| Celebrate our pioneers... To coincide with Queensland’s 150th birthday celebrations in 2009, CitiLibraries - Thuringowa is hosting a series of historical lectures to celebrate north Queensland’s contribution to this 150 year history. Sir Robert Philp was a member of state parliament and twice premier of Queensland. He was a partner in the successful shipping agents and merchants Burns Philp which was founded in Townsville in the late nineteenth century and which became well known throughout the Pacific region. Philp was a champion of northern development and a prominent member of the Townsville Separation League. The Sir Robert Philp Lecture Series is being conducted with the assistance of a Q150 Community Funding grant. The lecture series will bring prominent scholars in north Queensland history/heritage to the region and provide the regional community with the opportunity to engage and reflect upon the history of the North and its place in the history of Queensland. Bookings are essential so call CitiLibraries Thuringowa on 4773 8811 during opening hours to secure your spot! All lectures are provided FREE of charge and include complimentary refreshments.
9 June 2008 – Riverway Arts Centre – 7pm Why is Robert Philp worth remembering? Robert Philp (1851-1922) was a Scotsman, and there are two sides to the Scottish character: the prudent, calculating thrifty businessman and the romantic adventurer who will stake everything on a chance. Philp found ample opportunity to display both sides of his character in the pioneering decades of North Queensland and eventually on the wider stage of a Queensland federating into the new Australian Commonwealth. He was the subject of controversy during his lifetime, but it is now timely to undertake a new assessment of Philp and the world in which he lived and worked.
7 July 2008 – Von Stieglitz Room, CitiLibraries - Thuringowa – 7pm The History of North Queensland in Black and White: A Personal Retrospective. Associate Professor Noel Loos reviews how, as the first research student in the new Department of History at James Cook University, he came to commit himself to the writing of the history of Black – White relations in North Queensland. He indicates how his research findings shocked him into exploring, at greater length, the nature of frontier contact and conflict in North Queensland; as well as the nature of the missionary experience taken to Aboriginal people while they were subject to what Loos calls the ‘Aboriginal Holocaust’ targeted in the ‘History Wars’, like many other historians writing in this area, his research rejects assertions made by Keith Windschuttle.
11 August 2008 - Von Stieglitz Room, CitiLibraries - Thuringowa – 7pm Ellis Rowan: Flower-Hunting in the Tropics Ellis Rowan was Australia's most celebrated flower painter of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Also a skilled writer and publicist, she recounted her travels in the popular press and in a book entitled A Flower-Hunter in Queensland and New Zealand, published in 1898. This lecture will focus on the artist's work in Queensland, a favourite hunting-ground, and on her association with the tropics which was an essential part of her mystique.
22 September 2008 - Von Stieglitz Room, CitiLibraries - Thuringowa – 7pm William Lennon (1849-1938): a North Queenslander of ‘perpetual contradictions’?
6 October 2008 - Von Stieglitz Room, CitiLibraries - Thuringowa – 7pm
The White Man in the Tropics Dr Russell McGregor explains why it had once been widely believed that white people were inherently unsuited to living and working in the tropics, and how that belief was undermined in the early twentieth century through a combination of medical research and political determination. Much of the medical research was conducted locally however the political agenda was national in scope and nationalist in tenor, focusing on the attainment of a White Australia. An examination of these entanglements – of the local with the national, and the medical with the scientific – offers rewarding insights into why north Queensland developed in the way that it did.
17 November 2008 - Von Stieglitz Room, CitiLibraries - Thuringowa – 7pm
The World’s Great Age… The Golden Years: Queensland’s Miners, Poets and Story-tellers
2 February 2009 - Von Stieglitz Room, CitiLibraries - Thuringowa – 7pm
Industrial treasure: North Queensland’s mining heritage Mining was vital to the development of North Queensland, creating many of its ports and towns, bringing settlement inland, and providing infrastructure for other industries. While it is less significant now in the region's economy it has left an important heritage which is undervalued in Queensland today. This lecture shows some of the outstanding mining heritage places surviving in North Queensland and explains their significance.
9 March 2009 - Von Stieglitz Room, CitiLibraries - Thuringowa – 7pm
Livestock and Landscape: a history of the settlement of Queensland by cattle Livestock are integral to European attempts to settle the Australian continent, but the introduction of sheep and cattle has not been a straightforward or easy process. A complex process of introduction and adaptation took place, complicated by the emergence of registered breeds and ideas about how their presence reflected on their local landscape. This lecture explores the issues of the introduction of livestock to new environments and the significance of ways of defining and controlling breeds with particular reference to the interesting situation of North Queensland.
6 April 2009 - Von Stieglitz Room, Citilibraries - Thuringowa – 7pm Archaeology & the Historic Past in Townsville This lecture will explore the potential of archaeology to extend our understanding of the historic past in North Queensland. By concentrating on material culture (such as artefacts) archaeology can investigate lost voices from the past. Examples ranging from early settlement to World War II will be used in this presentation to illustrate these points.
11 May 2009 - Von Stieglitz Room, CitiLibraries - Thuringowa – 7pm
Townsville’s neglected founder: the mysterious Mr Black The first settlement in Cleveland Bay was Woodstock Station and the sole name on the official documents was John Melton Black. As Woodstock is now part of greater Townsville, Black is without doubt the founder of the city. This lecture examines the Australian career and subsequent English activities of this most enigmatic north Queensland pioneer. |
William Lennon (1849-1938), Irish-born businessman and politician, was the member for Herbert from 1907 until 1920, and a leading figure in the Queensland Labor Government. More controversially, he was Lieutenant-Governor (1920-1929) and President of the Legislative Council from 1920 until its abolition in 1922. This lecture explores the apparent paradox of a businessman who became a Labor hero.
This lecture explores selected fiction and poetry that stemmed from the mining industries of tropical Queensland. It uncovers some of the conscious and unconscious assumptions of the early mining industry through published short stories and poems, and considers how later novelists, such as Vance Palmer, Betty Collins, Kay Brown, Sarah Campion and Elizabeth O’Conner, adapted these assumptions for urban readers in Australia and overseas. The lecture thus draws attention to the important contribution that mining in the region made to the development of Queensland, not only materially, but also psychologically and ideologically.
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