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the Library has made available online, free digital versions of a selection of diverse works – both published books and unpublished theses all originating from the JCU History Department.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 series of blog posts provides a fresh response to each work through the contemporary lens of a prominent practicing historian. In today’s post, Adjunct Associate Professor Hannah Forsyth (University of New England) writes about Mt Isa: Oasis of the Outback by Noreen Kirkman, published in 1998 by the JCU School of History and Politics.
Thirty years after Broken Hill Proprietary (BHP) began mining the silver-lead-zinc lode in outback NSW, another lead-silver and later zinc and copper mining town began in outback Queensland. The town that was to become Mt Isa has attracted far less historical attention than Broken Hill, which acts as an icon for Australian capital and labour alike. Less important though it may in fact be, I was born in Mt Isa and enjoyed reading Noreen Kirkman’s Mt Isa: Oasis of the Outback a great deal.
As a longstanding reader of similar histories of Broken Hill, Oasis of the Outback was both familiar and unfamiliar. Tents and shacks that began near the mines expanded into a town, but by contrast to 1890s needs in Broken Hill, by the 1920s some of the tents were attached to motor cars. Even so, the photographs of camps do not look markedly different to Broken Hill’s early dwellings – or fashions. Visitors might have been shocked by the short skirts and thin fabric of the dresses worn by women in the hot Mt Isa settlement, not to mention their bobbed hair, though these are less visible in the otherwise wonderful photographic collection the book has included.
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| Portrait of John Campbell Miles, the prospector, and Douglas McGillivray, the promoter, of Mount Isa Mines 1924, Photographer: Robert Burness, Source: State Library of Queensland |
Boarding houses provided meals for miners who might have been understandably tired of the tinned food and flour they could buy at the general store, but soon a key new business was the local picture theatre. A school was soon needed. The Queensland government was prepared to allow one, but the tin shed with hessian walls was built and paid for by locals. Unlike Broken Hill’s first teacher who was given a house, an allowance for water deliveries and generous vacation time and funds to return to Melbourne for the summer, Mt Isa’s teacher received a stretcher bed and a mosquito net and permission to sleep in the school.
Uncertain investment messed with the mine share prices in the 1920s and it was a government-funded railway connecting Mt Isa to Townsville in 1929 that helped embed the town’s fortunes. The Bank of NSW opened a branch in the corner of the picture theatre, which moved from silent films to ‘talkies’ in 1930.
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| Workers outside mines machinery building, 1930, Photographer unknown, NQID 1839, NQ Photographic Collection, JCU Library Special Collections. |
When tents and shacks were replaced with houses, which is the subject of Kirkman’s chapter two, they were far sturdier and cooler than Broken Hill’s typical wood and iron huts. The beginnings of what other historians would recognize as welfare capitalism were present in the ‘model house’ and dormitories with ‘first class’ dining rooms attached, built for workers.
Ice was a major theme of welfare capitalism in the outback. Ice enabled food to be preserved and drinks to be cool. A Clubhouse open to men and women workers served cool drinks in a lovely building with a view over the park. Sport was played, the sick were professionally cared for and children were educated.
But by the early 1930s, the Company’s social activities, including the Club, were cause for complaint. Those wishing to establish commercial activities now found the Isa Mines Company had a monopoly on everything from housing, butchery and even the local brass band. Such disputes were the subject of Kirkman’s Chapter three.
Chapter four focused on a heated dispute over the hospital. The company-funded hospital was deemed unsatisfactory and meddling, so that many in the union opposed it. Critical care was needed close to the mine, but this was no longer close to town, driving growing divisions between mine and town – apparently also riven along the lines of which pub one habitually frequented.
Chapter five recounts the changes wrought by the Great Depression and the Second World War. With fortunes fluctuating with the price of lead, the town suffered under Depression conditions and the Company had difficulty supplying workers with adequate housing. Expectations by now were much higher, so that corrugated iron homes were pooh-poohed as ‘this is what they expect a man to bring his wife and family to live in’.
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| General view of Mount Isa Mines and mullock dumps, 1920s, Photographer: Mr Fred Port, Source: Queensland Museum |
War brought a different kind of abundance, as Mt Isa acted as depot for military equipment and camp for thousands of Americans. Food shortages were reported, but refrigerated meat and vegetables were still sold by Company stores. Silver-lead processing was abandoned in favour of copper, which was in demand due to the war. Chapter six describes post-war prosperity as commodity prices boomed and the town expanded.
WS Robinson, who started Zinc Corporation in Broken Hill (linked to Collins House Finance in Melbourne) with his brother Lionel and future US President Herbert Hoover, helped deepen welfare capitalism in Mt Isa. An Olympic swimming pool, bowling club, tennis courts and recreation area were supported by social clubs that encouraged women to organize events. The Company sponsored worthy causes and in the 1950s – the subject of Chapter 7 – it helped grow a housing cooperative that deepen the citizenship of the ‘good solid citizens’ of Mt Isa. The Company’s paternal rule was finally converted to civic structure with a local council in 1962.
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| Weekly Qantas plane service from Mount Isa to Brisbane, 1932, Source: State Library of Queensland |
The 1960s disrupted Mt Isa’s cohesion, just as it was becoming the ‘oasis’ of the outback, according to Chapter 8. Long an outpost for QANTAS, air travel became more popular and then, in the 1960s, other nearby mines began to plunder population. The union sought a pay rise and mining operations stopped for industrial action – though far briefer and less militant than any reported in Broken Hill. Coles and Woolworths moved in and a Civic Centre was built in anticipation of the Queen’s visit in 1970 – some five years before I was born, and where the book ends.
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| A team: Mount Isa ladies basketball representative team, July 1948, Photographer: H. Waldegrave, Source: State Library of Queensland |
By the time this book was published its author joyfully recounted the institutions the town could now boast: an annual rodeo, a fossil display, the flying doctors, school of the air and tours of the mines.
The book concludes by celebrating the oasis of the outback’s ‘own identity as the commercial, industrial and tourist capital of north-west Queensland’, which I’m sure seemed like an achievement indeed.
Oasis of the Outback sits alongside similar celebratory histories of Broken Hill, acting as propaganda in the service of continued civic cohesion at a time (it was published in 1998) such cohesion, including club membership but also any remnant of welfare capitalism, was disintegrating.
Such histories paper over the disputes between labour and capital. Moreover, in focusing on the achievements of institution-building spend far more time on hospitals than the health of workers exposed to large quantities of lead-laden air. Nevertheless, the details in Oasis of the Outback are glorious, as are the photographs. I was so glad to learn more about the town where I was born. I hope to visit it again, someday.
Adjunct Associate Professor Hannah Forsyth (University of New England)
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