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the Library has made available online, free digital versions of a selection of diverse works – both published books and unpublished theses all originating from the JCU History Department.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, Associate Professor Nancy Cushing (University of Newcastle) writes about Arctic Regions In a Torrid Zone: The Ross River Meatworks 1892-1992, published in 1990 by the JCU Department of History and Politics.
How many of us in our roles as academic historians have been approached by a local business about to celebrate an anniversary with the suggestion that perhaps we might like to write down their story? Depending on the type of business and the availability of records, this can work well, or rather badly. Often it is a struggle to try to find the historical significance that will make such a project rewarding to both the historian and the business.
That the query about the Ross River Meatworks centenary came to the History Department at James Cook University in 1987 while Dawn May was there was fortunate. May already had a Masters in Economics and experience conducting oral history interviews gained while talking to Aboriginal people about their work in the North Queensland cattle industry. A year earlier, she had completed the PhD thesis that would be published in 1994 as the groundbreaking Aboriginal Labour and the Cattle Industry: Queensland from white settlement to the present by Cambridge University Press.
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| Ross River Meatworks, Townsville, Date & Photographer unknown, NQID 4638, North Queensland Photographic Collection, JCU Library Special Collections |
May demonstrated a talent for taking what might seem at first glance to be a small and unpromising entity – a slaughterhouse - and by painstakingly placing it in regional, state, national, imperial and international settings demonstrating its central role in the great movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her forensic use of company records traces power struggles between producers, shippers and entrepreneurs; the importance of government interventions in the form of regulations, protection and Empire level deal making; and the impacts of world events like war and depression on viability. As B. J. Dalton wrote in the Foreword, in her hands, “one meatworks throws light on the international trade it serves, in much the same way that a good biography of one politician illuminates the intimate workings of a political system”.
Labour relations and how they were managed, including the importance of unionism, are also seen clearly in this insecure industry. Late in the piece, the issue of the place of women in a realm gendered male is explored with a familiar story of marginalisation, resistance and ultimate acceptance without genuine equality. Somewhat oddly for someone with a deep knowledge of Aboriginal people as workers, there is no discussion of their involvement with, or indeed intentional exclusion from, the meatworks.
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| Slaughter House, Date & Photographer unknown, NQID 22444, Queensland Meat Export Company Ltd Album, North Queensland Photographic Collection, JCU Library Special Collections |
The meatworks’ story is essentially international with the meat processed at Ross River being consumed mainly overseas. The means of preservation changed over time between canning, freezing and chilling but May shows that this was not linear. Distance from consumers in Britain, the United States and Asia informed the types of meat sent their way but so do consumer tastes and levels of demand. Technology was regularly upgraded producing better quality products in less time and with fewer workers, in another familiar trajectory and sparking further industrial disputes. Competitors are very much part of the story as well, with attention to the rise and fall of Argentina as a supplier of meat to Britain and the impact of zoonotic disease elsewhere in firming demand for Australian meat.
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| Preserving Room, Date & Photographer unknown, NQID 22449, Queensland Meat Export Company Ltd Album, North Queensland Photographic Collection, JCU Library Special Collections |
For an environmental historian like me, this was a page turner. The environment, particularly in the form of weather events, is present as an actor throughout the meatworks’ history. A cyclone could undo years of building up infrastructure; a drought could trigger either a shortage of animals for slaughter or a glut as producers sought to reduce their herds before they became unsaleable. Typical of the time of writing, the many cattle and fewer sheep whose lives ended at the meatworks remain an underwritten presence, represented at a distance in carefully constructed tables of numbers “treated” (capturing not only their killing but butchering, preserving and packing) and more graphically in the many illustrations of the works taken mainly from promotional booklets and newspaper articles. The only writing about their experience of their final days comes with reference to how a shift from droving and railways to motor transport of herds reduced time and injuries in transit, and one longterm employee who gained a reputation for being able to “rassle” a bolting bovine.
May finished the book speculating about whether the meatworks would survive to celebrate its bicentenary and I was also curious. A quick online search suggests that at least until very recently it has continued in operation and is now owned by a multinational food conglomerate based in Brazil. This is a development that would irk those who for so long saw South American beef as their major competition.
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| Freezing Room, Date & Photographer unknown, NQID 22440, Queensland Meat Export Company Ltd Album, North Queensland Photographic Collection, JCU Library Special Collections |
Arctic Regions in a Torrid Zone is a brilliant title and it was striking to see the freezing room workers in an image from the early twentieth century with cloth wound thickly around their feet and lower legs. What a place the Ross River Meatworks must have been to work on a hot North Queensland day, with the cattle bellowing, their blood flowing on the killing floors and coal smoke billowing from the compressors that powered the freezers. Thirty-five years after its original publication, May’s study remains engaging and relevant, with much to offer historians of rural economies, business, regionalism and states rights, international trade, labour relations, food, animal studies and more.
Associate Professor Nancy Cushing (University of Newcastle)
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