The killing season must end: Why Labor should not change its leader

The Killing Season on the ABC is brilliant television and should give producer Deb Masters and writer/presenter Sarah Ferguson a double in TV and journalism awards. The three-part series is deservedly taking plaudits for its riveting dissection of the Rudd-Gillard leadership wars. Though the period has been well examined in books, The Killing Season is rich multi-sensory art, from the wintry Poe-theme opening and the music of Schubert’s Piano Trio No 1, the theme of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, a flawed hero and adventurer.

The Killing Season offered extended interviews of its own flawed protagonists, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, two of the sharpest minds in Australian politics in the 21st century. Both had the right stuff to become Prime Minister but got in each other’s way. They were personal and political opposites, but made a smart marriage of convenience, as Simon Crean observed. Rudd got the nod as leader, easier to sell as a male Christian than a female atheist.

Rudd was a consummate actor and phenomenal media performer. He dominated their first election as a team and the defeat of four-time Prime Minister John Howard was put down to “Kevin 07”. The electorate respected Gillard but loved Rudd and his nerdy dad persona. His rock-star status was still rising after the 2008 Stolen Generations apology and his response to the Global Financial Crisis. But stratospheric ratings could not last forever and he quickly fell to earth after the Liberals appointed a hard-nosed leader to replace hapless Malcolm Turnbull. Saving Australia from financial collapse was an astonishing achievement but too intangible to measure and Rudd’s leadership slowly collapsed amid a series of self-inflicted blows.

Rudd wasn’t the only one making mistakes. Gillard and Treasurer Wayne Swan made a fatal error to replace him in June 2010, though each step in the process was defensible. Rudd had a winning lead when he was sacked in 2010, despite his problems. Rudd could not believe what was happening, his horror best expressed in The Killing Season in his shocked, almost whispered comment that trails off, “But the polls….?” His government had 52-48 lead over Abbott at the time, just like Shorten has now. But Labor panicked and he was gone. The people were not consulted and the coup would, as Anthony Albanese predicted, destroy two Labor leaders.

Much of the testimony of that 2010 period is of chaotic moments shared Rashomon-style with differing conclusions depending on the speaker. The Killing Season was, as one deft reviewer called it, classical tragedy “where at each stage all the tragic character can do is tighten the net”. Gillard replaced Rudd but couldn’t remove him. And for the next three years, he white-anted her relentlessly until his revenge was served stone-cold in 2013. Gillard and Rudd’s relationship was not the first poisoned by power and won’t be the last. Neither were “killed”, but they destroyed each other politically and are now both lost to parliament despite still being in their 50s and in their prime.

Worse still, their Labor Party is now out of power, rudderless as well as ruddless, after looking semi-invincible from 2007 to 2009. Two leaders and two elections later the moral challenges of our generation are in the calamitous hands of Tony Abbott, the great divider. The Killing Season is important history to see how we got to that equation in six short years. The astonishing personal enmity tells us how Labor imploded and is compelling viewing. But a better guide to why it happened comes from the rich first-hand testimony of the large coterie of supporting characters swirming around Gillard and Rudd.

Sarah Ferguson is Australia’s sharpest political interviewer. Her forensic approach extracted drama from every statement and counter-statement. Most Labor ministers were rueful, occasionally bitter, but always honest, whether they supported Beasley, Rudd or Gillard. Minders like Lachlan Harris and Andrew Charlton were eye-opening in their perceptive day-to-day detail. Their admiration for Rudd’s judgement was shared by Gordon Brown, Hank Paulson and Ken Henry. Only three notables from the Labor first rank did not have their say with Sarah and two of them, Lindsay Tanner and John Faulkner, are retired. The third is current leader Bill Shorten.

Shorten’s minders no doubt believed there was nothing to gain from raking over old coals – particularly coals that Shorten himself stoked, with important roles in the 2010 and 2013 coups. This was a mistake, he should have explained what Labor had learned from the process (arguably nothing if today’s factional announcement from Tasmania is a guide). Shorten was implicated despite his silence, caught out lying to Neil Mitchell about the 2013 challenge that brought Rudd back to power.

Shorten apologised privately to the Melbourne radio host but should return to Mitchell’s show to talk about why he lied in the first place. It has undermined one of Shorten’s main advantages over Prime Minister Tony Abbott, after the latter was caught out lying spectacularly and repeatedly to the public the night before the 2013 election.

The Killing Series came out at a bad time for Shorten. Fairfax went on the attack over questions he may have to answer in a politically motivated union inquiry. Others on the left such as Jason Wilson decry Shorten as a do-little union apparatchik constantly moving to the right to avoid being wedged by Tony Abbott. Yet he leads in the polls, and a move to sack him would only suit Abbott, who is trying to get Labor to panic again. Abbott has no intention of going to an early election he wouldn’t win, but more Labor leadership turmoil would change that.

Abbott hailed The Killing Season as an unmasking of Labor’s untrustworthiness. “I don’t normally say thank you to the ABC,” Abbott admitted in parliament, “but I have to say Australia is indebted to you on this instance.” Abbott was right on one point – he doesn’t normally say thank you to the ABC. He’s normally lying about its future, stacking the board, slashing its budget and attacking its editorial policies.

Barely days after The Killing Season, Abbott launched into open warfare over the Zaky Mallah exchange on Q&A on Monday. Not for the first time, he used the sporting analogy of “whose side are you on?” when attacking the ABC. Abbott’s crude “team Australia” rhetoric is inadequate when trying to distil a complex argument like why people support Islamic State. It was a point Mallah demolished when he spoke about how young Australian Muslims become disenfranchised. The ABC took no “sides” but offered a platform for dissenting views, a platform urgently needed as the Murdoch press (which sets the media agenda and has a vested interest in attacking the public broadcaster) becomes increasingly one-sided. The ABC is considered duplicitous despite the public judging twice as trustworthy as the government.

