‘No boy. These mob got no love in them.’ – Macow in The Kadaitcha Sung – A novel by Sam Watson Penguin Books (1990)
Looking from the North – Australian history from the top down by Henry Reynolds. Published by NewSouth publishing 2025.
Henry Reynolds first went north of the Tropic of Capricorn in 1965 with his partner Margaret Reynolds and their London-born baby. Margaret eventually became a Labor senator for Queensland, and Henry taught history at Townsville University College (now James Cook University). They could both be described as from the Whitlam generation, in the political sense of the term.
Context. North Queensland was dominated by conservatives in the 1970s and 80s, during the Bjelke-Peterson era. The largest city in the North, Townsville, was and is an army town. It also had the largest population of first nations people of nearly any city in Australia. Half the inmates of the 19th century prison at Stuart Creek were Aboriginal. Nearby Palm Island was a penal/mission settlement housing Aboriginal people forcibly imprisoned offshore from all over Queensland, many taken there because of their ‘subversive’ outlook.
Queensland differed from other states. We had ‘the Acts’ that were the legal instrument used to control every aspect of aboriginal people’s lives … who they could marry, where they lived, where they could work, what they were paid (if at all). They were kept in concentration camps called missions. Queensland had apartheid before South Africa. In the early days, before the dormitory system, Aboriginal families lived in tents and had to line up for food. It was the struggle against ‘the Acts’ (Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897) that dominated activism in Queensland in the 1960s, 70s and early 80s, more so than the struggle for land rights that dominated the struggle elsewhere and gave rise to the tent embassy in 1972 and shifted the Gurindji walk off from a wages dispute to a claim for land rights. A dispute that culminated in land rights in the Northern Territory under Whitlam and Fraser governments. Hawke promised to introduce similar federal legislation but squibbed it.
I don’t think I have ever met Henry or Margaret Reynolds in person. However, I did know Margaret’s predecessor, senator Jim Keefe, when I lived in Townsville in the early 1980s when the Reynolds were there. I am told that Henry Reynolds attended a solidarity picket outside the Townsville watchouse when I was imprisoned for a couple of weeks for contempt of court in 1980 during the Joh Must Go years.
During the 19th century, my grandfather and his forebears were pastoralists in Far North Queensland. They were part of the genocide committed on country by pastoralists, and later on, by the native police. One of my ancestors, Montague Curr, assisted in the murder of five Aboriginal people at a place misnamed Kamilleroi in the gulf (see The Curr family in Far North Queensland 1862-1913 by Fred Curr). Their participation during ‘the wild time‘ is evident.
Henry Reynolds describes the genocide in his chapter titled Killing Times. The frontier war was most intense from 1862 till 1869 and came as a result of the land rush made possible by the Queensland Land Act of 1860. The colonial government, in an attempt to populate the North, gave out pastoral leases on Aboriginal land under the condition that the squatters bring cattle sheep and horse to the north to stock their ‘runs‘. Needless to say, there was strong aboriginal resistance to this colonial enterprise. They used guerrilla tactics, and the state countered with the Native Police that was a brutal force that operated for more than 60 years, only to be shut down finally in 1927.
In 1861, Bowen or Port Denison was the first attempt at a colonial settlement north of the Tropic of Capricorn. It was surrounded by the Kennedy district (now a federal electorate), where my family had several pastoral leases, one at Merri Merriwah southwest of Bowen.
I found Looking from the North enthralling. It opened my mind to aspects of the North, to which I had given little thought. Chinese built the first railway from South Australia to Darwin. Before Federation in 1901, Darwin was a multicultural town. Strong Asian influences stretched right across the north from Broome to Cairns.
“In 1886, all 39 fishermen in Cairns were Chinese. In 1910, they owned 11 of the 15 fish traps and 54 of the 69 fishing boats in the region… Locally made junks carried goods all around Trinity Bay and along the lower reaches of the local rivers. They were made by professional (Chinese) boat builders from Cedar logs felled in the rainforest. Surviving photos of the junks on Trinity Bay indicate what an exotic and totally unexpected view it was for visitors arriving from the south.” – ‘Looking from the North‘ by Henry Reynolds.
Richard Trudgen said in his history of the Yolnu: “There were stories that some Macassan captains had said in previous years they might not be able to come in future because the Ballanda (British) out of port Darwin would not let them land (some Yolnu Elders today remember their fathers in tears of disbelief when the Macassan captains told them this news). But many Yolnu dismissed these stories. They said, “Who are these Ballandas? They have no say in the legal agreements between our Clans and the Macassans.”
The coastal clans were seriously affected. Relatives who were expected back on the next fleet were unable to return home and remained in Indonesia. Their own trading networks with inland mobs were disrupted. Commodities long used when no longer available. The visits that had so enlivened Yolnu life for many generations had come to a sudden end with no explanation and obviously with no thoughts of compensation. It was a dramatic warning to the Yolnu that their traditions were under threat from the Ballanda. It was also a bitter lesson about their powerlessness and the total disregard for their sovereignty. This occurred in the wet season of 1907 when the praus from Indonesia had not returned. – Looking from the North‘ by Henry Reynolds.
Economy of the North
Even though ‘the killing times’ stretched out until the 20th century settlers discovered it was better to allow first nations people onto pastoral leases and to exploit their labour as stockmen, stockwomen (called boys) and domestics than it was to exterminate them.
I invite the reader’s attention to this photograph shot in 1879 on Abingdon Downs on Aboriginal land. If you look closely, there were as many Aboriginal people on country as there were whitefellas (my family).
