In recent weeks two leaked discussion papers from the Federal Coalition have, not for the first time, attempted to shift the nation’s focus on to the northern parts of the country. The first discussion paper Developing Northern Australia : a 2030 vision begins with this statement. Northern Australia, the parts of Australia north of the Tropic of Capricorn and spanning Western Australia, Northern Territory, and Queensland, is often regarded as Australia’s ‘last frontier’. It has historically remained underutilised relative to the rest of the country. However, it is well acknowledged that this region has tremendous potential and competitive advantages through its significant natural, geographical, strategic and other attributes. The second draft discussion paper, on water management, apparently reiterates this focus on the north, the Courier-Mail reporting “The majority of the dams would be in northern Australia, where they would be used to irrigate arid zones for agriculture and more than double Australia’s food production.” View of Flinders Plains from the top of Mt. Walker. State Library of Queensland Negative number: 204428 View of Flinders Plains from the top of Mt. Walker The question of what to do with northern Australia is hardly a new one. In 1907 a paper was presented to the Royal Geographical Society by the Right Reverend Gilbert White, Bishop of Carpentaria, entitled Some problems of northern Australia. Bishop White sums up the problem in this paragraph. Now few persons will, I suppose, be inclined to deny that the unpeopled and unknown condition of most of the far north is an acute danger to Australia. While much of the land is barren and useless, there are great areas of good and fertile land, of which we are making no use whatever, and which are a standing temptation to anxious foreign countries who do not know what to do with their surplus population. Japan and China are close at hand, and who knows how soon China may become as formidable as Japan? Germany believes that her future lies in a colonial Empire. Personally, I believe that no greater danger threatens Australia than this empty and unprotected state of the north. Right Reverend Gilbert White State Library of Queensland Negative number: 167200 Right Reverend Gilbert White The chief problem in settling these apparently vulnerable northern regions was seen as the tropical climate. Bishop White asks Can the white man live and work in the far north, and can he bring up there children who are healthy, and fit to become parents in their turn?. Matthew Macfie explores this question in more detail in another paper presented to the Royal Geographical Society a few years later, Are the laws of nature transgressed or obeyed by the continuous labour of white men in the Australian tropics? The white population as might be expected, in these regions has long been stationary, with a marked tendency to decline. It is this class who are constantly leaving our excessively hot latitudes after discovering the incompatibility of these regions with the health and available vigor of those who hail from an ancestry indigenous to the the temperate zone. Even on the erroneous assumption that an actual rush of European whites to tropical climes was in progress, the fact remains that only an insignificant proportion of the inexperienced white immigrants, up to their arrival in North Australia, ever considered the question of the unfavourable relation of a tropical climate to their physical racial characteristics. Sooner or later, however, the discovery is made by them, and is necessarily followed by a continuous emigration from tropical North Australia of the majority of white immigrants who arrive there in ignorance of the science of climatology, and who feel compelled to retire from tropical labours when they learn by painful experience that if they persist in their dangerous indiscretion the end must be a premature grave. Drovers camp at Hughenden, ca. 1916. State Library of Queensland Negative number: 63497 Drovers camp at Hughenden, ca. 1916 Apart from these questions of racial suitability the most serious problem with northern development was recognized as the distribution of rainfall. Bishop White summarizes the problem. The first and most salient characteristic of Northern Australia is that, while the rainfall is large, increasing in volume as we go north, it nearly all falls between the 1st of January and the 31st of March, the rest of the year being for practical purposes rainless. In the 1930s prolific author Ion Idriess and engineer Dr. J.J.C. Bradfield both proposed schemes to divert water from north Queensland’s coastal rivers into inland rivers to provide water to the parched interior. Idriess plan was published in his book The great boomerang in 1941 but he had been writing articles in the press since the mid 1930s. He makes the plan sound simple in this passage from the book. We must lift or divert the floodwaters from the eastern Queensland coast and drop them back over the ranges into the headwater channels of the inland rivers: the Cooper and Diamantina in particular, the Georgina as the Plan develops, and later the Bulloo, Paroo, and Warrego. We must divert the headwaters of the northern rivers which flow into the Gulf of Carpentaria and, by means of channel, cutting, or tunnel, lead them back into the head channels of the Diamantina and Georgina.
Posted on: Tue, 12 Nov 2013 09:54:51 +0000
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