Separation

Griffith Taylor's Climograph, 1918

Australia

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1 January 1918

30 August 2010

Location

Australia

See map: Google Maps

30 August 2010

Queensland Geographical Journal

Griffith Taylor’s climographs comparing selected Australian towns with the ideal climate for the white race. Taylor’s climographs combine wet-bulb temperature and humidity data for each month of the year, producing a twelve-sided polygon for each location to allow easy comparison between them. Other climographs compiled by Taylor show the close similarity between tropical Australia and India.

Griffith Taylor, ‘Geographical factors controlling the settlement of tropical Australia’, Queensland Geographical Journal, No18-19, 1918, vols 32-33.

Group of sugar growers and families, Innisfail, North Queensland. Sure proof of a white race living and thriving in the Queensland tropics.

Collection of the Centre for the Government of Queensland

Map of the world showing the warm countries in which the skin of human beings gradually becomes brown, 1903

Australia

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1 January 1903

30 August 2010

Location

Australia

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30 August 2010

Melbourne

E.W. Cole Book Arcade

Map of the world showing the warm countries in which the skin of human beings gradually becomes brown, and the hot countries in which it gradually becomes black, 1903. E.W.

Raphael Cilento’s image of the evolving north Queensland type. In the adjacent text, Cilento explained that: ‘There is, indeed, beginning to be a very definite type of North Queenslander, or tropical-born Australian.... The race is in a transition stage, and it is very apparent that there is being evolved precisely what one would hope for, namely, a distinctive tropical type, adapted to life in the tropical environment in which it is set’.

The Australian Institute of Tropical Medicine, Townsville, 1910. This institution played a key role in propagating the message that there were no significant medical impediments to the establishment of thriving white communities in the tropics. Collection of the National Archives of Australia.

Collection of the National Archives of Australia

The Swallow family and members of their staff at Hambledon Sugar Plantation outside Cairns, c1889.

Collection of John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland image 171012

Whiteness in the tropics

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, two visions of a white tropical Queensland vied for ascendancy. One was based on the principle of white dominance.

'A river city is held together by its bridges, collects them like sutures across a wound’ from Simon Cleary, The comfort of figs, St Lucia, UQP, 2008, p91.

Victoria (replaced 1969) and Grey Street Bridges (now William Jolly), Brisbane, c1934. Postcard, Sidues Series, Collection of the Centre for the Government of Queensland.

Collection of the Centre for the Government of Queensland

City of Brisbane, c1906

Brisbane, QLD

Australia

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1 January 1906

30 August 2010

Location

Brisbane, QLD

Australia

See map: Google Maps

30 August 2010

Brisbane

Queensland Government

Collection of the Centre for the Government of Queensland

City of Brisbane, c1906. From Queensland: The Winter Paradise of Australasia, c1906, Brisbane, Queensland Government. Collection of the Centre for the Government of Queensland