A History of Queensland
- ISBN-10:
- 0521545390
- ISBN-13:
- 9780521545396
- Pub. Date:
- 07/05/2007
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0521545390
- ISBN-13:
- 9780521545396
- Pub. Date:
- 07/05/2007
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
A History of Queensland
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780521545396 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/05/2007 |
| Pages: | 354 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.75(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Cambridge University Press
978-0-521-87692-6 - A History of Queensland - by Raymond Evans
Excerpt
I
Millennia
The blue crane fishing in Cooloolahÿs twilight
has fished there longer than our centuries.
Judith Wright
Queensland is not a young land. It is only the name ‘Queensland’ that is young. Uncertainty is the inescapable condition of its early story. A litany of ‘possibles’, ‘probables’ and ‘maybes’ punctuate the narrative of how the great landmass took shape; how its climate, vegetation and fauna were transformed; how it was first peopled and how those people adapted, endured and prospered before encountering inexplicable others whose coming soon challenged everything. The full story will probably never be known. It is not initially read from documents that are themselves, in any case, inexact guides but is more dimly traced out of the land itself and its surrounding waters, its reefs and islands, its shells, bones, plants and rocks, as well as the weathered tools, art and detritus of its earliest human inhabitants.
Recounting this past is like telling a curiously inverted story. The landmass from which Queensland (and the rest of Australia) was slowly moulded – Sahul, a fragment of Gondwana – is more than 1800 million years old. The earliest fossils date from 1700 million years ago and the earliest known plants, 350 million years. Dinosaurs persisted for around 75 million years, dying out inexplicably some 65 million years ago. Aeons later, humankind arrived – probably 50 000–60 000 years ago – and began a steady colonisation of the continent across the next 10 000 years. By contrast, British, European and Asian colonists came only during the last 180 years. A truly proportional telling of even the human story of this place would grant them only a small concluding paragraph.
Yet, for practical purposes, the reverse must almost be the case, as this vast chronology is compromised by a paucity of precise information. The time‐frame buckles and distorts as most of the human history recountable is of recent contact. Though Aboriginal rock art, dating back more than 13 000 years in Queensland, is in itself mysterious documentation, often undecipherable, the earliest‐known European documents are maps – themselves acutely contentious – drawn during the sixteenth century, and written accounts dating from the early seventeenth. Aboriginal oral records shadow and confront the expanding European narrative, providing different accents and testimonies – a thin, persistent voice of contesting knowledge.
Queensland’s unstable coastline of some 10 000 kilometres, scattered with over 1000 adjacent islands, took its contemporary shape some 6000 years ago. It is still in motion towards the Equator ‘at about half the rate at which a human hair grows’. Several centuries ago, this outline began appearing recognisably upon European charts, drawn in Dieppe (a seaport of northern France) from the 1530s, some 240 years before James Cook sailed along it, and the immense geological saga and the short documentary record began finally to correspond. Queensland’s internal boundaries, however, were not decided until 1862 and not completely surveyed until 1886. The colony was finally fenced off from its neighbours only in 1900, on the brink of Federation as it was about to become a state.
This immense landmass of more than 1700 square kilometres is extensive enough to swallow the British Isles eight times over. It encompasses a staggering diversity of climatic and environmental features, and of animal and plant life. In a continent of extraordinary biological richness, Queensland contains the hottest and wettest zones, and its range of biota is matched by few areas in the world. It is the place of Australia’s earliest and most dramatic dinosaur fossil finds. There is a more divergent insect fauna than in other states as well as more species of birds, crustaceans, reptiles and amphibians. An evocative, early impression of such largesse is found in the Endeavour journal of botanist Joseph Banks. At Thirsty Sound (Broad Sound), there were ‘3 or 4 acres’ crowded with butterflies ‘to a wonderful degree’, Banks wrote in May 1770:
the eye could not be turnd in any direction without seeing millions and yet every branch and twig was almost coverd with those that sat still: of these we took as many as we chose, knocking them down with our caps or any thing that came to hand.