This is not just a problem for the ABC. It is a problem for Labor as an alternative government. Rupert Murdoch is a bulwark for Tony Abbott, his papers running constant interference and setting agendas by attacking Abbott’s enemies while giving him an easy ride. Mallah is considered the enemy but hysterical front page photos like the Courier-Mail‘s conflation of the ABC and Islamic State are okay because the Courier-Mail is on “our side”. The effect is to move the Overton Window of acceptable political discourse further to the right.

The Killing Season is classic public broadcasting and a terrific first draft of history. Labor should learn from that history and allow Shorten what it didn’t allow Beasley in 2007, Rudd in 2010 and Gillard in 2013: a chance to survive the killing season and be judged by the voters. They might be shocked to find that behind the screeching of Abbott and Murdoch, there is another Australia out there, and one that does not like to be told what to think.

That Unhappy Race Part 5 – The Drew and Hale Commissions

Aboriginal people at Durundur reserve.

By the 1870s those pushing for white expansion in Queensland saw only one way forward: corralling all indigenous people into one place far from white towns. In Maryborough white residents were offended by the large group of Aborigines camped near the cemetery. Though the Maryborough blacks were not troublesome since 1853, there were many massacres of indigenous people in the area. There was existential fear among whites after the Hornet Bank and Cullin-la-Ringo massacres (more blacks than whites died at both places, but that was ignored). There was also distaste at alcohol-fuelled quarrels and the tendency of the blacks to wander the streets naked. There were calls to move “savages” away from sensitive white eyes.

Edward Fuller was a Primitive Methodist who believed Aborigines could be shown the path to a white god. He thought the solution to the Maryborough problem was a mission on Fraser Island. Fraser was first proposed as a mission in the 1840s but nothing came of it. Government proposals in the 1860s to gazette a reserve got a chilly reception from squatters wanting to develop the island. Yet Fuller began his Fraser mission in 1870 attracting 30 people to his camp. He suffered white encroachment with timber-getters moving in, supplying blacks with alcohol. Fuller was a frustrated man on a mission and his inability to convert at Fraser Island, was mirrored by later failures at Lake Weyba, Hinchinbrook Island and Bellenden Plains (near Tully).

Frank Bridgman had better luck with the first secular reserve at Mackay in 1871. Bridgman was a southern grazier who brought sheep to the Isaac region. Initially he supported the native police’s brutal tactics to “disperse” blacks from his property near Fort Cooper barracks. Disperse was a euphemism. Judith Wright‘s grandfather Albert wrote in his diary in 1868 that “about 60 Blacks were shot at Grosvenor Downs last week”.

Mackay squatters sent a letter to colonial secretary Arthur Palmer, another Mackay hinterland squatter, asking for more protection “against the numbers and increasing audacity of the Blacks”. Bridgman believed a reserve of cheap Aboriginal workers might be useful in the sparsely populated north, writing “labour being valuable, there will be less wish to have them shot down.” In 1870 he asked Palmer for land in country too poor for white farmers, recommending scrubby land near Homebush Lagoon be gazetted for Aboriginal people. The land commissioner approved the request in 1871 and within two years Bridgman established the Association for the Employment and Protection of Aborigines in Mackay. The Association wanted low paid indigenous workers to replace indentured South Sea labour under attack in parliament. Bridgman hoped to use them on his sugar plantation.

By March 1873 over 200 Aborigines moved onto Bridgman’s reserve at Gooneenberry. Palmer was now premier and his government established a commission under public servant William Drew to see if the Mackay scheme could work across the colony. The commissioners came north and spoke to squatters (but not to indigenous people). Bridgman told them Aboriginal people were reliable employees. In their May 1874 report, the Drew Commission admitted a system of reserves and protectors would be expensive. It argued Queensland was only profitable from the lease and sale of crown lands “which the Aborigines originally occupied”. But Palmer was now out of power and new premier Arthur Macalister ignored the report.

What forced Macalister’s hand was an attempted murder. When Native Police shot a blackman at Cooktown it made the Sydney papers, catching the attention of Lord Carnarvon, Secretary of State for the Colonies. Carnarvon requested an explanation from the Marquis of Normanby, the governor of Queensland. Normanby rejected allegations of atrocities and argued Aboriginal lives were improved by white settlement. But London interest was embarrassing and unwanted. Normanby and Macalister re-instituted the Drew Commission to implement its suggestions. The Brisbane Courier said this was warranted but defended native police practices on the wild north frontier. “If the aborigines were more civilised than they are, we should either make treaties with them, or we should be at open war with them,” it said.

Queensland’s government opted to buy more time. In 1876 new Governor William Cairns instituted another commission under Anglican Bishop of Brisbane Mathew Hale with four other commissioners. Like the Drew Commission it was stacked with squatter sympathisers including explorers Gregory and Landsborough who saw the destruction of Aboriginal society as an inevitable consequence of Christian civilisation.

The Hale Commission was authorised to “inquire into and investigate the condition of Aboriginal inhabitants of Queensland and to report on the best means to legislate or otherwise improve their condition”. They established a reserve under Tom Petrie at Bribie Island. Petrie used his knowledge of Aboriginal languages to get them to work. Initial reports were favourable. Petrie suggested Brisbane blacks should live at the reserve. But Petrie didn’t stay long and his replacement Father Duncan McNab was a zealot with little empathy for Aboriginals.

McNab had a roving commission from the Catholic Church to convert Aboriginal people as long as it did not cost the church money. He had to fend for himself and applied to take over the Bribie mission when Petrie left. But McNab could not get Aboriginal people to work. Hale wrote to the police commissioner complaining blacks were allowed into Brisbane, a deterrent to keeping them on Bribie.

