Leading Australian historian Henry Reynolds brings to life the country's diverse and thriving far North in the last years of the 19th century - and the changes that were wrought there by a new national government "obsessed with racial purity". A major work; densely illustrated and thoroughly researched.
When you stand on Cape York, at Australia's northernmost tip, you are closer to Vanuatu than Canberra; as close to Manila as Melbourne. A tension between Australia's Southeast Asian geography and its British colonial history is key to the country's identity. And nowhere was this more vividly played out than in the towns of Australia's tropical north during the last years of the nineteenth century.
These towns - from Mackay to Broome - were successful, dynamic, multi-racial societies peopled with Melanesian caneworkers, Chinese entrepreneurs, Japanese deep-sea divers and adventurers from as far away as Polynesia and Ceylon. Darwin did more business with Hong Kong than with most Australian cities.
The prosperous pearling masters of Broome went shopping in Singapore, sent their laundry there and placed orders there for their white tailored suits. Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders mixed freely with the multi-racial population in these towns - and faced less discrimination than in the whiter South.
But these "piebald" societies were a threat, an affront to the new nation obsessed, in the words of the Prime Minister, with "the purity of race". And they would soon be snuffed out by the introduction of the White Australia policy in 1901 - the first social legislation of the brand-new federal government.
In this book, Henry Reynolds brings to life this unique and little-known history, revealing an Australia that might have been - and the Australia that would eventually come to be: a small European enclave at the bottom of the Asia-Pacific hemisphere.
Written with pace and simplicity, painstakingly researched and profusely illustrated with images from rarely-explored archives and collections throughout Australia, 'North Of Capricorn' is expansive, thorough, and groundbreaking in its scope. More than that, this book succeeds as a richly human illustration of the effects of race and politics on a national history.
