Australian History/Queensland

Glossary
Native Police: units within the Queensland police force made up of Australian Aboriginal recruits (usually from other areas to which the units are stationed) under the immediate command of an Anglo-Australian 'inspector' or 'sub-inspector' charged, primarily, with policing the Aboriginal populations of Queensland.

Pacific Islanders: people whose ancestry descends from island nations within the Pacific Ocean, including, for instance, New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), New Caledonia, the Solomons, and Papua New Guinea.

Aboriginal Histories
Pre 1859

1858: In January of this year, to aid the colonisation of Queensland, instructions were issued by Commandant E.V Morrisset to officers of the Queensland Australian_History/QueenslandNative Police as follows:

"It is the duty of the Officers .. at all times and opportunities to disperse any large assemblage of blacks: such meetings if not prevented, inevitably lead to depredation or murder"

1859-1869

1870-1879

1874: During this year the first timber cutters encroached into north-east Queensland wet tropical forests (setting up timber camps) cutting red cedar along the Tully, Johnstone, Daintree, and Bloomfield Rivers

1876: During this year settlement begins around Trinity Bay, within the Cairns District along north-east Queensland's coast. The Queenslander newspaper reports that local Aboriginal resistance and conflict is "very bad".

1880-1889

1886: Aborigines now make up about 55 percent of Queensland's pastoral workforce, and the proportion of Aboriginal workers was greater, the more remote the area.

1890-1899

1891: Aborigines along the Mulgrave River in North Queensland were" :

"..very useful to the miners [of the Mulgrave goldfields], who have many difficulties to contend with in a country so much broken and covered with so dense a jungle"

Torres Strait Islander Histories
Pre 1859

1859-1869

1870-1879

1880-1889

1890-1899

Melanesian Colonisation
Pre 1859

1859-1869

1867: Two years after the first sugar cane was planted in the Pioneer Valley [nearest contemporary city is Mackay] Pacific Islanders were brought in (primarily from the New Hebrides - now Vanuatu), as a necessary, major part of that workforce upon which the industry was to be built.

Historian Henry Reynolds, much later (2003) observed:

''"..the [Pacific] Islanders provided practically all the labour for the foundation and consolidation of the sugar industry - not just in the Pioneer Valley but in the cane fields which stretched from the south of Brisbane to Mossman in the far north. Without the cheap labour the industry would have faltered, unable to compete with sugar imported from Mauritius, Fiji and other tropical areas.  On the back of a workforce that cleared forests and scrub, planted, hoed, cut, and transported cane, towns prospered, roads were made, ports established and fortunes compiled .. from the green, humid valleys of the Queensland coast.." ''

1870-1879

1871: The numbers of Pacific Islanders working in the Pioneer Valley sugar industry is estimated at 700 workers

1880-1889 1881: The numbers of Pacific Islander working in the Pioneer Valley sugar industry had increased from the 1871 figure of 700 workers to over 2000 workers, with recruits from the Solomons now becoming more prominent.

1884: Queensland legislation was employed to limit those Pacific Islanders who remained in Queensland (after their work contracts expired) from setting up their own farms or doing any kind of work other than 'field labour in the agricultural industry'.

This restriction constrained all Pacific Islanders excepting those who arrived into Queensland before 1879. The pre-1879 group of Pacific Islanders did, never-the-less, still succeed in leasing marginal or hilly land, setting up their own small farms, growing sugar to sell to the mills, pooling savings to buy stock and equipment, and employing their own kin and Pacific Islanders.

1890-1899 1892: Pacific Islanders involved in the sugar industry were, by this time, well organised and had begun to use collective action, even strikes to improve their economic position, in a form of 'nascent unionisation'.

The editor of the industry magazine, Sugar Journal and Tropical Cultivator observed that the Pacific Islanders

''"..understood the art of keeping up wages far better than white men .. They never undersell one another .. [and they had] .. a kind of unionism among them which worked wonderfully smoothly.." ''

1894: The weekly newspaper, the Queenslander in 1894 noted just how organised the Pacific Islanders were, saying:

"They organise, keep up the rates of wages, travel from place to place in search of better pay, communicate with each other by letter or wire..".." 

Chinese' Colonisation
Pre 1859

1859-1869

1870-1879

1880-1889

1890-1899

Asian Colonisation
Pre 1859

1859-1869

1870-1879

1880-1889

1890-1899

Anglo-Australian Colonisation
Pre 1859 : Permanent Anglo-Australian settlement of Australia started in southern parts of the continent, well before European explorers (on land) ventured into the north.

Australian historian Henry Reynolds observed :

"Seafarers skirted the warm, mangrove-fringed coast from the earliest years of [Anglo-Australian] colonisation but few ventured ashore for any length of time. And when settlement belatedly came it was fitful and often transient...For a long time the common view was that white people could not settle permanently in the tropics"

Towns formed and grew up around ports along the coast in support of, and sustained by the growing of sugar cane and by gold mining.

1859-1869 1861: Governor G.F Bowen, in Brisbane, expressed excitement at the apparent onrush of squatters and miners into the vast hinterland outwards from Brisbane writing to his superiors in London describing a 'tide of colonisation'

1870-1879

1880-1889

1890-1899