McNab suggested the place was the problem, not him. He recommended a new reserve on the Stanley River in the upper Brisbane Valley. Supported by new premier John Douglas, Durundur was opened in 1877 and a few blacks moved in. Local squatters thought it would supply cheap labour. The Commission also approved another settlement at Mackay near Cape Hillsborough but this idea lapsed due to lack of government funds. The commission appointed Bridgman as its northern coastal districts agent. He suggested new reserves including one at Palm Island. Palms would eventually become Queensland’s most infamous gulag of the 20th century.

Early efforts of building concentration camps at Mackay, Fraser and Durundur all failed. McNab was impatient, wanting to immediately cure the Aboriginal people of pagan ways while funding dried up from Brisbane. But the Drew and Hale Commissions asked an important question that would not go away: did the Aboriginal people have rights to the land as prior occupants?

See part 6.

See also, part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4.

That Unhappy Race Part 4: Gideon Lang

Cullin-la-Ringo station, Qld c 1875.

On July 12 1865, Victorian squatter Gideon Lang stood up in St George’s Hall in Melbourne and delivered a lecture on a pamphlet he called The Aborigines of Australia. Lang’s account was the most detailed yet by a settler on Aboriginal people in eastern Australia.

Gideon Scott Lang was a Scot who moved to Melbourne as a young man following two older brothers. At Buninyong he joined his brothers in a farming venture where they considered how to deal with Aboriginal people on their run. The Langs found a peaceful solution with an agreement to feed them if they didn’t attack their stock. The Langs were successful and Gideon branched northwards to the Riverina before he visited the Darling Downs looking for selections. He was elected MP for Liverpool Plains and Gwydir in 1856 and served on the 1856 NSW Inquiry into Aboriginal conditions. By 1865 he was a director of a Melbourne bank and influential in Victoria.

Lang admitted he wasn’t a “blind partisan” for Aboriginal people having taken part in an attack against them in his squatting days. Lang said had anyone died in that attack he would have considered himself a murderer. The first half of his pamphlet deals with his own experiences in the south and solutions for co-existence with Aboriginal people.

The second half of the pamphlet was looked on with alarm in Brisbane: it was a direct attack on the Queensland squatters, their government and their native police.  Following revenge massacres for the deaths of white settlers at Cullin-la-Ringo four years earlier, Lang said frontier issues were caused by the refusal to recognise of Aboriginal society, deprivation of hunting grounds and the lack of government oversight. Lang said it led to atrocious cruelties on both sides, particularly in Queensland where it was the “rule and custom to arrange the black question by killing them off.”

Lang said he held these beliefs for 10 years but had delayed publication of his pamphlet until he found proof of massacres. That proof, he said, had now emerged. In May 1865 Aboriginal people had killed Native Police lieutenant Cecil Hill on the lower Dawson. His death hardened attitudes against the blacks, expressed by a letter writer to the Brisbane Courier: “These incorrigible rogues are becoming unbearable, and required a regular dressing down. Ordinary morality can only be driven into their obtuse skulls by leaden lessons.”

Officials were more circumspect and described revenge attacks for Hill’s death as “collisions” in the official record. These collisions, said Lang, were group punishment on large numbers of blacks. He suggested a new “chief curator” of Aborigines, with a police commissioner’s powers, to punish frontier outrages by white and black. The curator would have power to negotiate the use of waterholes with local groups before issuing pastoral land licences, and stations could hire local blacks who would receive food, blankets, tomahawks and tobacco.

Lang optimistically believed that within two years black and white would live amicably together. But white Queensland squatters were apoplectic at being told how to run their business by an uppity southerner. Queensland MP and squatter Gordon Sandeman rejected claims of atrocities as “sensational” and said Lang had no experience of Queensland. He described the native police as a “defensive force” and asked why Lang did not make his opposition known in the 1856 NSW inquiry when still in parliament. Sandeman said the most humane solution was to remove Aboriginal people from squatters’ runs, though he did not say where they might otherwise go.

Archibald Meston later took Lang’s ideas for his Proposed System in 1895 including the idea of chief curator, which Meston called “protector”. But whereas Meston’s plan was coercive, Lang offered Aboriginal people a choice to take part. In the short term the plan came to nothing. There was temporary relief from colonisation due to an economic crisis in 1866 and the frontier stalled.

In the late 1860s, a new threat emerged. Payable gold on the Mary River near Gympie, the Cape River near Bowen, and Ravenswood near Townsville, brought thousands of miners to Queensland. There were finds at Etheridge River near Georgetown and Charters Towers and the rush continued to the Cape at Palmer River, invading rugged lands that were too forbidding for pastoralists.

As one settler said, the blacks no longer knew where to go out of the way of white people. “No localities they might keep to themselves had been pointed out to them and no system of treatment of them had been laid down,” wrote another. The government looked helpless as blacks drifted to makeshift camps outside new white towns where they were unwelcome.

In 1872 the London-based Aboriginal Protection Society asked Queensland’s third governor the Marquis of Normanby to appoint an unpaid board to look into the Aboriginal problem. New premier Arthur Palmer was unenthusiastic thinking the inquiry’s expenses would cripple treasury. However Normanby got his way. He persuaded Palmer to avoid embarrassing inquiries from London about South Pacific Islander “blackbirding” indentured labour, which Queensland’s sugar industry relied on. The government’s lack of support meant the inquiry was doomed to fail but it had lasting implications.

See part 5 here.

See also, part 1, part 2 and part 3.

That Unhappy Race Part 3: The Squatters’ Inquiry

In 1861 the new Queensland Government held its first Inquiry into Aboriginal affairs. It would not be its last. Among the white “indiscretions” it examined was the killing of five Aboriginal people at Fassifern by Native Police lieutenant Frederick Wheeler. Wheeler was one of many white young men who believed their role was to eliminate all black people. In Fassifern there had been reports of Indigenous people killing settlers’ stock. Without bothering to establish who was responsible, Lt Wheeler shot and killed four men and one woman. He would have got away with murder but for the fact one of the dead worked for local squatter, Ipswich magistrate and MP, Henry Challinor.

