It is a rare book that earns universal praise. Rarer still when that same book asks us to rethink Australian history. Yet from Jackie Huggins to Mark McKenna, from Raymond Evans to Clare Wright, Henry Reynolds’s Looking from the North is hailed as an immediate classic.
The book’s premise is simple but powerful: colonial settlement began in the south of the continent, and this shapes assumptions about experience in northern Australia. Reynolds instead points to the very different patterns of European engagement, the violence that characterised the growth of rural industry, the multicultural settlements in the Northern Territory and Queensland. Here is a picture teaming with detail but skilfully framed. Looking from the North delivers what it promises, upending expectations.
Henry Reynolds begins with the personal — arriving in Townsville in 1965 with wife Margaret and their first child. They would stay for more than three decades, but the narrator soon disappears from the text. Even discussing controversies in which he was a key player, including the documenting of the frontier wars, Reynolds largely resists personal reflection. This seems a loss — he has so much to tell us about the north he knows. Yet we soon see the continent afresh through his reading of what matters.
Here are the stories of early contact, the settlement of northern Queensland by just a handful of pastoralists, the complex history of settlers and First Nations people, misunderstandings in the south and in distant London. Reynolds explains the role of Aboriginal peoples in the rural industries they first resisted and then made possible with capable labour and knowledge of country. He doesn’t avoid the disturbing record of the Queensland government’s Native Police, nor the massacres on the frontline. And Reynolds is keen to highlight the Asian diasporas which found a home in northern Australia until the White Australia Policy saw longstanding communities expelled and ancient trade exchanges ended.
It is an extraordinary story told gently. In an almost understated tone the text conveys distressing facts — the estimate, for example, that the Native Police killed more than 40,000 First Nations children, women and men in just over forty years, with perhaps another 20,000 deaths from vigilante groups, which suggests that as many First Nations people died cruelly in Queensland alone as the entire nation lost in the first world war.
There are also quiet corrections. The assumption that Pacific Islanders shipped into Queensland to work on the canefields experienced near slave-like conditions requires nuance. Examples can be found of exploitation by plantation owners, without doubt, but also of Pacific Islanders who returned more than once, built lives in northern towns, started businesses, and became prosperous — at least until the Commonwealth intervened. Evidence matters. Truth-telling runs quietly through the narrative.
Reynolds traces Chinese migrants attracted to goldfields as miners and suppliers of food and equipment. Their presence sparked moral panic in the south versus a quiet local recognition of how quickly these new arrivals became respected within communities. Yet such contributions didn’t win friends in the newly created Commonwealth. Reynolds devotes a chapter to the introduction of the White Australia Policy. If removing Japanese and Filipino pearlers devastated that industry, it was a price entirely acceptable to politicians living thousands of kilometres south.
Further chapters trace an important shift through the twentieth century — the imposition of whiteness across the north up to the second world war, and then a growing recognition that a migration policy based on skin colour and culture was no longer tenable following the 1963 United Nations Declaration Against All Forms of Racial Discrimination. The pariah status of apartheid-era South Africa was a sharp reminder of how Australia might be viewed if it failed to change. Courts and government alike begin to shift, and the policies of 1901 slowly faded.
Also changing the north has been the slow but consequential growth of the land rights, which have been pursued by the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement since 1959. It is a movement still gathering strength, as the most recent agreements across Cape York demonstrate, with nearly a million hectares returned to traditional owners.
First Australians are the thread running through Looking from the North. In acknowledgements to close the volume, Henry Reynolds pays tribute to the First Nations mobs which welcomed him and his family to Townsville. He celebrates the Torres Strait Islanders and the descendants of Pacific Islanders he came to call friends, and the students at James Cook University with whom he worked, shared research projects, learned with and from. Only passing reference is made to the heated history wars during which Reynolds was often attacked but also recognised as an outstanding historian who helped Australians understand uncomfortable realities of our shared history.
In reading Looking from the North I thought often of the north Queensland I knew only as a visitor from Brisbane. The Cairns that bears fleeting traces of the diverse and thriving nineteenth-century town Reynolds describes. The small ports scattered along the coast to ship coal, wool and cattle from the vast hinterland. The rich history, and sometimes troubled present, of Thursday Island. The landscape managed for generations by First Nations people, including the lookout at Grassy Hill near Cooktown where the English captain climbed often to track a path through the reefs. And the view of the coast from the grassland at the peak, beaches and hills peeling away to the south, giving a glimpse of the perspective Reynolds encourages us to ponder in this short but powerful book. •
Looking from the North: Australian History from the Top Down
By Henry Reynolds | NewSouth | $34.99 | 224 pages
