History Aboriginal Queensland Research Papers

Many Australian towns and suburbs have their origins in Aboriginal camps. This paper offers a general overview of Nambour, a town on the Sunshine Coast (Queensland) in terms of its Indigenous name, sites and history.

Research notes: a summation of historical (19th-20th) century) source references to camps, burial grounds etc on the Maroochy and Mooloolah Rivers; a collation of all Maroochy Dreaming stories from early references; and an attempted... more

In 1927, the Queensland State Government opened a lock hospital for indigenous people with venereal diseases on Fantome Island, one of the Palm Island Group in Northern Queensland, thereby forming a new link in a chain of islands of... more

In 1927, the Queensland State Government opened a lock hospital for indigenous people with venereal diseases on Fantome Island, one of the Palm Island Group in Northern Queensland, thereby forming a new link in a chain of islands of exclusion. During the next 45 years, the island also became the site of a disease-screening station, a penitentiary and a leprosarium in a policy that targeted Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as the perpetrators of contagious diseases. The scheme reflected anxiety within the public health administration about the ability to sustain a healthy and racially-pure white population in northern Australia. Only a scant body of work devoted to the Fantome Island institutions has been undertaken to date. This thesis explores in detail the impact of the policy of removal and detention to the island on the indigenous residents and their communities. It subverts the claims of humane and medically efficacious measures made in government rhetoric by the examination and interpretation of data retrieved from interdepartmental correspondence and other private sources, indicating a pattern of continual neglect and violation of human rights.

Current work has so far cast the patients as passive and anonymous figures, subject to the unremitting authority of white church and state powers. This thesis, by drawing on a diverse set of sources, brings to light the active role played by patients in attempting to shape their own destinies. Ranging from rebelliousness to conciliatory resourcefulness, their responses accorded with individual survival strategies and capabilities, and included forming friendships and small communities.

Some oral histories of the island tend to be nostalgic and overlook the disharmony and pain revealed in documentary evidence. Long-term patients of the leprosarium developed an attachment to the island but also, many discharged patients were forced to spend the remainder of their lives on Palm Island, in even worse conditions. The value ascribed to the island by former patients and their families is evident in their continued struggles to preserve the remains of the institutions and to maintain the right of access to the island.

A summary of the original environment, Indigenous use and key sites in the Indigenous history of what is now Brisbane CBD, especially around the Queen's Wharf re-development.

Kerkhove reconstructs the now-defunct Rosewood Scrub that once covered a large area between Ipswich and Gatton (Queensland). This region of unusual botany and geography formed a very dense barrier against settlement until it was cleared... more

Camps The Woolloongabba/ South Brisbane camps seem to have been the largest encampments of southside Brisbane.

Recent statistical analysis by Robert Orsted-Jensen suggests the severity of conflict on the Queensland frontiers was much worse than previously calculated. This paper collates accounts of fortified huts and homesteads along the frontiers... more

Almost ten years ago, Denis Byrne noticed that Aboriginal heritage was gradually becoming foundational to our identity as a nation. Australia’s quest for a “longer past” necessitated acknowledgement of the continent’s Indigenous roots... more

The Aboriginal resistance figure Multuggerah and the 'Battle of One Tree Hill' associated with his career have recently resumed importance in community and local government debate over appropriately naming the Second Range Crossing... more

Kerkhove proposes that a region wide inter-tribal alliance was developed to conduct resistance against settlement in south-east Queensland. He argues that this 'Black War' of southern Queensland was a historically acknowledged conflict... more

abstract Wilhelmina (Mina) Rawson (1851–1933) is lauded in both academic and popular circles as the author of the first uniquely Australian cookbooks, which she wrote between 1876 and 1895. Rawson was a prolific writer and stressed that... more

Early newspaper references to large-scale gatherings and traditional battles (tournaments) in the Ipswich area, Queensland, showing that this area was frequently used for this purpose.

This article concerns Arthur Vogan's novel The Black Police, published in 1890. In his book Vogan drew upon an affective global language of suffering that combined appeals to his experience as an eyewitness of the frontier with popular... more

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- by Belinda McKay and +1
  Patrick Buckridge
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- 8
  Colonial literature, Australian Literature, Contact zones, Queensland

Signalling hills are important features in the cultural landscape of Aboriginal Australia. This brief report considers the complexity of Aboriginal smoke-signalling communication and the apparent use of smoke-signalling hills in... more

The bunya tree played an important role in Aboriginal culture, with large gatherings accompanying the triennial harvesting of its nut. European imaginings of the bunya were strongly influenced by the conviction that cannibalism was widely... more

The bunya tree played an important role in Aboriginal culture, with large gatherings accompanying the triennial harvesting of its nut. European imaginings of the bunya were strongly influenced by the conviction that cannibalism was widely practised at the bunya feasts as no animals could be killed at this time, and that this also led to frontier massacres: in the Moreton Bay region, the bunya thus acted as a lightning rod for colonial anxiety. A range of colonial associations and meanings for the bunya – gloomy, primitive, Gothic, sublime – which could conveniently be termed 'Romantic' developed from its link with the terror, guilt and fear experience on the frontier, especially through the novels of Rosa Praed. Developing concurrently with that tradition is another, which might be thought of as a 'Classical' tradition, in which the bunya is invested with a more rational, civilised and (in the eighteenth century sense) 'benevolent' set of values. Other writers use inherited meanings of the bunya as a symbol of continuity and conjunction between European and Aborigines in Queensland, providing a way of expressing optimism and benevolence in relation to the 'vanishing race'. The dual tradition of the bunya in Queensland literature – its Romantic and Classical representations – highlights the complexity of Australian cultural history, exemplifying especially the disruption of 'metropolitan' cultural chronologies which can be particularly characteristic of a colonial culture. Equally, the duality may raise a doubt about the utility of such well-worn conceptual antinomies as Romantic and Classical; but there do seem to be some real and interesting differences between the two representations, such that the bunya evoked on the one hand the anxious frisson of terror in face of the savage and the primitive, while on the other hand it stood for the possibility of rational and moral solutions to the legacy of frontier violence, and of a future harmonious convergence between black and white in a process of widening civility. In both ways, the bunya performed a surprisingly important historical role in structuring, through literature, white people's perceptions of their relationship to Aboriginal culture and history in Queensland.

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- by Patrick Buckridge and +1
  Belinda McKay
- •
- 8
  Postcolonial Literature, Colonial literature, Australian Literature, Contact zones

This chapter deals with state institutions on the later northern frontier, using archival material to examine the role of police in managing the lives of Aboriginal people. Police officers played an important part in the removal of... more

Forced relocations, known as removals, affected every Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community in Queensland in the 19th and 20th century. Despite the island location of many missions and stations, the watercraft engaged in... more

Reviews the above mentioned book which contains a social history of the Gunggari Aboriginal group located in South West Queensland and which outlines their struggle for land rights. Following the commencement of the British settlement of... more

Abstract: In 1891, the Presbyterian Church established a mission station on the western side of Cape York Peninsula. They named the station Mapoon. Over the next 72 years, hundreds of children of mixed descent and Aboriginal families came... more

Aspects of Buderim's Aboriginal Use

H. J. Gibbney, Revised by Anastasia Dukova 'Armit, William Edington (de Marguerittes) (1848–1901)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. William Edington (de Marguerittes)... more

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Despite a recognition that the tropical savannah regions of northern Australia have a very long and important role in the history of Aboriginal occupation (eg Horton 1981; O’Connor and Veth 2000; Veth 1989, 1993), only limited... more

History Aboriginal Queensland

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