The 1861 Queensland Legislative Assembly Select Committee merely issued a slap on Wheeler’s wrists despite reports of other killings in the Logan district. They said he acted with “indiscretion” but because he was a “most valuable and zealous officer” his punishment should just be removal to another area. Wheeler moved to Central Queensland and continued his reign of terror on blacks. It was not until 1876 he was charged in Rockhampton with the death of a black youth. Wheeler fled Australia rather than face justice.

The 1861 Inquiry followed a similar trajectory to inquiries in NSW in 1856 and 1858. All looked at the problem with white eyes and none addressed the causes of the violence on the frontier. The squatters’ parliament in Brisbane thought it was an inevitable consequence of colonisation and believed only a military-style native police force could solve the problem.

The 1861 recommendations were a masterclass of administrative action that addressed processes rather than causes. It ordered the native police appoint cadets, troopers should be stationed away from towns to avoid temptations of alcohol, they should be recruited from areas far from where they would serve, officers would provide monthly reports, and required a new simpler means of keeping accounts.

The Inquiry decided that despite “misguided” officers like Wheeler the native police had to stay. The Queensland “myalls” (wild blacks) could not adjust to civilisation. The Inquiry noted “all attempts to Christianise or educate the Aborigines of Australia have hitherto proved abortive”. They said Aboriginal people were cannibals beyond redemption who had “no idea of a future state”, and were “sunk in the lowest depths of barbarism”. The Inquiry offered no suggestions how to improve their situation.

The policy of Aboriginal expulsion from their lands was allowed to continue. Challinor, the man who exposed Wheeler, told the Inquiry that Aborigines should be allowed to hunt game in their own country. He also supported the Christian mission of William Ridley who recommended co-existence. But Aboriginal people roaming wild among the cattle did not suit squatter interests.

In 1837 Colonial Secretary Glenelg told the Australian colonies the Aborigines should be treated as British subjects. But in 1861 Queensland decided this rule did not apply beyond the frontier. Rare voices like Challinor advocated for Aboriginal protectors in each district to arbitrate issues between black and white. But with Aboriginal testimony not allowed in Queensland courts until 1884 their side of the argument was not heard.

They weren’t heard from in the 1861 Inquiry either and white voices were not supportive. Queensland’s first Surveyor-General Augustus Gregory said the native police was popular on the frontier and necessary for the safety of the colony. Even Aboriginal sympathiser Tom Petrie, who spoke Indigenous languages, said native police had a beneficial role and a white-only force would be “inefficient”. Two missionaries from Zion’s Hill, Johann Zillman and Augustus Rode, admitted they had made no conversions and agreed the native police kept the black population in a state of fear.

The overwhelming view of Queensland’s parliament was either that there was no problem, or if there was, it would solve itself. With this sanguine view the government withdrew from Aboriginal affairs to weightier matters: how to make more money for the squatters.

Those like Challinor that saw the problem, were mostly driven by Christian concerns. The squatters contemptuously called them the Church Party and considered them well-meaning fools with no idea of life on the frontier. Ridley was now a journalist in Sydney using newspapers to promote his ideas. He said missions in Wellington Valley (NSW) and Poonindie (SA) showed Aboriginal people were capable of “social and spiritual improvement”. He believed successful missions must attract Aboriginal people in large numbers. They should not be drilled in European ways but learn bushcraft through hunting and other traditional pursuits. School should be taught in English but hours should be short and the missions should be far from the temptations of towns and their “vile passions”.

Station manager J.C. White, wrote a similar letter to the government about the “pressing” need to find new lands for Aboriginal people. White said station owners forbade them from crossing their runs to hunt kangaroos in case they set fire to the grass. Some resorted to killing cattle, increasing the likelihood of conflict. White said Aboriginal people were not bloodthirsty or cruel but “kindly disposed, hospitable and social, intelligent and improvable”. He suggested protectorates and depots where they could receive food rations and negotiate for employment on stations. He also suggested the native police should be abolished except on “extreme frontiers”. Governor Bowen was impressed by White’s letter and authorised land grants to persons or institutions that might establish Indigenous missions and industrial schools.

When Catholic priest W.J. Larkin offered his services of educating Aborigines in the Roma district, he too got support from the government keen to keep London’s Exeter Hall liberals onside. But a change of government brought a change of attitude. Queensland poured money into the expansion of the railways rather than improving the lives of Aboriginal people. The ideas that germinated in the work of Ridley, Challinor, Petrie, White and Larkin would eventually coalesce in Archibald Meston’s 1895 “Proposed System”.

Next: Part 4

See Part 1 and Part 2

A trip to Coochiemudlo Island

For the Quandamooka people, the islands of Moreton Bay were rich hunting grounds. They could roast water lily bulbs and the roots of ferns, pick pandanus fruit, and hunt birds, reptiles, bats, bandicoots and koalas. They could hunt or net dugong, dolphin, and turtle, and harvest a wide range of fish and shellfish. One small island in particular lay tantalisingly close to the mainland which they named for its distinctive iron-coloured cliffs: “kutchi mudlo” (red stone).

Stones on the island showed they traded with people as far inland as Rosewood, west of Ipswich. The Quandamooka used ochre from the soft red rock to decorate their bodies and shields. They told Dreamtime stories that the red was the blood of a dolphin speared by a sparrow-hawk.

Coastal Aboriginal people lived in blissful ignorance of a dangerous world beyond. Captain Cook named Moreton Bay on his trip north in 1770 but did not explore it. Matthew Flinders explored the bay in great detail aboard the Norfolk in July 1799. He landed on what is now Norfolk Beach, Coochiemudlo on July 19. Next month on Sunday, July 19 there will be the annual recreation of that landing. Flinders assumed the Pumicestone Passage was a river and failed to spot the opening of the Brisbane River.

