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

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
1 January 1906
30 August 2010
30 August 2010

Location

Brisbane, QLD
Australia
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

Photographs of the Brisbane River during the 1893 flood. Collection of Fryer Library, University of Queensland.

Copyright © Collection of the Fryer Library, the University of Queensland

The Brisbane River divides Queensland’s capital city and threads its way through the suburbs and into its hinterland.

Of the estimated 12,000 deaths in Australia from the Spanish or pneumonic influenza in 1918-19, 1030 were Queenslanders, 315 of whom were known to be Aborigines, representing 30 per cent of the State death toll.  In Queensland, the pandemic had arrived first at the main seaports of the middle and southern coast and had then moved inland to urban and rural regions. Initially, it affected white people then began affecting Aborigines, coming for them on top of an epidemic of pneumonia.

Copyright © Gordon Briscoe, AO

Map of Queensland indicating Aboriginal ration depots, compounds, missions and government settlements, 1890s-1940s, 2003

QLD
Australia
1 January 2003
27 August 2010
27 August 2010

Location

QLD
Australia
Canberra
Aboriginal Studies Press, AIATSIS

Copyright © Gordon Briscoe, AO

Map of Queensland indicating the Aboriginal ration depts, compounds, missions and government settlements, 1890s-1940s, from Gordon Briscoe, Counting, health and identity: a history of Aboriginal health and demography in Western Australia and Queensland, 1900-1940, Canberra, Aboriginal Studies Press, AIATSIS, 2003.

Gordon Briscoe, Counting, health and identity: a history of Aboriginal health and demography in Western Australia and Queensland, 1900-1940, Canberra, Aboriginal Studies Press, AIATSIS, 2003

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