If it was Aboriginal labour that saved the pastoral industry in the North, it was Melanesian (or Islander) labour that built one of Australia’s biggest export industries: sugar. Kanakas cut cane when whitefella labour couldn’t. However the first federal parliament in its wisdom (sic) passed legislation, the Immigration Restriction Act and the Pacific Islanders Labourers Act where Pacific islanders from Cairns and Brisbane were deported back to their islands despite two generations of contribution to prosperity in the north. They had been there longer than many white people. Smart people in the south like Prime Minister Edmund Barton could be very stupid. All In the name of racial purity. His only defence is that scientists of the day were talking up eugenics.
This deficit of labour affected all the colonies in Australia. Later in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, the sugar barons used refugees from fascism in Italy and Spain to cut the cane.
It took the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler to wake some governments up to the consequences of such policies.
However, years later, the Howard government suspended the Racial Discrimination Act to enable the government to send the army into the Northern Territory against aboriginal traditional owners.
So much for international covenants like the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2007 with the support of 150 countries. Both Kevin Rudd (ALP) and Julie Bishop (LNP) later signed up to these internationally recognised agreements. Rights of indigenous people are easily broken, as shown by the Menzies government handing over the Montebello Islands of Western Australia and Maralinga and Emu Field in central Australia so that British government could conduct atomic testing between 1952 and 1963.
In his conclusion, Henry Reynolds says that much has changed since. But as he points out, Defence Minister Richard Marles was a member of Rudd’s ministry in 2009 when the declaration on the rights of indigenous people was ratified. However, in 2025, his government seems perfectly willing to cast sovereignty of First Nations people aside to make Northern Australia the launching pad for the thrusting spear of United States hostility towards China.
The good news is Aboriginal people survived the genocide of the 19th century and challenged the notion of a white Australia. So, too, did people from the Asia-Pacific persecuted by a policy that leaves its legacy to this day.
I recommend this book to the reader. Looking from the North is available in most libraries, including the Brisbane City Council library service..
Ian Curr
29 December 2025
When control over Crown land was transferred to the self-governing colonies in the 1850s, the terms of the leases were perpetuated. The colonial office also determined that the leases would preserve the rights of traditional owners to remain on their land and to maintain their way of life.
In fact, it was explicitly stated that it was illegal to force traditional owners off their land. What the colonial office projected for Australia’s vast open grasslands was a system of land use that allowed for the complementary use of the same land by pastoralists and hunter-gatherers…
“Looking from the North: Australian history from the top down” by Henry Reynolds Page 64.
1. The Colonial Office statements about coexistence were policy rhetoric, not enforceable rights, and colonial courts never recognised Aboriginal legal interests in leasehold land.
2. Pastoral leases granted effective exclusive possession to settlers, meaning Indigenous occupancy survived only at administrative discretion.
3. British sovereignty was asserted as settlement, not conquest, making Indigenous sovereignty legally inadmissible rather than legally extinguished.
4. While Indigenous governance systems continued socially, the colonial legal order replaced them in all formal jurisdictions.
5. The Uluru Statement reflects moral and political claims, but Australian constitutional law still rests on Crown sovereignty recognised by courts such as in Mabo (No 2).
Tropical Australia was not empty in 1901. The Indigenous nations were fully in possession of it and exercised sovereignty over it… The British assumption was that they had acquired an original sovereignty, and as a result, there was no need to deal with the existing sovereignty, which they believed wasn’t there… Perhaps it survives in one form or another up to the present… as they explain in the Uluru Statement from the Heart of May 2017. – Henry Reynolds in “Looking from the North“.
Reynolds explains in “Looking from the North” that relations between Indigenous camps and pastoral head stations were far more complex than most white settlers understood.
Senior Aboriginal men and women did not believe that Europeans had become the rightful owners of their land. Instead, they viewed settlers as intruders who had to be carefully managed. By allowing younger people to take on station work roles, elders could maintain traditional authority while increasing settler dependence on Indigenous labour and intimate relationships. This dependence made camps safer and helped preserve core cultural practices.
At the same time, although elders were confident their rights to country remained unchanged, they were unaware that white station owners legally held only pastoral leases rather than full ownership. These leases provided security of tenure at low cost but did not grant absolute property rights and were originally intended to permit parallel use of land by traditional owners — a framework created under Imperial legislation before colonial self-government.
Watson’s field notes from Tuesday, April 19, 1881, describe his encounter with Montague Curr at Kamilleroi* and what Curr told him about an earlier violent episode:
“Referring to the unfortunate stockman (Turner) recently murdered by the blacks, Mr Curr told me that the stockman and a black boy were hunting for stray cattle. They came upon a black’s trail which they followed to their camp.
Then, they drove away the black men and took possession of the gins with whom they remained in camp. Presently the stockman fell asleep. One of the gins stole his revolver and gave the signal to the blacks who came around, put a spear through both his thighs pinning him to the earth and then beating out his brains with nullas.
Then they cleared out.
This is the boy’s version but he did not report the murder for four days. It seems the stockman had been thrashing him for some days and it is thought he may have had his “revenge”.
Mr Curr told me that he and others had pursued the blacks and shot five and that the police were coming to give them a further dressing as that was the only thing they understand.
It seems hard to steal a man’s gin and child and shoot him when he objects but I believe there is no help for it but a speedy ostensible annihilation.” – Quoted from Robert Watson’s railway survey field notes (1881), as reproduced in The Curr Family in Far North Queensland 1862–1925†
* Please NOTE that Kamilleroi country is a long way south of Kamilleroi Station … The name may have originated by people moving off country up to the gulf.
Thanks Ian, it’s on top of the new pile of books waiting to be read. I’ve always found his books enlightening. Best wishes