Typical tropical-born Queenslander, 1925

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’. Source: Raphael Cilento, The white man in the tropics: with especial reference to Australia and its dependencies, Commonwealth Department of Health Service Publication no7, 1925.

Dr Raphael Cilento was among the most prominent champions of a purely white north Queensland. Unlike some of his contemporaries, who equated whiteness with Britishness, he conceived the term in more expansively European terms. Cilento himself was of Italian descent.