Queensland’s vegetation, too, is the most varied and striking in Australia. Habitats range from the Great Barrier Reef, one of the world’s prime biodiversity regions, through humid mangrove swamps and tropical rainforests of impressive antiquity; dense wallum country adjacent to shorelines along a narrow, flood‐prone coastal plain; open sclerophyll (hard‐leaved) wooded expanses of the eastern uplands, scattered with ancient, fertile volcanic outgrowths; the almost continuous, forested cliff‐line of the Great Escarpment, running north and south; mountainous impasses and rolling, grassy savanna plains, stretching away into dusty interior lowlands; arid and sparsely covered desert country of red sand and stone, interspersed with low, stark plateaux and mesas, rising again to craggy ranges in the far north‐west and merging away into the extensive mudflats of the Gulf.
Queensland as a discrete entity is a political construction recently created by Western imperialism. Yet as a place of differing landscapes and seascapes it is too vast to be sensibly incorporated by any singular perception. It is not one but many quite distinct places, to each of which cohere narratives, myths, emotions, attitudes and behaviours – places of intense contrast, places of the unexpected and of extremes which can both lift the human heart and break the spirit. Its striking variety, curiosity and excess are all held and reflected in its human history.
The sense of its being ‘many places’ is caught within the general impress of Aboriginal settlement upon a complex environment. Before European arrival the region contained over 200 of Australia’s 600–700 Aboriginal nations. At least 90 Indigenous languages and many dialects were spoken among them. These territorial units of population were multilingual and fluidly interactive. By 1788, such societies, like European countries, differed substantially from each other. They were sometimes in conflict, but often in friendly alliance and diplomatic communication. They exchanged products and culture. They visited and interacted for ceremonial and social purposes. And they shared similar spiritual explanations about their world and its distant origins.
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1.1 Aboriginal language families in Queensland: the thick line indicates group boundaries and the thin line language boundaries
Yet unlike European countries, the emphases of traditional Aboriginal lifeways were not so much on competition and acquisition as upon co‐operation and maintenance; and less on boundaries than upon relationships: the meaningful association of places connected by story; a sense of time not as a linear chronology but as an omnipresence, each moment incorporated like a floating drop in a perpetual sea; and a sense of being as part of all Being, inextricably interlinked. Each place existed simultaneously in culture, in nature and in spirit. It had an equivalent, enmeshing exterior and interior reality. Its exterior reality was understood as a holistic ecology, incorporating rather than privileging humans, whose living spaces, thoroughfares, sacred sites and trade routes lay like a latticework within it. This ‘immensely complex web’ of pathways and sacred places reticulated ‘a conceptual typology connected by song, story and ritual’; there was virtual equivalence between geography and ontology. Indeed, in mind and action, the two were one: a land ‘gridded with spiritual significance’ and inhabited by all creatures, corporeal and metaphysical, according to the ‘Dreaming tracks where the Rainbow Serpent travelled’, creating and sustaining all life. As one Queensland Aboriginal writer puts it:
Creator Beings . . . shaped the Australian landscape . . . Throughout this period, humans remained asleep in various embryonic forms . . . They were awoken by all the activity above. The Creator Beings helped . . . [them] to become fully human, teaching them the laws of custodianship of land, the laws of kinship, of marriage, of correct ceremonies – they gave them every kind of knowledge needed to look after the land and to have a stable society.
Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders, in Queensland as elsewhere, were not so much in a relation of ownership with land as one of kinship with environment – a relationship as close as a blood bond. All meaning came from land. It was a ‘sacred entity, not property or real estate’. Every contour of this environment was precisely named and sung. Every season was conscientiously explored for its bounty. In north Queensland, for instance, Europeans today experience two seasons: a summer ‘wet’, extending from December to March, and a cooler, drier period from May to October. For the Wik Mungkan people of the Gulf, however, there were (and are) seven marked seasonal changes, all intimately connected with natural transitions and hunting and foraging endeavours. An intrusion of the Western concept of linear time into this cyclical ontology, as in such notions as ‘Dreamtime’ or ‘Storytime’, is an abrasive reading of this ‘billowing of consciousness of country’. The secret to seeing this lies in the Aboriginal sense of abidingness: ‘Ancestral Abiding Events and rhythmic life‐events are co‐joined quite literally through place’. The Dreaming is not therefore the subject of ‘when’, but of ‘everywhen’, ‘. . . existing independently of the linear time of everyday life and the temporal sequence of historical events’.
