First Nations people please be advised this article speaks of racially discriminating moments in history, including the distress and death of First Nations people.

When I produced the deadly earnest study A History of Queensland back in 2007, the publishers, tucked away down south in Port Melbourne, seriously asked me why I had not included a key section on crocodiles and yet another on the origin of the lamington. Why did I have to have so much in there on labour and race relations, they complained. At least they stopped short of demanding a recipe for pumpkin scones.

Looking from the North: Australian History from the Top Down – Raymond Evans (NewSouth)

Queensland historians – and indeed many of the denizens across the 2,000km stretch of Australia’s “Deep North” – soon grow familiar with such near-comic, general incomprehension from bemused southerners, who occasionally lift their gaze northwards. And they generally do not have to await the judgement of posterity to experience notable condescension from them.

Queensland is the place of crocodiles, lamingtons, bananas, Joh, rednecks, pumpkin scones and cane toads – and that is all one really needs to know. The Territory and the Kimberley are even less distinguished, far away somewhere beyond the black stump. Of course, the less you know, the less you know you don’t know.

Henry Reynolds’ latest volume attempts to put at least some of this to rights. The tropical north offers us quite a fascinating dichotomy, even though this demands a bit of grasping. It comprises around 45% – or almost half – of the Australian landmass, yet holds only 5.2% of the national population, mostly concentrated in a handful of towns, such as Cairns, Townsville, Mt Isa, Darwin and Broome.

Does the fact that 95% of the population live below the tropic line substantially explain the prevailing disregard – especially as the recognised centres of cultural and intellectual excellence lie broadly within the Sydney-Canberra-Melbourne “golden triangle” and are largely preoccupied with their own navel-gazing?

Indeed, one might ask whether slightly more than 5% of the national population should sensibly receive more than 5% of the national attention.

Reynolds thinks it should. This is not so much based on demography, but rather due to the North’s territorial expanse, its economic and strategic significance and, most importantly, the uniqueness of a history rarely considered when the contours of national identity are delineated.

Especially in relation to two of the most pressing, present preoccupations – “truth-telling” about First Nation dispossession and smouldering controversy over the annual intakes and ethnic origins of migrants – the history of the tropics has much to contribute.

A ‘shameful’ chapter

Over scores of millennia, northern Australia was the fount of deep history. First occupation proceeded from north to south. Aboriginal peoples arrived on the continent through northern entry points tens of thousands of years ago before moving steadily southward. Macassan trepang traders arrived in the North centuries before the British appeared at Botany Bay.

In the 19th century, land-taking by white colonising settlers (or, more accurately, “unsettlers”) came late to the tropics. They arrived from Melbourne, Sydney and Tasmania in the late 1850s, settling first, according to Reynolds, in the coastal port of Bowen in April 1861. But surely the first northern settlement began almost three years earlier with the proclamation of Rockhampton (later dubbed the township of “sin, sweat and sorrow” by British novelist Anthony Trollope) right on the Capricornian line in October 1858.

Still, both Rockhampton and Bowen have their origins painted in blood. Reynolds describes “ruthlessly usurping” pastoralists expanding rapidly across Aboriginal hinterlands, seizing traditional territories for vast “runs”, each of them between 65 and 250 square km.

The “reign of terror” this inflicted upon the various peoples of these “ancient homelands” was answered at most times, he writes, by armed, militant resistance from local Mobs. With guerrilla tactics and economic warfare upon white personnel, flocks and herds, they attempted to stem the vast, swelling tide of colonial advance.

Variously described at the time by participants as “a species of warfare”, “extermination” or, in omnibus fashion, “a war of extermination”, this acquisitive process was rigorously sustained by colonial legislatures packed with pastoralists and planters, guarding their economic interests.

Read more: Friday essay: neither a monster nor a saint ... Sir Samuel Griffith, Queensland’s violent frontier and the rigours of truth-telling

This elite phalanx was basically organising and funding its own violent land-theft, via the state-run Native Police services. Practitioners of British common law, in mostly impotent courts, helpfully averted their gaze from the inevitable slaughter.

Reynolds posits – and I would agree – that North Queensland saw the worst of this and then facilitated its spread across the “top end”. By this point, the killing power of Western ordnance had become increasingly acute, as belief in white racial superiority was also peaking.