In 1823 cedar-lumberers Thomas Pamphlett and John Finnegan were wrecked on Bribie Island and survived with the help of friendly Aborigines. Pamphlett and Finnegan were rescued in November 1823 by Surveyor-General John Oxley, on a voyage from Sydney to find a site for a new northern colony. The two men showed Oxley the mouth of the Brisbane River, a quarter of a century after Flinders missed it. In 1824 Oxley’s recommendation that a convict settlement be established at Moreton Bay was implemented.

When the colony of Queensland was declared in 1859, bullock teams swum from the mainland to Coochiemudlo to drag felled trees to the sea. Coochiemudlo was used for oyster farming in the 1880s by the Moreton Bay Oyster Company until ravaged by the marine mud worm at the turn of the century. The islands also became popular as a recreation resort for wealthy Brisbanites, and tourist steamers plied the Bay.

In 1887, the western half of Coochiemudlo was subdivided into one acre lots which owners turned into market gardens producing bananas, passion fruit, grapes, paw paw, pineapples, tomatoes, vegetables and flowers. Despite an auction of 90 lots of crown land in 1888 there was initially little interest from anyone settling on the island. The earliest residents were father and son Henry and Norman Wright who camped there for four years amid the sandflies and mosquitoes before leaving “this god forsaken place” about 1900.

The unoccupied land was exploited for timber and cattle grazing. After the First World War two injured veterans Doug Morton and Eric Gordon started to share-farm on the island. Gordon did not stay long but Morton, who survived Gallipoli and the Somme, found he could survive Coochiemudlo too, and lived there for 40 years.

In 1921 he married Mary Colburn from a farming family at Victoria Point. She was the only woman on the island for the next 12 years. Doug and Mary grew commercial crops and flowers, and cultivated a custard apple they named Island Gem. Doug built jetties and developed the tourist industry. Morton’s Steps on the west of the island are named for him. The Mortons left Coochiemudlo in 1966, when they felt it had become too crowded.

By then the farming era was over. Alfred Grant developed the eastern half of the island in the 1950s. Richard Marsh and Company also subdivided the north and west of the island into tiny allotments for small holiday cottages. Sales stagnated in the 1960s and only 20 people lived permanently on Coochiemudlo in 1970.

A regular ferry service in the 1970s and then a vehicular barge in 1987 made the island more attractive to commuters and retirees and permanent residency increased. The foreshore was kept as a reserve keeping the pristine look from the sea.

Despite living in Brisbane for 17 years, I’d never been to the island until this week. A return 10-minute trip on the ferry from Victoria Point cost just $8 and the island felt a million miles from anywhere despite being less than 40km from the centre of Brisbane.

The walk around the foreshore (a mixture of beach front and mangrove) took me under two hours. There are only a handful of stores and cafes and they congregate around the jetty. There is supposed to be bicycle hire on the island but I did not see any evidence of that when I was there. Perhaps they only advertise on weekends. In any case, the island is ideal for walkers and nowhere is far from anyplace else on Coochie. It’s a beautiful and relaxing part of south-east Queensland, and I’ll be back – though I’m not sure I’ll be there on July 19 for the pageantry of Matthew Flinders day. What the Quandamooka make of that day I do not know, but I suspect that like Australia Day, they don’t look on it with fondness.

That Unhappy Race Part 2 – Queensland’s new and violent frontier

Bora ring, Banyo, Qld (an initiation site for young men). Photo: author’s collection.

When the economic depression of the early 1840s ended, there was a rush to expand into known parts of Australia. New South Wales was settled as far west as the climate would allow and many followed the Darling River tributaries north into Queensland. Explorer Ludwig Leichhardt set off north from the Darling Downs in 1844 and settlers quickly followed him up the Dawson River and along the coast to Rockhampton. Newly wealthy gold profiteers acquired land in the north.

Their cattle and sheep fouled Aboriginal waterways and there was inevitable conflict. As tit-for-tat killing escalated, whites saw it as a life or death struggle and formed punitive parties aimed “to show the blacks a lesson”. The government ignored the growing violence on the frontier. Meanwhile the missionaries that followed the Lutherans were unsuccessful. Undaunted, former Moreton Bay missionary William Ridley went on a 450-mile mission of southern Queensland to understand the similarity of Aboriginal languages and he was accepted wherever he went. Ridley saw how cattle crowded Aboriginal people off their country, “cut off from four-fifths of their usual supply of food”.

In 1857 eight members of the Fraser family were killed by Aboriginal people at Hornet Bank Station on the Dawson. Frontier newspapers called for an overwhelming response and at least 300 Aborigines were killed in the following 18 months. The Brisbane Parliament established in 1860 escalated action – with disastrous consequences for Indigenous people.

The new Queensland Government started life broke. Even the seven-and-a-half pennies inherited in Treasury were stolen after a few days. The Sydney government, unhappy with Queensland’s new status, billed it for ₤20,000 of work carried out before separation in 1859. Ridley gave testimony to the new parliament’s 1861 Select Committee on Aborigines that the only way they could co-exist with pastoralists was if the government cordoned off land to the natives. But new governor George Bowen needed to raise money quickly by borrowing against future earnings in land sales. Bowen rushed through the 1860 Land Act offering attractive terms on one-year leases of 100-square-mile runs. The terms insisted the runs be stocked to one-quarter capacity ahead of a second 14-year lease.

The terms suited the Pure Merinos, the Darling Downs squatters. They dominated Queensland’s first parliament (NSW’s universal male suffrage was not extended north of the border until the 1880s). By 1861 gold-financed land-hungry speculators rushed north and west into the Kennedy, Maranoa, Warrego, Comet and Barcoo districts. Aboriginal people resisted but were overwhelmed by native police.

