Summary

Introductory statement from the book:

History was among the first subjects taught at the Townsville University College when it opened in 1961 although Australian History was not introduced until 1966. The isolation of North Queensland presented special problems for the teaching and researching of Australian history. There was virtually no indigenous historiographical tradition. A few local historical societies existed but there was little apparent interest in the past. North Queensland towns still had an air of impermanence; their buildings perched insecurely on the soil. G.C. Bolton's excellent survey of North Queensland to 1920 A Thousand Miles Away was published in 1963 but the general histories of Australia paid little attention to North Queensland which, despite its size, lacked political identity. It was a region, not a state. Distance had delayed development. Bowen was settled in 1861 and most subsequent events appeared to recapitulate earlier southern experience. Sugar and indentured Pacific Island labourers were unique but the squatting movement of the 1860's was a generation later than the occupation of Australia Felix. The gold rushes of the seventies appeared a replay of Ballarat and Bendigo. Even the Chinese influx to the Palmer lacked novelty. Conflict of settlers and Aborigines offered no fresh theme to historians familiar with the Black Line. and Myall Creek. North Queensland students could be pardoned for believing that little of importance had ever happened north of Capricorn, that Australian history had all taken place 'down south', a thousand miles and more away.

By the early seventies local history had become a major teaching and research interest at James Cook. Distance alone determined the local focus of much under-graduate and post-graduate research while regional history was increasingly introduced into Australian history courses both to make the subject more directly relevant and to investigate the ways in which national issues had worked their way out locally.

Race was an inescapable North Queensland theme. Interest developed more from local realities than from the growing fashion for racial studies in the late sixties and early seventies. There had never been a white Australia in North Queensland and Aborigines, Torres Strait Islanders and Pacific Islanders make up about 10% of the present population. Race relations have always been a major issue and will no doubt remain so long into the future. Students found the objective study of such topics disturbing, challenging, but always immediately relevant to their own lives. Inadequacies in Australian historiography quickly became apparent. Racial issues were rarely dealt with, violence had been expurgated, the pioneer tradition romanticised. It was hard in North Queensland to believe in the benign influence of the frontier. Out back vices often loomed larger than outback virtues. Racism and violence seemed quite as characteristic as mateship. Regional racial studies therefore had both a local and general significance. They contributed to a burgeoning regional historiography and added to the reassessment of the whole story of the European invasion of Australia.

The problem of finding evidence relating to racial minorities was constantly in mind. New questions had to be asked of traditional source material, oral history pursued, collected and assessed. The first paper in this volume was one of the earliest attempts to shift the perspective to the 'other side of the frontier'.