Journal of Chinese Australia, Issue 1, May 2005

Book Review

Reynolds, Henry. North of Capricorn: The Untold Story of Australia's North. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2003. pp.220. A$49.95.

Amanda Rasmussen

This is an engaging, sophisticated, respectful, richly researched and thought provoking work by one of Australia's most widely read and influential historians. The book is also beautifully presented. Some of the photographs yearned for more detailed captions, but the images are especially enriching. Using 1901 as the pivot for an examination of North Australia as marginalised and misrepresented in the imagination of the nation's founders, Reynolds seeks to recapture the experience of the multi-racial communities of northern Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The first seven chapters of the book are masterful recreations of the worlds of Aborigines, Pacific Islanders, Chinese and Japanese in Mackay, Cairns, Thursday Island, Darwin, Broome and across northern Australia. Reynolds argues that without their invaluable contribution the development of the economies of north Australia at this time would most likely have been negligible. Aborigines' intimate knowledge of the land and hunter gatherer way of life often made them preferred stock workers and policemen to available white workers. Pacific Islanders provided practically all the labour for the foundation and consolidation of the sugar industry. Chinese pioneers cleared north Queensland's dense tropical rainforest, Chinese miners were the backbone of the Northern Territory mining industry and Chinese merchants and market gardeners sold otherwise scarce goods. Japanese divers and entrepreneurs were a critical part of Broome's pearl industry. The success of non Europeans is underlined by the failure of attempts to introduce European miners and sugar workers to the north.

Reynolds highlights the high level of non-European engagement in community and political life. Japanese and Chinese were active and generous contributors to local charities.[1] The politically astute Cairns Chinese who made a special address to the Queensland premier on his visit in 1898 demonstrated both their pride and reputation and their awareness of 'their vulnerability and lack of political power to counter the growing demands for a white Australia'.[2] Pacific Islanders, who had a 'kind of unionism among them which worked wonderfully smoothly' actively pursued fair wages and conditions and mounted a sustained campaign against legislation to deport them.[3]

The book celebrates these successful multi-racial communities where 'hundreds of men, women and children of diverse background' had by 1901 'day by day learnt how to live peacefully and profitably together'.[4] Visitors noted the democratic intermingling. At the theatre on Thursday Island a contemporary observer wrote of an audience which ranged from local officials in European evening dress, Japanese in both European dress and kimonos, 'swarthy Manila men ... in white duck suits, American negroes, Cingalese, South Sea Islanders, the two latter nationalities mostly in cool garb of singlet and dungaree trousers', Aborigines, children and dogs.[5] Reynolds explores the ways that the communities, particularly Melanesians, constructed a new pan-Melanesian/Australian identity from the reconciliation of new and old ways of interacting, dressing and believing. He emphasises the success of relationships between non-European groups. Macassans had been woven into Aboriginal legend, kinship networks and the coastal economies; Japanese, who were remembered by Aborigines for honouring agreements, developed productive long term relationships; the Chinese also became an integral part of Aboriginal economic and social life. This depiction of the dynamics between racial groups over different geographical areas is made possible by Reynolds important decision to centre his study on northern Australia, rather than as in much of the scholarship he relies on, on a close analysis of one of the racial groups living in the region.

Reynolds demonstrates that racism was less prevalent in the north than the south. He argues that 'the daily contact with a variety of racial groups, the ordinariness of it, does appear to have widened the avenues of tolerance'.[6] There were few 'expressions of racial ideology in the north'. Indeed one newspaper editor, Alexander Corran, was perceptive and prophetic in his criticism of the Immigration Restriction Act.[7] 'Ideological purity seemingly flourished best when not confronted by complexity, contradiction or by real, living people.'[8] One shortcoming of this book is that these apparently less tortuous racial relations were not further explored. Europeans rarely feature as more than observers or failed settlers, and yet they must have engaged in as multi-faceted and complex cross racial relationships as the non-Europeans on which the book centres. Other studies of the experiences of Europeans in the north have been written and the aim of this study is to highlight the experiences of hitherto marginalised peoples, but Reynolds argument about the success of these multi-racial communities seems incomplete without a chapter on the ways that the everyday lives and concerns of European Australians were also part of these communities and touched the worlds of people from other racial backgrounds.

Nevertheless, Reynolds' triumph is to so vividly evoke the humanity of the individuals and communities he describes that the reader immediately responds with frustration to the marginalisation and misrepresentation of the north by the southern legislators of federation explored in Reynolds' final chapters. Fear of what was seen as the inevitable inequality of the races if national racial unity was not achieved is well historicised. Parliamentarians were not to know 'that the White Australia policy came to be a source of international embarrassment, a political, moral and intellectual dead-end' because they believed 'that the white race was superior and ... that racial thought would be indefinitely accorded moral and intellectual respectability.'[9] This ideological conviction blinded the legislators to 'what non-Europeans had achieved in North Australia; what contribution they had made to industry, trade or agriculture; how their diverse cultures had enriched social life; how they family and business contacts had opened up inter-colonial and international opportunities'. In fact, Reynolds reiterates using an effective juxtaposition of images, the communities were not a threat because they had degenerated as predicted but their success challenged that most 'compelling ideal of the time, the dream of an "absolutely white Australia"'.[10] Reynolds is sure of his timing in the final chapter. The reader is wrenched by the poignant letter from a Pacific Islander on the eve of his deportation to the wife and child he will leave behind, and then reminded to warn against continued unease about Australia's north and its marginalisation and misrepresentation today.

Histories like this one which are determined to draw attention to issues of nation, race and politics with surety and sophistication must continue to be written. This book is an important and intensely interesting contribution to the scholarship in this field. However, it follows a tradition of historical writing in Australia which focuses on attitudes of Europeans to non-Europeans and the effects of the White Australia policy on their lives, sees the nation as the perimeter of research and discusses nation building as a central theme. I look forward to transnational histories which more fully follow the Australian community links to Indonesia, China, Japan and the Pacific Islands so enticingly drawn by Reynolds.

Notes

[1] Henry Reynolds, The Untold Story of Australia's North: North of Capricorn, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2003, pp.70-71, 90

[2] Reynolds, p.75

[3] Reynolds, pp.44, 57-58

[4] Reynolds, p.191

[5] Reynolds, p.89

[6] Reynolds, p.75

[7] Reynolds, p.161

[8] Reynolds, p.174

[9] Reynolds, p.161

[10] Reynolds, p.176

About the author

Amanda Rasmussen wrote her Honours history thesis
at the University of Melbourne on the Chinese Australian diplomat
Charles Lee and his years in China. She is currently working on
her PhD thesis at La Trobe University on the experience of Chinese
at Bendigo Victoria in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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