A rare voice of objection was former officer of native police, Frederick Walker. Walker was an English emigrant who worked on central NSW properties before forming a semi-official troop to protect properties in Port Phillip. His success took him into the Riverina, and then north into the Macintyre and Condamine districts. But Walker developed a conscience saying squatters and Aboriginal had reciprocal rights. Though he continued to crush Aboriginal resistance moving to the Wide Bay in 1852, squatters didn’t like his plain-talking nor the levy they paid to support his troop and used his heavy drinking as an excuse to remove him in 1854. When the native police force halved, Aboriginal attacks increased. Walker continue to mount a private force until ordered to disband by the government in 1859.

The Hornet Bank massacre destroyed trust between black and white and the native police had orders to “disperse any large assemblages of Blacks”. Walker complained to the government of harsh treatment by troopers and in some cases, murder. He hoped to stop this “infernal system” which had “cast a deep stain on the honour of this Colony”. While Walker believed Aboriginal people were less civilised than the British, he thought them deserving of human justice. He encouraged Aboriginal labour at his Bauhinia property and those of his neighbours. Unhappy with the lack of concern in Queensland’s parliament, Walker sent letters to the Times in London about “deliberate murder” on the frontier. Walker unwittingly facilitated the further invasion of Aboriginal lands during his search for the missing explorers Burke and Wills opening up the Plains of Promise in the Carpentaria and the rich Burdekin River valleys.

Any hope he might be taken seriously disappeared after another massacre of whites in 1861 at Cullin-la-Ringo near today’s Emerald. This second massacre seemed to prove Aboriginal treachery in white eyes and confirmed the Queensland Government in its decision to continue with native police. The “live and let live” policy promoted by William Ridley and Frederick Walker was discredited.

See part 3 here.

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See part 1 here.

On Irish jokes and Australian casual racism

I‘ve been thinking about the relationship between Ireland and Australia so I read with interest Pádraig Collins’ angry article in the Guardian yesterday. The article was headlined “When it comes to smearing the Irish, Australia is the world’s serial offender” which was over-precious and over the top, though the writer made some good points. Collins is, like me, an Irish-born journalist living in Australia, and I know why he is angry.

Collins was responding to TV footage of Liberal apparatchik Grahame Morris’s bizarre anti-Irish rant during a same sex marriage debate. After saying he “loved the Irish”, Morris used Irish caricatures such as failed potatoes, silly shamrocks and funny accents to explain why Australia should pay no attention to the stunning “yes” vote in Ireland’s same-sex marriage referendum. No doubt being an equal opportunities bigot, Morris would have found equally hilarious reasons why Australia should not follow the example of Britain, New Zealand or the many other jurisdictions that have legalised SSM.

Collins didn’t think the shamrock as a weed joke funny, nor the inability to distinguish to pronounce “th” funny, though he didn’t mind people having a crack at them. (British people found it funny when I pronounced tree and three the same way when I lived in the UK in the 1980s and in the end I did “thry” to differentiate them). But what most annoyed Collins was the crack on the Famine.

The Famine of the late 1840s is Ireland’s defining event, a Holocaust which left two million dead and another two million emigrants in five years. The Irish are touchy if you make jokes about it. Personally I think both the Holocaust and the famine are fair game for jokes, but it depends on the attitude of the teller and who or what is the butt of the joke. Morris’s big butt was if the Irish were too stupid to survive food shortage caused by potato failure, then you shouldn’t trust their opinion on anything. The actual reasons for the famine are complex – and Irish and British attitudes are at fault – but it is this sense of the “stupid Irish” that helps define Australian attitudes to Ireland.

It was an attitude that started well before the Famine. The Irish were a constant undercurrent to those swearing loyalty to the Union flag on Australian shores from 1788. Enlightened marine Watkin Tench laughed at the stupid Irish convicts who escaped from their Sydney prison thinking China was just a hundred miles to the north. When the Irish weren’t been stupid, they were being drunk and that remains equally funny. On St Patrick’s Day, Tony Abbott made several jokes at Irish expense in a “cringetacular” 70-second video including a fake apology for not having “a Guinness or three” with the Irish.

As Collins reminds us, Abbott is a serial offender of Irish jokes and unafraid to use other Celtic stereotypes. In his joke “the English made the laws, the Scottish made the money and the Irish made the music”, the Scottish are mocked for their meanness, the Irish for their irrelevance outside the arts, while the adult English get on with the job. It explains why despite his religion Tony Abbott has no sympathy for the Irish. Abbott is an English Catholic, who, like his mentor BA Santamaria and his friends Cardinal George Pell and Greg Sheridan, tries to keep his religion out of the conversation. Of these only Sheridan is an Irish Catholic, which probably explains why the joke is usually on him. He might be among those Irish, according to Abbott in another joke, who not only lost money on the race, but also on the action replay.

It’s not just politicians. The Age spoke of a “drunk Paddy in $500k flood of tears” adding to a rich history of Australian media discrimination against the Irish, that also dates to colonial times. Though the man’s name was Padraig (the Irish for Patrick, hence Paddy) it stung too much like “grasping Jew” and the financial size of the mess he created allied to the man’s public shame caused his suicide a day later. As Irish ambassador Noel White said, the headline “drunk Paddy” simultaneously took a swipe at an entire national group while demeaning an individual. White reminded Sydney Morning Herald readers the Irish were part of the Australian narrative since European settlement and still come, “young, talented and hard-working” in the Australian cause. But that image is less memorable than being stupid and drunk. The drunken Irishman was popularised by Punch magazine in the 19th century and it still leads to uncritical acceptance of a distorted national stereotype that affects the Irish in Australia. White reminded Australians the stereotype also diminishes those who use it.

