In 1907, Chris Watson, leader of the federal Labor Party, began an article on âOur Empty Northâ by quoting President Rooseveltâs warning against leaving it so. By then, Rooseveltâs admonition had been repeated so many times it barely needed quotation. Watson reiterated the presidentâs claim that rich lands lay in Australiaâs north and, more stridently than Roosevelt, he stressed the dangers of Asia:
An immense area, practically unpeopled, unguarded, stretches there at our most vulnerable point, while, distant a few days steam, cluster the myriads of Asia, threatening ever to swarm across to the rich fields of a land, attractive in all respects to a frugal, industrious people, condemned at present to exist in a much poorer country.Legions of white settlers were needed to garrison the north, he declared, and tropical Australia held the resources to sustain them. 1
Watson, who had been Australiaâs first Labor prime minister three years earlier, wrote his âEmpty Northâ article shortly after touring the Northern Territory. While expressing some concern about the tropical climate, he thought it would âprove no serious deterrent to successful settlement.â The issue that consumed most space in Watsonâs two-part article was the northâs suitability for farming, for as he explained: âSettlement must depend, in the main, upon agriculture.â Here, Watson conformed to long-established convention, upholding the cultivation of the soil as the only viable means of both sustaining a large population and validating title to the land. Cattle-grazing offered no secure occupation, he stated, while mining was an âindustry of secondary importanceâ: worth pursuing provided Chinese miners could be squeezed out, but unable alone to adequately people the north. Close settlement depended on agriculture, and Watson affirmed the Territoryâs possession of abundant lands for that purpose. 2 However, he side-stepped the question of why, if the Territory was so well endowed for agricultural pursuits, there were not already flourishing farms there. Other Australians were more perturbed by that anomaly.
This chapter explores three factors behind federation-era anxieties over Australiaâs northern spaces. The first is the long history of failure to either build sound economic foundations or establish a viable population. There were some successes, all concentrated in a thin strip along the north-east coast of Queensland, but across the vast expanse from the Great Dividing Range west to the Indian Ocean, settlers were scarce and their enterprises precarious. The second section considers how Australiansâ changing attitudes toward Asia influenced their perspectives on that part of the continent closest to it. After federation, the white Australia policy barricaded the nation against Asia, but as the third section shows, contemporaries were well aware that the great white walls had been breached before they had been built.
A Lackluster Performance
The first attempt at colonizing northern Australia was at Fort Dundas on Melville Island in 1824, followed by Fort Wellington on the nearby mainland in 1827. Both were abandoned in 1829. Their primary purpose was to assert British sovereignty over the north of the continent, with a secondary purpose of extending British commercial interests in the East Indies. The same motives underlay the third attempt at colonization, at Port Essington in 1838, with an additional purpose of providing refuge for survivors of the growing number of shipwrecks in the Torres Strait. Given the distance between Port Essington and the Torres Strait, the last of these motives was unlikely to be fulfilled. It wasnât; nor was a viable trade with the Indies established, while the strategic motive quickly subsided since no rival power showed the least interest in colonizing northern Australia. 3 Sickness and starvation stalked the settlement while the monsoon heat sapped the colonistsâ energy. Thomas Henry Huxley, visiting Port Essington as a young surgeonânaturalist on HMS Rattlesnake in November 1848, damned it as âthe most useless, miserable, ill-managed hole in Her Majestyâs dominions.â 4 A year later, the colonists of Port Essington burned the settlement to the ground and sailed away.
The American historian C. Harley Grattan observed that by the middle of the nineteenth century âthe British had not solved the problem of settlement on the northern coast but they had securely established a pattern of failure which was to stand as a model for some years to come.â 5 There was undoubtedly a pattern of failure, but the would-be colonizers clung to an image of northern Australia as a land with enormous potential for cultivation and commerce. Europeans then conceived the region very differently to how it is seen today. What we now call Southeast Asia was then Austral India or the Indies, an exotic land of tropical abundance, spices, and riches. Northern Australia was imagined as a southward extension of the Indies, with similar potential for agriculture and commerce. Prominent among those who promoted this vision was the entrepreneur George Windsor Earl, who spent six years at Port Essington trying to transform image into reality. 6
At first, Earlâs ambition was to build a trading base in northern Australia, âan emporium of the Archipelago of the Arafuraâ extending along the northern coast and nourishing âa thriving trade with China.â 7 Without abandoning that ambition, by the mid-1840s, his emphasis had shifted to tropical agriculture using the plentiful Asian labor available nearby. Earl envisaged a plantation economy in the region now called the Top End, with European planters supervising a numerous Asian workforce and with a multi-racial merchant community similar to that of Singapore. 8 This was the conventional model for tropical colonization. Earlâs vision, shared by many of his contemporaries, presumed that the tropic lands of Australia held the fertile soils, abundant water, and other resources essential for intensive cultivation, and all that was needed to make the wilderness bloom was an injection of energy and enterprise. Such environmental optimism proved far more resilient than the aspiration for a multi-racial north.
