Summary

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

Dr. Daniel Lavery answers the question 'Why is this significant?'

Published in 1863, Sketch of a Residence is one of the more important documents in Queensland's colonial history. James Morrill was on both sides of the colonial frontier and, uniquely, his short memoir is from 'the other side' of that frontier.

Morrill, an Essex-born mariner, survived a shipwreck and washed ashore just south of the future Townsville in 1846. Near to death, Morrill was tended by members of the Bindal People, and began to reside with them around Mount Elliot.

After spending time with the Juru People to the south, Morrill returned to the Bindal and had no contact with Europeans during the 1850s. In 1861, however, the Kennedy District was opened up and there was an increasing incursion by Europeans seeking pasture for their stock. After mass killings of his adoptive kinspeople in the early 1860s, Morrill approached some shepherds in the Burdekin delta in January 1863, and shouted, 'Don't shoot mateys, I'm a British object.'

Morrill sailed to Brisbane where he became a reluctant celebrity. Weary of re-telling his story and in the hope of earning an income, he produced Sketch of a Residence with the assistance of a scribe.

James Morrill's intentions in coming out of the bush will never be fully known. Certainly he spoke of the danger of being shot by the pastoralists. But Morrill also emerged from the bush with a plan to save his kinspeople from the ethnocide that was enveloping them. Leave the coastal wetlands to them, he urged, it was unsuitable for pasture. The pastoralists could have the open woodlands and grasslands where their animals could graze. All could co-exist peacefully.

His plan was barely listened to. Why would they? Land titles were being issued in Brisbane without any consideration given to the Indigenous inhabitants. Ironically, it was the Juru and the Bindal – and other Indigenous peoples – who had become the British objects.

Morrill returned to Bowen – to what he called 'my country' – working, buying land in Bowen, building a cottage, marrying and fathering a son and further assisting with the occupation of the north. Indeed, in mid-1865, Morrill purchased at auction the first block of land sold in Townsville but he died suddenly later that year aged only 41 years.

James Morrill's Sketch of a Residence among the Aboriginals of Northern Queensland for Seventeen Years is a seminal document in the revision of our frontier history. Without his 1863 Sketch we may never have imagined what it meant to be on that side of the Queensland frontier where you were being shot at rather than doing the shooting.