Collins cited Peter FitzSimons who, during an impassioned article on getting rid of the monarchy and the Australian‘s “plain” obituary of Colleen McCullough, unexpectedly segues to an Irish joke. According to FitzSimons, “Paddy and Margaret” live “outside Dublin” so their suburban problem is one Aussies are familiar with: loud barking dogs in the neighbour’s yard during the night. Paddy’s solution is stupid and hence Irish but there is a dash of sense in it that makes it funny. Paddy moves the dogs to his garden and says “now we’ll see how dey fookin’ well like it”. Again there is the tree/three problem and foul-mouthed language made acceptable Irish style: “fookin” or “feck”. But what we find funny is not the stupid Irish but the absurd truth that barking dogs annoy neighbours more than their owners. Collins quotes another FitzSimons Irish joke about an antique expert asking “Paddy” what his stuffed dogs would fetch if they were in better condition. “Sticks”, Paddy replies. This punchline is potentially funny but why does the man have to be Paddy? Is it only the Irish who would either misunderstand the question, or understand it but deliberately misinform with the answer? In another FitzSimons “joke of the week” Paddy texts his wife: “Mary, I’m just having one more pint with the lads. If I’m not back in 20 minutes, read this message again.” No doubt FitzSimons thinks it hilarious Paddy is drunk and Mary is stupid.

FitzSimons would defend his right to tell Irish jokes due to his Irish heritage or his Australian heritage, which is half Irish anyway. Collins calls him a “regular one man Charlie Hebdo, keeping the world safe for Paddy jokes”. But what it really shows is endemic casual racism in Australia. Australia is an accepting country but much Australian humour is unreconstructed as “Abo jokes”, blackface on television or cricket signs of “curry munchers” show. The butt of the jokes is anyone who is the “other”. That the Irish remain “the other” in Australia despite 237 years of simultaneous colonisation, tells us more about Australia’s amnesia to its history rather than Irish sensitivity to jokes against it.

Collins says Irish jokes died with the dinosaurs but I disagree. They are still there – and the Irish are telling them. My own Irish jokes are self-deprecating but the Irish are never reduced to “Paddy” and they are not quite the butt of the jokes. Abbott is unintentionally on the money when he claims Bill Shorten’s straying from a political point was an “Irish joke”. Irish absurdism turns the joke upside down, making the world look stupid. Collins should ignore the idiocy of Morris and Abbott. The joke will eventually be on them and their decrepit views.

“That unhappy race”: A history of Queensland’s Indigenous relations (part 1)

Of all pre-Federation colonies, Queensland produced the most comprehensive legislation to deal with Aboriginal affairs. But the powerful 1897 Queensland Act was deeply flawed and had disastrous consequences for the state’s indigenous population in the 20th century, despite well-meaning beginnings. The Act was the brainchild of Archibald Meston who wrote to Colonial Secretary Horace Tozer in 1895 about his “carefully submitted plan for the improvement and preservation from extinction of that unhappy race.”

As Gordon Reid wrote in his book That Unhappy Race it was the first proposal for the preservation (as opposed to protection) of Aboriginal people since colonisation began. Reid’s book is not a study of Aboriginal people, but is concerned with colonial perceptions of a social problem involving Aborigines. Given the usual attitude was to brush “that unhappy race” under the carpet in the hope of speedy extinction, Reid helps us understand 19th century history in the colony where Aboriginal people were most numerous.

The bill passed by Queensland’s Parliament on December 10, 1897 was the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act. Its objectives were to ensure better treatment of Aboriginal people in white employment, to remove the unemployed to exclusive reserves, and restrict supply of alcohol and opium. The Act applied to all Queensland Indigenous people and those who lived with them. A white “protector” was the only non-Indigenous person allowed on the reserve. Authorities issued 12-month permits to employers who wanted to use Indigenous or “half-caste” labour. Indigenous people could not move or be moved from one district to another without the protector’s permission. The protector had full rights over Indigenous people at the reserve including imprisonment for a wide range of offences. Aboriginal rites and customs were banned.

The law was the most comprehensive response to the problem of white and Indigenous co-existence in Australia. The British government optimistically obliged settlers to avoid bloodshed with native people, which proved impossible – or was at least conveniently ignored – on the expanding frontier. Southern colonies set up aboriginal protectorates in the mid 19th century but they proved ineffective against encroaching pastoralism. Towards the end of the century, most administrations had abandoned Indigenous policy – the assumption was Indigenous people were becoming extinct or “out of sight and out of mind”. But Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people remained in large numbers in Queensland despite large scale killings by pastoralists and native police and the fear of miscegenation and opium addiction convinced the government to act. Queensland’s squatter-dominated parliament also saw advantages in a cheap labour pool of Aboriginal workers with few rights.

European meddling in Queensland Indigenous affairs began with the Moreton Bay penal colony (1824-1838) when Lutheran missionaries and the colony’s chaplain tried to convert natives. In his “Proposed System” of 1895, Meston concluded the early missionaries were unsuccessful. “It is hardly likely that Moreton Bay wild blacks of that period would have had any reverence for white men whose physique would bear no comparison with their own,” Meston wrote. By 1828 the colony housed 800 prisoners and 200 soldiers, surrounded by four tribal groups, some hostile. Pioneering churchman John Dunmore Lang hired 10 German evangelical Lutherans for a mission north of the penal settlement at Zion Hill, Nundah with access to government rations. Aboriginal people visited the mission to obtain food in good times but stayed away when crops failed as they did in 1840. Life remained difficult at Zion Hill and there were no conversions, despite missions to Toorbul and other outposts.

Settlers were banned from Moreton Bay until the early 1840s when Patrick Leslie moved up from New England to establish a sheep run on the Condamine. Others followed, putting pressure on the government to open up the colony for settlement. The penal settlement was closed down in 1842 and when the wool price fell, the government ended support for the mission.

