Books
Henry Reynolds
Looking from the North
Change the viewing point and you change what you see. Henry Reynolds did this in 1981 when he published The Other Side of the Frontier, opening up to historical investigation Indigenous responses to the European invasion and revealing the extent of both organised resistance and pragmatic adaption. He has done it again with Looking from the North: Australian History from the Top Down.
Reynolds and his wife, Margaret, who was later a Labor senator for Queensland, lived in North Queensland for about 30 years after he was appointed to a lectureship at the very new Townsville University College, later James Cook University. Gradually Reynolds came to see Australia from the north down, to realise that the history of the Australia above the Tropic of Capricorn was very different from that of the south, which was the focus of Australia’s dominant historical narratives. If you ever wondered why Queensland was different, this book is a revelation, its insights obvious once your gaze is redirected from the temperate south to the tropical north. Reynolds, who started publishing before academic careers became subject to research and publication metrics, writes directly and confidently for his fellow citizens to help us understand the country we live in. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.
The colonisation of the north did not get under way until the 1850s, after all the colonies, except Western Australia, had become self-governing. Britain had withdrawn from oversight of the colonies’ domestic management and the Traditional Owners were still living on about 45 per cent of the Australian continent, untroubled by the invaders. With self-government, colonial governments took responsibility for vast swathes of territory about which they knew almost nothing. The conquest of the north was a colonial, not an imperial, venture undertaken by democratically elected governments, and this is where the moral responsibility lies for what eventuated, including the now well-documented massacres.
The colonial governments, and later the federal government, claimed sovereignty over the north and its unknown inhabitants but they were acutely aware that this claim was not matched by European occupation and that they must develop the north. Reynolds shows how the economic development of the north was only possible with non-white labour. Few white people wanted to live there. Even when enticed to come, they rarely settled. The pastoral industry depended on young Aboriginal men and women still living on Country, the sugar industry on Pacific Islanders, and pearling on Japanese divers and capital. The Chinese, originally drawn by mining, became the backbone of northern towns, from wealthy merchants to fruit and vegetable growers, storekeepers, cooks, tailors and domestic servants. They had, Reynolds argues, as much right to regard themselves as effective colonists as any of the British who had come to the north.
The north’s successful multiracial communities offended the almost universal racist obsession with a White Australia, though few southerners had any experience of them. In the choice between the competing imperatives of developing the north or creating a White Australia, White Australia won. Pacific Islanders were deported and the Chinese and Japanese communities strangled by immigration restrictions. Indigenous Australians stayed, and their unpaid labour built the pastoral industry across the northern savannahs. But the north remained less developed than it might have been had its multiracial communities been allowed to flourish.
This is a tantalising glimpse of a path not taken, as is the non-enforcement of traditional rights to occupation in the pastoral leases granted in Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia by the British government. If enforced, these rights, says Reynolds, would have spared endless Indigenous suffering and profoundly changed the national story. As he says, it is “a tragedy of monumental proportions”. These rights were rediscovered in the High Court’s 1996 Wik judgement, which came like a bolt from the blue to the pastoral families who had believed they had unencumbered title, and were staunchly resisted.
The last third of the book retells the story of the death of White Australia, the campaign for Indigenous rights and their legal affirmation. World War II weakened the discursive power of race, which was replaced by the universalist discourse of human rights promoted by the new United Nations. A race-based immigration policy became increasingly untenable if Australia did not want to become an international pariah like South Africa, and Indigenous Australians began to assert their rights, first to equal citizenship and then to land, self-determination and territorial sovereignty.
The land rights revolution, resulting from the combination of the 1976 Northern Territory Land Rights Act and the 1992 Mabo judgement, has transformed northern Australia. Seventy-eight per cent of the land north of the Tropic of Capricorn has now been returned to Traditional Owners in one form or another. The outstation or homelands movement has seen thousands of people move back to their traditional Country, rejecting the official policies of assimilation and asserting their self-determination. This is unsettling unfinished business, a yet-to-be-completed process of decolonisation.
Reynolds ends with the militarisation currently under way in Darwin as the proximity of the north to Asia has become a strategic asset for the projection of American power into the region in competition with China. Despite having legal rights over more than three-quarters of the territory and more of the coastline, Indigenous landowners have not been consulted. Has it even occurred to Minister for Defence Richard Marles that they should be?
NewSouth, 240pp, $34.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 22, 2025 as "Looking from the North".
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