Dreaming and the mystery of origination thereby stand above or outside time, transcending and confounding historical explanation. Historical realities are to be sought elsewhere but this also continues to be a challenging search. How or when Aboriginal ancestors first entered the landed confines of Queensland remains unclear as conclusions about migration trails, population numbers, and entire millennia are tossed about by Western researchers with academic abandon. If we were to accept for now an occupational timespan of 50 000–60 000 years and an entry route from the north‐west, via South‐East Asia across the islands of Timor and Lombok, we would be comfortably within present archaeological and anthropological explanatory bounds. At any time, however, some new finding could consign all this to the winds. Aboriginal people, for their part, continue to assert that they ‘became human in this country’.
Around 60 000 years ago, Homo sapiens were still in process of developing language at the same time as attempting early, perilous water‐crossings over distances of up to 100 kilometres on rafts of bamboo or ‘sheets of bark, sewn together’ by grass cord. Within 50 000 years, they had begun to record their presence in designs on cave walls, and probably on perishables like bark and wood, using natural earth colours. The climate, originally like that of today, was becoming increasingly colder, sea‐levels were perhaps 150 metres lower and the landmass that became Australia was around one‐fifth larger, stretching towards Indonesia and unrecognisable in shape. As ocean levels fell, it became progressively easier to reach. The Gulf of Carpentaria was a swampy inland lake, and Queensland and New Guinea formed one continuous body of land. By 25 000 years ago, when the last ice age commenced in earnest, this mountainous, open‐forested land‐bridge attained maximum width; and what would become the Barrier Reef was simply a range of chalky hills upon an increasingly desolate plain extending eastwards.
A drop in global temperatures by an average of 8°C was both rapid and cataclysmic. Tim Flannery suggests that it happened ‘over a century or two, or even within a few decades’. As the climate grew far colder and dryer, lake and river systems shrank or vanished, and formerly temperate zones were reduced to either glacial sheets or ‘a vast dust‐bowl of swirling sand dunes where vegetation could not survive’. The bountiful, verdant places that had greeted the earliest arrivals – moist, lush and inhabited by dozens of now lost mega‐fauna species (giant, short‐nosed kangaroos, marsupial rhinos and lions, and diprotodons – large herds of cow‐sized herbivores), gave way to a harsher, more depleted landscape. Numerous species died out, probably from a combination of climatic, environmental and human pressures. As hunting chances declined before the glacial spread, people expanded their resource repertoire by creating the earliest‐known seed‐grinding technology. The once genial shorelines and river systems down which the first arrivals probably migrated southward became inhospitable and unyielding. Populations pulled back in the face of famine and drought. Many rivers ceased to flow; lakes, previously abounding in fish and game, dried out. The shady shoreline beaches were now blanketed with salty, gypsum‐rich clays, repelling plants, animals and people. Although the vastly extended landmass provided the easiest ocean access in this period, it was ironically at its most forbidding. For the successive generations now inhabiting it, this represented an enormously difficult period, perhaps 10 000 years in extent, of grim, stoical survival.
Yet, after possibly 50 000 years of progressively reducing temperatures, there was another sudden and dramatic turn‐around. For, about 15 000 years ago, ‘in perhaps as little as three to five years’, the glacial age was over. The ice‐sheets turned to water, rainfall increased, new river systems began forming, oceans commenced a rapid advance upon shorelines, and plant communities, along with fauna and people, were again on the move. Easier times for hunters and gatherers, however, were undercut by serious territorial contractions. Sea‐levels rose up to 30 metres every thousand years, translating into an advance over land of several hundred metres annually. By 7000–8000 years ago, when the British Isles were also being sculpted from the seas, the land‐bridge to New Guinea was inundated, leaving behind a strait peppered with islands. At the same time, there was a commensurate advance of tropical rainforests, abetted by high rainfall, upon formerly open coastal plains and woodland. Ecological shrinkage and territorial expansion had, in effect, been replaced by their opposite. Some groups lost all their territory. From this prolonged trauma of displacement, the most powerful and enduring myths of land‐connectedness were woven as a form of compensatory lore.
