The Untold Story Of The People Of Australia's North.
One of Australia's leading historians brings to life Australia's s diverse and thriving far North in the last years of the 19th century.
When you stand on Cape York, at Australia's northernmost tip, you are closer to Vanuatu than Canberra, as close to Manila as Melbourne. The tension between Australia's Southeast Asian geography and its British colonial history is a key to understanding 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 cane workers, Chinese entrepreneurs, Japanese deep-sea divers and adventurers from as far away as Polynesia and Ceylon. Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders mixed freely with the multi-racial populations - 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.
Written with pace and simplicity, painstakingly researched and profusely illustrated, 'North Of Capricorn' is expansive, thorough and ground breaking in its scope. More than that, it succeeds as a richly human illustration of the effects of race and politics on national history.
