Last evening, Vilis, Janis, and I attended another of the Queensland History Lecture Series hosted by the Townsville City Libraries. This seminar had the catchy title ‘Is Queensland Different?’ Presented by Dr. Anna Haebich of Brisbane/Gold Coast’s Griffith University, the lecture was, disappointingly, rather like a broken kaleidoscope that tumbled snippets of Queensland’s history into a disjointed montage rather than a clear design.
Take, for example, the following unrelated pieces of information: 1) It was thought for many years that white people couldn’t survive Queensland’s climate; 2) Queensland possesses great numbers of poisonous and dangerous animals; 3) The Aboriginal populations of Queensland are very diverse; 4) In 1859, a Queensland government was hastily formed; 5) Queensland’s frontier was extremely violent, and by 1900, 90% of the original Aboriginal population was dead as a result of massacres, imported diseases, and skirmishes with whites; 6) The shearers’ strikes of the 1890’s gave birth to the Labour Party; 7) Southerners treat Queensland as a joke; 8) Queensland has a masculine society; 9) The worst natural disaster in Australia’s recorded history, the Pearling Disaster, occurred in Queensland in 1899, when a cyclone (Tropical Cyclone Mahina) slammed into the Cape York coast and killed more than 400 people, many of whom were sailors on pearling boats; 10) Queensland was the realm of Squatocracy (not explained, but I Googled the term and learned ‘squatocracy’ is an Aussie term for a social class of wealthy and highly influential landowners); 11) The 1897 Act prohibited Chinese residents from employing Aboriginals because whites wanted to dominate this labour force (this also had something to do with opium addictions, but I didn’t quite follow that). And so on.
At one point, Dr. Haebich did suggest, without elaborating, that Queensland’s lifestyle and architecture were indeed different, but almost immediately annulled this point by stating that some people consider these differences imaginary. At the end of the presentation, a member of the audience asked, “Different from what?” The lecturer had never addressed this point during her talk, nor did she address it in her reply. That was too bad because many of the facts presented were inherently intriguing and could have led to fascinating discourses. The ingredients were there, but the cook never turned on the stove.
Townsville Street Scene (© Magi Nams)
