Abstract
The title of this chapter paraphrases the infamous words of Raphael Cilento, an influential Australian doctor, government official, and amateur historian, who in 1959 wrote that the history of Queensland was fundamentally a story of how white workers developed, colonized, and ultimately triumphed over the tropics, thereby disproving medical theories holding that whites were unsuited to living and working in the torrid zone.1 This chapter seeks to challenge this narrative—which continues to be rearticulated in many Queensland histories—of white labor triumphing over climatic conditions, and demonstrate how the science of, and connected imaginings about, tropical Queensland were made and remade through a contested process involving the erasure and removal of Indigenous peoples (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders) from the body politic.2 While other historians have focused on how Australian doctors and scientists sought to ensure the health of the “white race” in the tropics, I examine how Indigenous peoples featured in the discourse of tropical medicine.3 In particular, I explore the ways in which scientific knowledge linked in with successive Queensland government policies to position Indigenous people outside of the social body and inside of spatially segregated reserves.
Paraphrasing Raphael Cilento’s words from his Foreword in Triumph in the Tropics: An Historical Sketch of Queensland (Brisbane: Smith and Paterson, 1959), xv.
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Notes
Warwick Anderson, “Geography, Race and Nation: Remapping: ‘Tropical’ Australia, 1890–1930,” Historical Records of Australian Science 11, 4 (1997): 457–68.
Philippa Levine, “Anthropology, Colonialism, and Eugenics,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, ed. Alison Bashford and Levine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), Kindle Edition.
Raymond Evans, A History of Queensland (Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2007);
Evans, Susan Saunders, and Kathryn Cronin, eds., Race Relations in Colonial Queensland (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1993);
Dawn May, Aboriginal Labour and the Cattle Industry: Queensland from White Settlement to Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
Ann Curthoys and Clive Moore, “Working for the White People: An Historiographical Essay on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Labour,” Labour History 69 (1995): 1–29.
Parsons, “Constructing Hygienic Subjects: the Regulation and Reformation of Aboriginal Bodies,” in Bodily Subjects: Essays on Gender and Health 1800–2000, ed. Tracy Penny Light, Barbara Brookes, and Wendy Mitchinson (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013).
J. W. Bleakley, “Annual Report of the Chief Protector of Aboriginals,” Queensland Parliamentary Papers (hereafter QPP) 3 (1914): 1028.
In 1964, for example, 56 percent of Indigenous Queenslanders were recorded as “state wards.” Annual Report of the Director of Native Affairs, 1964, A/59295, Series 18154, Item 337281, QSA, Brisbane; Mark Copland, “Calculating Lives: The Numbers and Narratives of Forced Removals in Queensland 1859–1972” (PhD diss., Griffith University, 2005), 349.
Parsons, “Spaces of Disease: The Creation and Management of Aboriginal Health and Disease in Queensland 1900–1970” (PhD diss.: University of Sydney, 2009).
Bill Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation (New York: Routledge, 2001), 157.
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Edward W. Said, Orientialism (London: Vintage, 1978);
David Arnold, “India’s Place in the Tropical World, 1770–1930,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 26, no. 1 (1998): 1–21.
Alexander Rattray, “Notes on the Physical Geography, Climate and Capabilities of Somerset and the Cape York Peninsula, Australia,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, 38 (January 1868): 409–11.
Richard Eves, “Unsettling Settler Colonialism: Debates over Climate and Colonization in New Guinea, 1875–1914,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 28, no. 2 (2005): 304–30;
Anderson, “Immunities of Empire: Race, Disease, and the New Tropical Medicine, 1900–1920,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 70, no. 1 (1996): 94–118.
Jo Robertson, “In a State of Corruption: Loathsome Disease and the Body Politic” (PhD diss., University of Queensland, 1999), 140.
James Beattie, Empire and Environmental Anxiety: Health, Science, Art and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia, 1800–1920 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 39–71
L. J. Colwell, Lectures on North Queensland History (Townsville: James Cook University, 1974), 74; Population figures from Queensland Treasury, Historical Tables, Demography, 1859–2008 (Q150 Release), 2009 [http://www.oesr.qld.gov.au/products/tables/historical-tables-demography/index.php]; The Queensland census, like other censuses in Australia, deliberately excluded Indigenous people from data collection until after the 1967 referendum.
Henry Reynolds, North Of Capricorn: The Untold Story of Australia’s North (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2003);
Cathie May, Topsawyers: The Chinese in Cairns, 1870–1920 (Townsville: James Cook University, 1984).
Russell McGregor, “The White Man in the Tropics” (lecture presented by Dr. McGregor at CitiLibraries-Thuringowa, Sir Robert Philp Lecture Series, Number 5, October 6, 2008).
Deborah J. Neill, “Creating the Cadre, Teachers, and the Culture of Tropical Medicine,” Internationalism, Colonialism, and the Rise of a Medical Speciality, 1890–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012): 44–72.
Walter Maxwell, “A Report Upon Some Factors Related to the Cane Sugar Industry of Australia, by Walter Maxwell, Director of the Sugar Experiment Stations of Queensland,” CPP 2 (1901–1902), 975.