Distant private colonists, remote from the southern administrative centre, became very much a law unto themselves. More than 70 Native Police camps covered North Queensland at various times, out of the known 150 or so that have been identified. These camps, conducting monthly patrols and many “dispersals”, were better weaponised, given a freer hand and often persisted far longer than their southern counterparts.

Though Reynolds estimates that the force was run by “250 or so white officers”, further research by a crack archaeological team has now pushed this total to around 440.

Aboriginal troopers within the Native Police force – somewhat harder to enumerate – numbered in the range of 1,000–1,500. Despite the disquiet this information presently causes, it is important to recognise that this organisation (which ran from 1848 to 1929 in the Queensland zone) was likely colonial Australia’s most efficiently lethal killing machine.

Some recruits were attracted to the force by offers of military regalia, horses, rifles, payment and sexual access to captured Aboriginal women. Others were openly coerced, some being taken directly from colonial prisons.

Reynolds concludes:

The whole story represents one of the most egregious, shameful chapters in the history of Australian colonisation. It has been widely and justifiably exposed by numerous contemporary historians as it was by humanitarian critics in the 19th century.

Queensland Native Police pictured in 1864. Wikimedia Commons

Read more: Our mapping project shows how extensive frontier violence was in Queensland. This is why truth-telling matters

A demographic revolution

Queensland was increasingly seen by British colonial officials in Whitehall as “a rogue colony”, due to its enthusiasm for illegally “exterminating” Aboriginal people and extreme racial policies directed towards Melanesians and Asians.

One sees this clearly upon reading the disquieting reports written by travelling journalists venturing into tropical Australia for such southern publications as The Sydney Morning Herald, The Argus and The Age. As one correspondent noted in mid-1880, “the doctrine of extermination” was widely broadcast throughout the northern towns he visited. In general conversation, he “heard it repeated that the blacks must be exterminated and this is the sentiment of highly educated persons”.

North Queensland, too, is the key to understanding the subsequent frontier histories of the Northern Territory and much of the Kimberley region of Western Australia. For it was largely Queensland cattlemen, with their white and Aboriginal work-forces, as well as fervent gold-seekers from the Gulf Country, Cape York and north-western Queensland, who spearheaded the colonisation of these regions. They took their aggressive ideas, desires and suppressive techniques into new zones of conflict.

By the 1920s an original, pre-contact First Nations population of around 400,000 across the entire North (with perhaps 300,000 in Queensland) had been reduced by over 90% to around 40,000 people (with around 17,000 remaining in Queensland). These had been replaced by almost 500,000 migrant incomers. Yet most of the sequestered lands were now in the hands of only 1500 or so pastoral families, partnerships and absentee companies.

Arguably, this stark demographic revolution, accompanied by an elitist process of land enclosure, should be the major concern of Australian history and culture today – and perhaps, one day, it will be. Focusing on the neglected North helps us to begin thinking seriously about this.

Across the British Empire, it was unusual for English and Celtic emigrants to settle in any tropical zones in large and permanent numbers. Queensland’s tropical history is thus also unique, globally.

Denser settlement of working-class people and small farmer communities, as distinct from plantation owners and exclusive pastoralists, was almost unheard of elsewhere within the global tropics. White peoples and steamy, sunny climates were not expected to compute. Hence the North became a testing ground for multiracial interactions, with migrants coming from Asia, Melanesia and across Europe as well as the British Isles.

Darker skinned migrants were invariably regarded and treated as inferior, according to graduated racial hierarchies endorsed by Western physical and social sciences and Christianity. Fixed stereotypes connected ethnicity to social worth, encouraging segregation and socio-economic inequalities, such as slave-like labour systems for Aborigines and Pacific Islanders.

Yet, Reynolds maintains, the complex interracial melange created at such centres as Cairns, Thursday Island and Darwin actually served to promote a more “relaxed acceptance” of the non-white presence. As he writes,

Racial mixture manifested in daily mingling seemed to alleviate social tension, not exacerbate it as the zealots of racial purity expected.

