North of Capricorn: The Untold Story of Australia's North [Book Review]

Abstract

Southern Australians today like to look down on northerners as racist rednecks — the sort of people who gave Pauline Hanson's One Nation a leg-up, and who routinely revile Aborigines in the crudest terms. Yet, as Henry Reynolds explains, in the Federation era it was southern Australians who foisted the 'white Australia" dogma on the north, thereby stifling its development as a dynamic, successful multiethnic society. Then, southern publications like The Bulletin disparaged the north as 'Piebald Australia", castigated Queensland as 'Queensmongreland' and protested that, in Cairns, white men 'ate with the Chows'. For white Australian nationalists in the early twentieth century, the common complaints were that the north harboured too many races, permitted too much racial interaction, and was altogether too lax in upholding racial exclusivity.