When South Australia took control of the Northern Territory in 1863, its leaders shared Earlâs vision. They too regarded northern Australia as a southward projection of the Indies and imagined it had a climate and physiography much like Javaâs. So they sought to establish tropical agriculture and cultivate trade with Asia, thereby building the combined South AustraliaâNorthern Territory into a âGreat Central Stateâ extending from the Great Australian Bight to the Arafura Sea. They tried to do so according to the tenets of systematic colonization on which South Australia itself had been founded. Settlement would be carefully planned, with the institutions of civilizationâschools, churches, law, governmentâestablished at the outset and development proceeding in a rational and orderly fashion. But reality belied grand intentions. Bumbling beginnings at selecting and surveying a site for the capital were followed by lackluster efforts at development and settlement. Trade with Asia faltered; tropical agriculture floundered; and the Territoryâs meager goldfields failed to attract a stable population. Into the 1880s, some South Australians continued to dream of Palmerston (Darwin) becoming another Singapore, but it was becoming clear that systematic colonization would not prove the success in the north that it had been in the south. 9
European expansion into north Queensland was unencumbered by ideals of systematic colonization. It was conducted in brasher, more nakedly materialistic style, driven by graziersâ greed for more lands on which to pasture their sheep and cattle. Shortly before Queensland separated from New South Wales in 1859, squatters and goldminers had nudged north of the Tropic of Capricorn, as far as present-day Marlborough. In 1861, the frontier surged further north with the opening of the Kennedy district. From their base at Port Denison (Bowen), pastoralists quickly took up runs along the length of the Burdekin River and its tributaries, then pushed further west and north toward the Gulf of Carpentaria. On 1 January 1864, the government threw open two new pastoral districts, Burke and Cook, thereby making the entirety of north Queensland available to pioneer graziers.
Yet pastoralism did not reign alone in north Queensland. Plantations were established along the north Queensland coast from the late 1860s, the area under sugarcane expanding rapidly from the mid-1870s onward. Many field workers, especially in the early years, were Asian; some plantations were even owned by Asians, such as the Hop Wah plantation south of Cairns. But the majority of canefield workers were Pacific Islanders, known as Kanakas, who were indentured for periods of three years or longer, at low rates of pay and poor working conditions. Sugar was not the only crop; nineteenth-century north Queensland grew a wide range of tropical produce. But no matter what the crop, the plantation workforce was always predominantly non-white and the field laborers exclusively so. This accorded with both established practice in tropical colonies and the contemporary medical doctrine that members of the white race were unable to perform physical work in the tropics.
North Queenslandâs economy was further diversified by mining, primarily of gold. After several short-lived alluvial rushes scattered around the region, the discovery of the rich reefs of Charters Towers in 1872 put gold-mining on firm foundations. Charters Towers grew into a city of over 26,000 people in the 1880sâthe biggest in Queensland outside Brisbaneâwith grand public buildings and its own stock exchange. With three branches of primary industryâpastoralism, agriculture, and miningâfunctioning with as much success as could be expected in a recently colonized region, north-eastern Queensland was set on a demographic and economic trajectory unique in tropical Australia. By the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the coastal region was reasonably populous and prosperous. West of the Great Dividing Range, things were very different, with insecure industries, little economic diversification and a tiny non-Indigenous population.
Although agricultural success stories were confined to north-eastern Queensland, they buoyed faith in the north more generally and helped sustain an image of the entirety of northern Australia as a land of tropical fecundity. What had been achieved in east-coastal Queensland, many commentators maintained, could and should be achieved elsewhere in the north. J. Langdon Parsons, South Australiaâs Minister for Education and soon-to-be Government Resident for the Northern Territory, took this line after touring the sugar plantations around Mackay in 1883. From what he saw there, Parsons drew the conclusion that for sugarcane to flourish in the Territory, all that was needed was capital investment and colored labor. He betrayed no hint that factors such as climate, rainfall, and soil might be relevant to a regionâs suitability for cane-growing, writing instead as if the tropical location of both Mackay and Palmerston guaranteed equivalence in sugar-growing potential. 10
By the time Parsons conducted his tour of Mackay, several sugar plantations had been established in the Territory, including the Delissaville plantation on the Douglas Peninsula across the harbor from Palmerston. By 1884, ÂŁ20,000 had been invested in Delissaville, for a total output of five tons of sugar that year and seven tons the year before. It folded in 1885. A f...