separation Movement article, Sydney Morning Herald, Thursday 3rd June, 1886. Source: National Library of Australia, Trove Digitised Newspapers |
But Doran shows that it was really optimism rather than grievance that lay at the heart of the movement. North Queensland was growing in wealth – with its pastoralism, gold and sugar – as well as in population. These were freeborn Britons: having grown to ‘manhood’, they felt they were capable of governing themselves and had a right to do so. Separationists were acting out of a supreme confidence in the future of their region, one whose future would be brighter if allowed to govern itself. It is a sensibility that would permeate Queensland life and politics well beyond the heyday of the movement, extending down to the present.
There was also a developing regional consciousness: North Queenslanders were different from people elsewhere in the colony, based on their tropical climate, distinctive economy, and distance from the main concentrations of population, wealth and power in the colonies. Doran was writing before Benedict Anderson published his influential study of nationalism, Imagined Communities (1983), but her account is very much in line with his thinking. As one commentator noticed in the early 1890s,
Pick up the card of a merchant in the north, and you will find on it not “Queensland”, but “North Queensland”. Use a sheet of club paper, and it bears the “N. Q.”. Every newspaper prints it; every man heads his correspondence with it; and there is a separate almanac compiled for “North Queensland”, thus ignoring Pugh [Pugh's Almanac].
Doran confronted the cliches about separation. No, it wasn’t just got up by sugar interests to ensure a continuing supply of indentured South Sea Island labour. Opponents of separation, such as Samuel Griffith, played up that connection for party reasons. The movement had a wide base that included class-conscious workers hostile to ‘coloured labour’. Separation spawned songs and even a carnival (complete with clog dancing and a waxworks display of the colony’s first government), as well as a plethora of leagues, associations and conventions devoted to advancing its aims. It became part of the region’s civic culture.
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| Portrait of the Honourable Portrait Sir Samuel Walker Griffith, Premier of Queensland, 1890. Source: Queensland State Archives. |
Why, then, did it fail, especially when it was anticipated almost from the jump that Queensland would eventually divide? One reason was that following the grant of self-government to Queensland in 1859, the consent of the colony’s parliament was always likely to be needed. Separationists, who believed it was in the power of the Crown to give them what they wanted, petitioned and lobbied the Colonial Office and sometimes heard sympathetic noises in return. But to override the will of a colonial parliament came to be seen as an increasingly large and dangerous step in London. There were also astute politicians such as Griffith skilled in dangling alternative models, such as ‘financial separation’ or his federal system of provinces (as passed by the Legislative Assembly in the early 1890s but blocked by the upper house), at just the right time to take the wind out the movement’s sails.
Other problems included divisions in the movement (such as over whether to accept half-loaves) and rivalries among the major towns (such as between Bowen and Townsville). Which town would become the capital of the future colony? The rise of the Labor Party in the north prompted some second thoughts about separation on the part of conservatives, who worried that it might rule a northern colony. But Doran sees the Depression of the 1890s as critical: it helped wreck the earlier optimism and buoyancy integral to North Queensland separation. In such ways, Doran’s study deploys a kind of history that has become fashionable in recent decades: the history of the emotions. She never leaves us in doubt that it is sentiment and emotion, more than narrow economic calculations, which mattered.
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| The Wonderland of the North: Scenic beauties of North Queensland: The ideal Australian Winter Tour, page 5, Queensland Government Intelligence and Tourist Bureau (1922). Source: NQHeritage@JCU |
The story of how historians based in regional universities such as JCU rewrote Australian historiography in the 1970s and 1980s is yet to be fully appreciated. Christine Doran’s thesis is an important contribution to that ‘project’. This century, we have seen a procession of distinguished scholars build on the foundation of A Thousand Miles Away: A History of North Queensland to 1920 (1963) by Geoffrey Bolton and a rich body of work by Townsville-based scholars. They have integrated North Queensland into Australian history while also placing that story into its wider region. Doran would herself go on to teach and research southeast Asian history at Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory.
It is no longer possible to write serious Australian history as if nothing of note happened north of the 22nd parallel until 1942. To read Christine Doran’s study of North Queensland separatism more than 40 years after its completion is to be reminded of the richness of that story and its wider relevance to our understanding of the nation and the Indo-Pacific region.
Frank Bongiorno, Professor of History at the Australian National University and Immediate Past President, Australian Historical Association
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