
This post was triggered by the wonderfully evocative old photo above. It comes from the Fryer Library, University of Queensland, part of a large collection indexed here.
The page will gradually grow into an anthology-style post like People in Australia before Europeans arrived and The European colonisation of Australia but covering specifically the early colonial period in northern Australia, roughly 1850 – 1930 and anywhere north and east of a line from Bundaberg to Darwin. Like those two, it will be a collection of snippets from items that deserve to be remembered, from various online sources.

Readings
A review of Frontier Justice: A History of the Gulf Country to 1900 by Tony Roberts (2005). classic.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/IndigLawB/2005/29.html
Killing for Country (2023) by David Marr is a history of the colonial period which centres on the author’s family, the Uhr family. Reg and D’arcy Uhr were members of the Native Police in South Australia, the NT and Queensland, in which role they feature in Frontier Justice. At other times they were publicans, butchers, drovers or miners. Marr’s book is an unsparing catalogue of a brutual war of dispossession. There is a short, well-informed review on the Australian Policy and History site and another on the National Indigenous Times site.
Artifacts returned to traditional owners near Ingham by descendants of the first European settlers: abc.net.au/news/2024-03-16/indigenous-artefacts-cane-fields-traditional-owners-returned/103591436
A ward of Mackay hospital was planned near the site of the old ‘Kanaka hospital’ where countless Islander people died. A prominent historian and a South Sea Islander elder called for the exploration of the building site in mid-2024 to look for remains but as of December 2024 none had been found. abc.net.au/news/2024-12-19/ancestral-remains-south-sea-islanders-mackay-base-hospital-qld/104718586
Powerful art presenting an indigenous perspective on colonisation: an exhibition in Brisbane described and shown at peterhanley1.wordpress.com/2024/07/29/a-walk-on-the-light-side-the-powerful-and-beguiling-work-of-waanyi-artist-judy-watson/
And also…
Here are some related posts on Green Path, my environment-focused blog:
- An introduction to the Roper Bar (a river crossing used by Leichhardt, in 1845, and settlers ever since) and nearby Roper Gulf communities and missions.
- mogoer munya, a book by John Elliott about James Morrill, who was shipwrecked off the Queensland coast in 1846 and rescued by the Birri-Gubba people of Cape Cleveland.
- Mataranka and We of the Never-never are introduced here.
- Alex Miller’s novel Landscape of Farewell centres on a massacre near Springsure in 1861.