Such contraction and the resultant pressure on living space also encouraged movement into regions further inland, to repopulate the former howling tundra of ice‐age desert storms. As ocean engulfed the coastal plain, rainfall increased further west, an adjustment noticeable by about 10 000 years ago. The interior remained arid, but became habitable. In the inland central Gulf region, for instance, Kalkadoon people dug wells up to 10 metres deep to supply themselves with water. This return to wetter conditions was permanent. As rainfall increased and river systems expanded, ‘sclerophyll woodlands returned to the south‐eastern slopes. Rainforest, previously reduced to the wettest, most sheltered habitats, expanded across the Atherton Tableland . . . The landscape took on the aspect that greeted Europeans’. For Aboriginal peoples, these 10 000–12 000 years of stable climate and receptive environment were probably their most dynamic and productive. It is from this period that most of the detected rock art, such as the 1200 Quinkan galleries at Laura and the stencilled caves of Carnarvon Gorge, appear to date. Grindstones now came more into use, indicating increasing exploitation of seed resources, and the repertoire of small tools and other weapons expanded in their specialisation and sophistication. Ochre and quartzite quarries, fish traps and weirs, such as the huge ‘automatic sea‐food retrieval system’ at Hinchinbrook Island; and ‘fire‐stick farming’ to reshape expanding forest regions into grasslands probably all reached their apogee in this era. In the west, around Cooper Creek, fields of wild millet – up to 400 hectares in extent – were harvested: ‘reaped with stone knives, piled into haystacks, and threshed to obtain the seeds, which were then stored in skin bags or wooden dishes and finally ground with millstones’. Other harvesters in the Mulligan–Georgina region to the east of the Simpson Desert, gathered the treasured narcotic, pituri, and jealously guarded the cooking and steaming processes that provided its special potency. In their general custodial capacities, Aboriginal peoples also practiced rudimentary husbandry in the north Queensland rainforests, collecting and storing wild berries ‘in hundredweights’ (50 kg lots), and, on Cape York, regenerating wild yams and overseeing the growth of certain fruit trees as a form of proto‐agriculture.
In the south‐east, elaborate triennial festivals were organised around the harvesting and roasting of nutritious bonyi (or bunya) nuts, attracting thousands of participants to the Blackall Ranges and Bunya Mountains from populations extending over 85 000 square kilometres. Along the coastline, as far south as the Keppel islands, Aboriginal peoples used formidable multi‐pronged spears, barbed with stingray and echidna spines, outrigger canoes and mother‐of‐pearl fish‐hooks adopted from Torres Strait, as well as great nets up to 90 metres in length for fishing; while, further south, particularly at Moreton Bay and Fraser Island, co‐operative, semi‐domesticated bottle‐nosed dolphins were also involved in securing the catch. A Darling Downs squatter, who witnessed this on Stradbroke Island in the early 1840s, wrote:
There were many hundreds [fishing] along the beach with their towrows [ie nets] in hand. As soon as a shoal of fish appeared . . . some two or three blacks would advance to the water’s edge. At a signal to drive the fish into the bank – which signal the porpoises would instantly obey – the main body of blacks, some hundreds in number, would rush in and dip up the fish.
Where resources were rich and dependable, semi‐permanent villages were established, providing evidence of habitation very different from the familiar imagery of rapidly constructed windbreaks. Such ‘villages’ have been documented in places as widespread as the northern rainforests, far western Queensland and Moreton Bay. There were numerous ‘Djabugay villages’ along the Barron River, inland from Cairns where:
sometimes they would build djimurru (large huts for thirty or forty people).These huts could be maintained over many seasons and were readily constructed when required for . . . social gatherings, ceremony or dueling contests.
