Summary

This item is one of our 50 Treasures: Celebrating 50 years of James Cook University.

Dr. Sandi Robb answers the question 'Why is this significant?'

Two little volumes, Cottage Gardening in Queensland, (fourth edition), December 1915, and Cottage Gardening in Queensland 1920, are significant for three reasons: for their social commentary of the first two decades of the twentieth century; as a practical guide to north Queensland gardening, and as a carriage service to incite anti-Chinese sentiment in line with the White Australia Policy.

Henry Treloar wrote what is now the first guide to tropical gardening in Queensland, which makes an outstanding contribution to garden history and understanding gardening trends in the early twentieth century. Produced in Townsville and Brisbane, the pamphlets stand testament to time for their accurate guidance and usefulness when it comes to seasonal gardening in the tropics. Small in size, but jam-packed with information, these two volumes provide a practical guide to the management, preparation and production of fruit and vegetables for any man who had a 'small' back yard (a quarter acre/1000 square metres.).

While loquacious throughout his 1915 work, any attempt by his Brisbane editor to reign in Treloar's self-indulgent waffle and limit commentary to vegetables and vegetable growing alone failed miserably. Like a grasshopper on a leaf, Treloar's formidable style snuck in and made its presence felt, proving difficult to eradicate.

Both pamphlets, written at times of social uncertainty —during World War One in 1915, and later the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1920— remain important for their social commentary as a post-Federation society dominated by and for, the White Man in the Tropics. Despite having sustained the Townsville community with fresh fruit and vegetables since first settled in 1864, antagonism towards Chinese gardeners had steadily increased over the decades and was validated by new laws introduced by the Commonwealth at Federation. Chinese settlers were designated alien status under the Commonwealth Immigration Act 1901, even if they had previously been naturalised as British Subjects. In his publications, Henry Treloar took an oath to uphold the White Australia Policy by clearly rejecting Townsville's Chinese as aliens, in his garden.

The language was emotive. He wrote, 'there is a blot on our escutcheon, a blot that must be erased- a social blot, a commercial blot, an economic blot - a blot of such magnitude as threatens to obscure us'. In writing this, he successfully defines the social divide by using 'Us' or 'Them' language, and in doing so, relegates the Chinese community to the 'Other': despised, denounced and to be destroyed. The very heart of Treloar's gardening argument revealed as a desire to control his economic environment by planting the seeds of the White Australia Policy one row at a time, firmly in the minds of his readers.