Echoes of the Antebellum South were reinforced when the Queensland Education Department, in its wisdom, decided I needed to be moved to Palm Island, immediately after the election of the Whitlam government and Minister for Aboriginal Affairs Gordon Bryant’s flying visit to the Palms. Bryant’s comment that conditions on the island exemplified the difficulties facing Aboriginal and Islander people in twentieth century Australia (or words to that effect) were widely reported, but nothing I’d read or heard prepared me for the discovery that the Third World existed just twenty minutes flying time away from Townsville.
Those issues are significant enough to demand their own chapter (The Black North) here, but my spell over there alerted me to the existence of deeply racist undercurrents running through out Australian society. People down there, of course, seemed to regard Northerners as a bunch of rednecks, and there were (and are) plenty of unreconstructed racists hereabouts, though there are probably just as many scattered across the country, sitting comfortably in a suburban existence where they don’t have to deal with those issues and tut-tutting when something about racial, interracial or gang violence appears on the mainstream media.
Much of that feeling of separateness this chapter is concerned with springs, of course, from the mainstream media, which operates in quite a different manner to that which applied fifty years go. It’s worth pointing out that back in those pre-internet days southern newspapers were air freighted into the North, and you could buy the same Sunday Mail or Sunday Sun that you’d be getting in Townsville on Sunday morning walking out of a Brisbane movie theatre on Saturday night.
If you were a Northerner going to buy a newspaper it was probably either your local weekly or bi-weekly rag, or the regional daily published in one of the major centres, the Mackay Mercury, the Townsville Daily Bulletin or the Cairns Post. The editorial content in each of those would have reinforced the them and us separateness that comes with a sense of separation, as well as fuelling some of the regional rivalries that will be discussed in the next chapter.
With their pages largely filled with local content, and state and national news developments viewed from a regional perspective those newspapers reinforced a sense of separation that was eagerly exploited by politicians chasing the local vote, and when it came to local politicians chasing the local vote few did it as effectively as Tom Aikens, the sole parliamentary representative of the North Queensland Labour Party and Member for Mundingburra (1944-1960) and Townsville South (1960-1977).
You might start by thinking the fact that an Independent (to use the more contemporary label) could survive in the state parliament for thirty-three years is quite remarkable, and a click on the link above would more than likely reinforce that notion. He was not, after all, in a position to draw on any local power base other than the former Hermit Park Branch of the ALP which had been expelled from the party and morphed into the NQLP, and while he was president and, later, the patron of the Townsville Choral and Orchestral Society that wasn’t the sort of position that would deliver a great number of votes.
Where Aikens excelled, however, was in the hurly burly of old style electioneering, and his regular report to the electorate evenings held at the old Regent Theatre in the heart of Hermit Park were not to be missed, as Aikens hurled bucketloads of scornful invective towards any topic that had attracted his attention. You mightn’t have agreed with the sentiments but it was pretty good theatre.
More...