Early European arrivals in the 1820s reported visiting small fishing settlements, each several kilometres apart, scattered along the Moreton Island and Stradbroke Island shorelines. Large, regular, well‐built huts, ‘forming a sort of village,’ were described, with some structures capable of accommodating ‘up to 40 persons’. On Bribie Island, a Western naturalist recorded:
fixed habitations . . . little fishing villages of six or seven huts in a cluster. Some . . . [huts] . . . are of great length extending upward of eighty feet [24 m], and covering a considerable space of ground . . . One of them was in the form of a passage, with two apartments at the end. The arches were turned and executed with a degree of skill which would not have disgraced an European architect.
Scientist Jared Diamond argues that certain Aboriginal societies, especially in northern Australia, were on a course leading to Indigenous food production:
They had already built winter villages . . . fish traps, nets and even long canals. Had Europeans not . . . aborted that independent trajectory, Aboriginal Australians might within a few thousand years have become food‐producers, tending ponds of domesticated fish and growing domesticated . . . yams and small‐seeded grasses.
Yet, if there was such a tendency underway, after the fashion of horticultural activities on the north‐eastern islands of Torres Strait, it was at best an unhurried, meandering amble. Not only was there a relative lack of domesticable plants and animals, there was also an extremely unpredictable climate, prone to severe drought and flood cycles, and a predominantly infertile soil‐base to overcome. A hunter‐gatherer economy was really the most intelligent and fail‐safe of adaptations. Optimally, foraging and hunting for only some five hours on the rich coastal plains could provide ‘enough shellfish, fish, fowl or game for a day and enough yams, root stalks, cycad nuts or acacia gum to support large groups through days and weeks of ceremonies and festivity’. This largesse is dramatically evidenced by hundreds of shell middens – the detritus of thousands of seafood feasts – along the beachfronts. On western Cape York, some 500 mountainous middens, up to 13 metres in height at Weipa alone, contain a yield of 200 000 tonnes of cockles, accumulated over 2000 years. The less effort spent in food gathering, the more time left for manifold games and leisure; for socialising, artistic creativity and the generational communication of the wisdom of elders, the cementing of clan relations and the conducting of ceremonials and dispute resolutions. Times of dearth and hunger, of course, also continued.
Overall, the enhanced environmental opportunities of the post ice‐age era were adaptively grasped. They led to greater specialisation in hunting and gathering techniques; better resource management (including vast burnings to improve pasture land for the attraction of herbivores); advanced cultural growth; the development of plant and animal husbandry (for instance, the newly arrived dingo was gradually domesticated from around 4000 years ago); the probable occupation of smaller, well‐defined territories once coastlines stabilised; and the adoption, for certain resource‐rich groups, of semi‐sedentary living. An abundant environment and an increasingly efficient, balanced and spiritualised utilisation of it contributed in turn to an expanding population, which continued a slow, incremental increase over perhaps the next 8000 years until the smallpox epidemics of the late 1780s and early 1830s slammed into it.
There is considerable debate upon this population peak, with much of historical consequence riding upon it. The guesstimate of 100 000 to 120 000, once widely quoted for the whole of Queensland, is no longer tenable. These were figures set between one‐third and one‐half of the 250 000–300 000 ‘irreducible minimum’ for the entire mainland and Tasmania in 1930, which cautiously doubled previous estimates. High pre‐contact figures were not popular in white Australian minds due to the embarrassing issue of low Aboriginal survival numbers. In 1983, however, this ‘gross undercount’ was again revised radically upwards by economic historian and demographer Noel Butlin to at least one million – roughly the continental figure that Governor Phillip had posited in 1788. Butlin assessed a ‘population band of 1 000 000–1 500 000 persons’ or ‘an Australian aggregation of the order of 1.25 million’ at first contact, with New South Wales and Victoria together accounting for the earlier total. Proceeding more guardedly, pre‐historians D. J. Mulvaney and J. P. White in 1987 agreed that although an Australia‐wide total of 900 000 was ‘plausible’, the figure of 750 000 was ‘a more reasonable one’. Both estimates stressed, however, that as smallpox reduction had not impacted so severely in northern Australia, ‘suggesting increases [up to fivefold] in southern densities do not necessarily imply radical increases in northern densities’.
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