Cultural assimilation in reverse

How true is this? It does seem in some danger of being overplayed, especially given the opium, leprosy and miscegenation scares of the time. The spread of opium addiction from the 1880’s to the 1900’s was blamed almost exclusively on the Chinese. Leprosy scares of the 1890’s targeted all non-whites with a prolonged, hysterical fear campaign. There was, as well, a generally expressed repugnance towards so-called “half-caste” and “piebald” offspring and a consistent, negative pattern of racist profiling by the northern press. Racial disturbance and rioting is also omitted or downplayed in the analysis.

That being said, I was recently astonished to find a long, descriptive letter, reprinted in the Bendigo Advertiser and written in mid-1878, sent from Townsville by a former resident of Victoria to a workmate. Reflections on Aborigines as “savage blacks” are not unexpected for the time, with the writer, J.B. Henderson, observing, “I have heard it said they are often ‘hunted’ and ‘dispersed’ and I think it must be so.”

Yet the major surprise comes when Henderson reflects on how a combination of climate, environment and association has peeled away a considerable degree of the locals’ accustomed Britishness. They are no longer as they were. Their “manners and customs” have become “more like the south of France or Spain than that of Englishmen”. Moreover, they have become more like the local Chinese than anyone else. He states:

We have a good many Chinese things and manners here among the English population and the emigrants who arrive here from the old country [Britain] soon acquire them. We have Chinese dresses, coats, customs etc etc and our social habits are a mixture of Southern European and Eastern Chinese […] I should like you to see me in my wide Chinese trousers, called ‘Bajou’, white shirt and overall (this dress is called a ‘Bandana’) and straw hat, or in a light pair of duck pants […] and Chinese crop-coat […]

These disclosures are so unexpected they are worth reproducing at length. Cultural assimilation appears to be unfolding here in reverse, sliding from Western into Asian behaviours.

Certainly, the major historical record abundantly shows acute Sinophobia pervaded Queensland’s colonial society and structural racial inequalities haunted socioeconomic relations. Yet, it would appear an experiential counter-narrative was also possible culturally, under certain fortuitous circumstances.

White Australia and beyond

Reynolds’ narrative then encompasses some devastating impacts imposed by the administration of the White Australia Policy after 1901. Thousands of Melanesians in Queensland were forcibly deported (actually almost 7,300 of them rather than the 4,269 enumerated here).

Centuries of Macassan contact with Aboriginal peoples right across the North were abruptly terminated in 1906, to the vast distress of the Yolgnu people. Chinatowns in such centres as Cairns, Mackay, Atherton and Darwin were “wipe[d] off the face of the map” from the 1920’s to the 1940’s.

Asian minorities were purposefully calculated to “wither away” by demographic attrition. “A spirit of contemptuous antagonism” against non-whites was officially fostered throughout Australian culture – a dark spirit of distain we still wrestle with today.

In approaching the present, Reynolds unfolds the long and winding road towards Aboriginal land rights from the point where it was first articulated in an Australian parliament (as late as May 1963 by Kim Beazley) to a contemporary position where the volume celebrates how over “90% of the Kimberley is held under some form of Indigenous tenure, as are 80% of Cape York and 70% of the Northern Territory”.

Such achievement is certainly noteworthy in a country once “obsessed” with “the hierarchy of races” and “strong community support for the old ways” of dominance and dispossession. Yet Reynolds tends here to gloss over the many caveats and restrictions now surrounding Aboriginal land tenure, directing this renewed ownership away from deeply traditional practices of Country and towards western capitalist processes of property usage.

More might also have been attempted in analysing the much vaunted multiculturalism of such present-day centres as Cairns, Darwin, Broome and Thursday Island.

Despite some textual repetition and occasional departures from strict relevance, this book is yet another of Reynolds’ deeply rewarding studies. It communicates directly and powerfully with deft and incisive sentencing.

If anything, it tends to understate the severity of the prolonged and fraught racial history it discloses. Readers may not agree with everything this author has to say. But in enterprising and challenging ways they are encouraged here to think outside the usual box about this country: to look at it sensibly “from the top down”.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Raymond Evans, Griffith University

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Raymond Evans receives funding from Commonwealth ARC grant 1980's. No present funding -.In the 1980's worked with an ARC grant..