Zion Hill was abandoned by 1850 and a new mission sprung up at Caboolture. The anti-Irish Lang, convinced by his vision of a Protestant-only colony, sent another missionary north, William Ridley, but the Catholic Church also had designs on Moreton Bay sending four priests to a short-lived mission on Stradbroke Island in 1843. Neither Protestant nor Catholic had much success. Relations between black and white deteriorated. Settlers believed Aboriginal people were irredeemable and behaved accordingly, most notoriously poisoning Aboriginal people at a Kilcoy station with strychnine-laced flour. By the end of the 1840s, the problem was increasingly solved by force.

See part 2 here.

The Redmonds in Australia 1883: Part 5 – marriage and farewell

John Redmond in 1914 with his second wife Ada and his daughter Johanna (by his first wife Johanna Dalton).

As the Redmonds’ exhausting Australian tour moved past the six month mark in early August, the brothers split up again. Willie crossed Bass Strait to spent 10 days geeing up the Irish in Tasmania. He spoke in Launceston and Hobart before returning to Melbourne where he attacked the Irish Coercion Act of 1881. Introduced by Gladstone, the Act provided for imprisonment without trial in Ireland to deal with the growth of the National Land League. Parnell’s Irish Party filibustered but the act finally passed, allowing police to make arrests on a political basis.

John Redmond had personal matters on his mind as he returned to Sydney. After a break of two weeks, he was due to travel to New Zealand but delayed it for reasons explained in the Sydney Freeman’s Journal of August 18, 1883: “It is not business in the strict term that has delayed Mr Redmond, but something more in the way of romance, for it is no secret that the honourable gentleman is to be married very shortly to Miss Dalton, a near relative of Mr Thomas Dalton MLA of North Shore. The interesting ceremony, we believe, will take place about the 4th of September.”

Redmond was betrothed to Johanna Dalton, half sister of the Irish-born Dalton Brothers, Thomas and James, who established a commercial empire in Orange and Sydney. Thomas was a member of parliament but younger brother and former mayor of Orange James Dalton was closer to the Redmonds and had paid a price for supporting their cause, sacked as a magistrate in Orange. The wedding brought two powerful Irish families together (three years later, the link was cemented when Willie Redmond married James Dalton’s daughter Eleanor).

Redmond gave less lectures in this Sydney leg of the trip, caught up in wedding preparations. But the brothers were still hounded by the hostile Sydney press (Catholic Freeman’s Journal excepted). John responded to an inaccurate report on a division among Australian Catholic bishops about the Irish mission. That was put aside on Tuesday, September 4 when John and Johanna married at St Mary’s Church, North Sydney. After a reception at Thomas Dalton’s nearby home “Wheatleigh”, they spent the night at Moss Vale before travelling to Melbourne. As they honeymooned, Willie Redmond sailed for New Zealand on September 6, arriving five days later. John also went to New Zealand in early October and the brothers toured towns until October 25 when they sailed back to Melbourne.

The showpiece event in this second tour of Melbourne was the Irish Australian National Conference on November presided by Brisbane doctor and former Young Irelander Kevin Izod O’Doherty. The 200 delegates from across Australia and New Zealand heard a cable message from Parnell and defined a constitution of a federal council with executive powers. O’Doherty was elected president. The Argus was unimpressed and urged the Irish to “refrain from encouraging the Redmond convention” while British citizens in Australia “keenly felt that they are insulted when their mother country was held up to infamy as some bloody and barbarous power”. The editor said no one had a right to come to Australia and “enjoy the benefits of our laws, unless he meant to leave behind animosities which could plunge Australia into strife”. The Advertiser also deemed the convention a failure saying the leading Irish of the colonies stayed away, a charge vehemently denied by delegates.

After one last lecture on rebellion in his home county, “Wexford in ’98”, Redmond and his wife went back to Adelaide where the tour started nine months earlier. He then returned to Sydney via Melbourne and gave a farewell lecture on “A Chapter of Irish History” also about the failed 1798 rebellion. The Sydney Morning Herald reported Redmond saying the rebellion was misunderstood. “Outside Ireland the popular theory was that it was a Popish rebellion marked by deeds of cruelty on behalf of the people,” the paper said.

The last days were overshadowed by the Phoenix Park murder trial where James Carew turned queen’s evidence implicating the Irish National League with his testimony. As a result many prominent Irish-Australians distanced themselves from the Redmonds tour. James Dalton was a loyal exception. The press used the Carew evidence as final damning proof the Redmonds were unwelcome visitors. Their vehemence, rancour and partisanship affected Redmond who remembered it for years afterwards.

Yet as the brothers and Johanna left Sydney on December 6 to sail to America, they could look back on a tour largely successful in raising Irish consciousness in British Australia. For 10 exhausting months they toured the length and breath of Australia (except the west) and New Zealand. They raised ₤15,000 for the cause. Thousands heard their message directly and many more indirectly despite (or perhaps because of) press hostility. The Redmonds were not the last to realise there were positives in bad publicity.

Their Australian trip in 1883 was controversial but highly successful on a personal and professional basis. John and Johanna Redmond had three children before her premature death in 1889. Redmond later married Englishwoman Ada Beesley. He remained close to the Daltons and Australian affairs until his death in 1918 while leader of the Irish Party, just as his beloved Home Rule seemed at hand. Willie Redmond died a year earlier in France in 1917, the only Westminster MP to be killed in action in the First World War. That war which delayed Irish Home Rule passed in 1914, also destroyed it, and Ireland went through two more terrible wars to wrest independence from England at the cost of the six counties.

See also Part 1 (Adelaide), Part 2 (Sydney), Part 3 (Queensland) and Part 4 (Melbourne). I’m indebted to the research of Jeff Kildea.