“Impressions of Cooktown, By The Vagabond,” The Argus, December 29, 1877, 4; “Tropical Queensland: How the English Type Degenerates,” Western Star and Roma Advertiser, October 25, 1890, 4; Robert W. Felkin, “On Acclimatisation,” Scottish Geographical Magazine, 7 (1891): 647–56; “Climatic Effects on Races: The Tropics and White Men,” Freeman’s Journal, September 29, 1900: 26–27.
Lyndon Megarrity, “‘White Queensland’: The Queensland Government’s Ideological Position on the Use of Pacific Island Labourers in the Sugar Sector 1880–1901,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 52 (2006): 1–12;
Ralph Shlomowitz, “Markets for Indentured and Time-expired in Queensland,” Australian Economic History Review 22, no. 1 (March 1982): 49–67;
Patricia Mercer, White Australia Defied: Pacific Islander Settlement in North Queensland (Townsville: James Cook University, 1995).
Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
Presented to the Royal Society of Tasmania, it was later published as a Commonwealth Government paper. J. S. C. Elkington, Tropical Australia: Is It Suitable for a Working White Race? (Melbourne: Government Printer, 1905), 1–8.
Matthew MacFie, How Can Tropical and Subtropical Australia Be Effectively Developed? (Adelaide: Government Printer, 1907);
Griffith Taylor, “The Settlement of Tropical Australia,” Geographical Review 8 (1919): 84–115.
James Gillespie, The Price of Health: Australian Governments and Medical Politics 1919–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 41.
Anton Breinl, “The Object and Scope of Tropical Medicine in Australia,” Australasian Medical Congress Transactions 1 (1911): 526.
Breinl, “Report on Health and Disease in the Northern Territory,” Bulletin of the Northern Territory 1 (March 1912): 32–54;
F. H. Taylor and W. J. Young, “The Coastal Climate of Queensland: Meteorological Observations Taken in Townsville,” The Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 15 (August 1914): 225–27; Young, “The Metabolism of the White Races Living in the Tropics,” Annals of Tropical Medicine and Parasitology (1915): 91–108.
Breinl and Young, “Tropical Australia and Its Settlement,” Annals of Tropical Medicine and Parasitology 13 (1920): 351–412 (quote, 398).
Cilento, The White Man in The Tropics: With Especial Reference to Australia and its Dependencies (Melbourne: H. J. Green Government Printer, 1925), 5.
John Matthews, Two Representative Tribes of Queensland (London: T. F. Unwin, 1910), 80–82; The rhetoric of Aboriginal protection is most clearly articulated in the work of Archibald Meston, “Report on the Aboriginals of Queensland,” Queensland Votes and Proceedings 4 (1896), 723–38.
Bashford, “Quarantine and the Imagining of the Australian Nation,” Health & History 2, no. 4 (1998): 387–402.
Bleakley, The Aborigines of Australia (Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1961), 147.
McGregor, “Wards, Words and Citizens: A. P. Elkin and Paul Hasluck on Assimilation,” Oceania 69, no. 4 (1999): 243–59.
McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory 1880–1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997).
There was also a competing discourse which positioned Africans as innately diseased. Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (California: Stanford University Press, 1991), 203.
Mark Harrison and Michael Worboys, “A Disease of Civilization: Tuberculosis in Britain, Africa and India 1900–1939,” in Migrants, Minorities and Health, ed. Michael Worboys and Lara Marks (London: Routledge, 1997), 108.
Note, for example, Bashford, “Is White Australia Possible?” 248–71; Hattori, Colonial Dis-ease: US Navy Health Policies and the Chamorros of Guam, 1894–1941 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004);
Lenore Manderson, Sickness and the State: Health and Illness in Colonial Malaya, 1870–1940 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
Lux, Medicine That Walks: Disease, Medicine, and Canadian Plains Native People, 1880–1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 115–17.
For a more general overview of white representations of Chinese people in Australia, see Andrew Markus, Australian Race Relations, 1788–1993 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994);
John Fitzgerald, Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia (Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 2007).
Parsons, “Creating a Hygienic Dorm: The Refashioning of Aboriginal Women and Children and the Politics of Racial Classification in Queensland 1920s–40s,” Health and History 14, no. 2 (2012), 112–39; Parsons, “Constructing Hygienic Subjects.”
Parsons, “Defining disease, segregating race”; Mark Finnane, “Cilento, Sir Raphael West (1893–1985),” in Australian Dictionary of Biography: Volume 17 (Melbourne: Melbourne University of Press, 2007), 215–16.
A. T. Yarwood, “Sir Raphael Cilento and The White Men in the Tropics,” in Health and Healing in Tropical Australia and Papua New Guinea, ed. Roy MacLeod and Donald Denoon (Townsville: James Cook University Press, 1991), 49–51.
Randall Albury, “Cause, Responsibility and Blame in Disease and Disability,” Black Cockatoo 1, no. 2 (1993): 19.
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© 2014 James Beattie, Emily O’Gorman, and Matthew Henry
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Parsons, M. (2014). Destabilizing Narratives of the “Triumph of the White Man over the Tropics”: Scientific Knowledge and the Management of Race in Queensland, 1900–1940. In: Beattie, J., O’Gorman, E., Henry, M. (eds) Climate, Science, and Colonization. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137333933_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137333933_12
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