QUEENSLAND REACHES MATURITY

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 29004, 19 September 1959, Page 10

QUEENSLAND REACHES MATURITY

[By ERNESTINE HILL] With flags flying from the Gold Coast to Carpentaria’s lonely shores in the heyday of a Royal visit, Queenslanders are looking back on their first hundred years with intense emotion, some amazement and a nervous national pride. Where yesterday is history it is too close and too real. To take shape in true perspective it needs time.

A great many still living can

remember their parents and grandparents telling them of Separation Day, 1859, when a new colony of Australia came into the map with a new borderline, sevenpence in the Treasury and 18,000 people around Moreton Bay and the Darling Downs. Letters Patent under Victoria’s chubby little hand had suddenly presented them with 670.500 square miles—a complete blank. No more than half a dozen explorers had coasted and crossed that wilderness that petered out to the west in desert sand . . . yet they covered it all with roads and towns within 10 years, built five ports on the coast with bullock tracks over the range to mines of copper and gold and tin and the biggest cattle stations in the world. In another 10 years they were building their thous-and-mile railway lines. Over a million people, with pageants and processions, now honour that day. A half-million , are in Brisbane, our third capital city, the other half-million scattered across the void that once was theirs for the asking, the Waste Lands. Lucky the man with a patch in it, for all the way to the desert it is long i lease, hermetically sealed—“a land for cattle” and 20 million sheep. The white map, then of nothing, is a cobweb of names. Festival The years between have passed like an Arabian Night’s tale. Some 30 modern cities and a couple of hundred thriving towns are ringing the bells of thanksgiving, parading their marching girls and brass bands to carnivals, levees, gymkhanas, sports, i banquets and speeches neverending broadcast to the world. The furthest pub in the mulga scrub has its string of coloured lights, picnic races and balls in the R.S.L. hall, the old pioneers telling the tale. Town councils all over the State are doing up the graveyards and cutting down the trees and unveiling memorials to themselves in an epidemic of civic pride. Back to Bogantungan. Back to Chartres Towers, Breathes there a man? Who said Australians have no history and tradition, no love of native land? In the recent Back to Croydon week two hundred Queenslanders travelled up to 200 miles to a ghost town of gold S in the gulf to look for the vanished little homes of half a J century gone, to sit on the mullock heaps reciting the sagas of the old mines in ounces to the ton, to sing together the school songs where the schoolhouse used i to be and dance by a hurricane lamp to an accordian. From natural love and affection one of them—lrish without a doubt—bent down and kissed those alluvial sands where his father cradled gold and his mother cradled him by the creek. Vanished r Here is another such vast f region of earth where hap- | hazard colonisation in little more than one lifetime has changed I so utterly not only the face of nature but the face of man. Of the numerous and vigorous aboriginal tribes that held the , title deeds for 10.000 years not one is to be found. On the far north missions of

Cape York and the Gulf a few full-bloods and their families still wander in the old home ground but three generations tamed to the white man’s ways and thoughts, forgetting the old. Who are the new Queenslanders? They arq a distinct Australian race, perhaps the most easily identified—lean, active, keen, stringier than most, more wiry than strong, more bone than brawn. Their faces are often freckled and browned by a toolively sun, early wrinkled at the corner of eyes and mouth, for they readily smile and frown. Clothes, elegance and etiquette, and social distinctions do not worry them a great deal in a warm and wearing climate. They are naturally friendly, as everyone knows, surprisingly energetic, quick to respond in sympathy with new ideas and full of courage in new enterprise—and yet they are easy-going, content to lose as well as to win and to start again with their courage and confidence undimmed. True children of the country, they have learned its lessons every step of the way—its contrasts of withering drought and sweeping flood, its long punishments of painful endeavour and its sudden yielding of a rich reward. A hardy and hopeful people, they always allow for the unpredictable and so refuse to fail. They can take the cyclones, the sandstorms, the failure of the tobacco crops, the heavy labour of ploughing back a million tons of sugar, if need be, into the earth again cheerfully, without complaint—they have learned philosophy in a hard school, the trial and error of a land of dreams where nothing may be what it seems, but it all comes right in the end. > Adventure The picturesque ancestry of Queensland —that worthy aristocracy “bom in a hoUow log” or under a bullock dray that is now revered—harks back to the sons of adventure of very early years, the cedar-getters and the castaways—to the cast-iron pioneers driving their flocks to the farthest waterholes, without pity “dispersing” the native people and without self-pity battling through the poverty-stricken years. Still here are the sons of bush riders who conquered Australia with a waterbag on the saddle, cutting a bridle-pad through the ranges to cross the trackless plains and camp in mirage . . . sons of the caravans of gold, those ragged round-Australia armies, and long after the gold was gone they found the fertility of earth, and stayed. Here are the sons of the Irish bride-ships creeping down through the Torres Strait and the reefs with a cargo of gentle colleens to mother a new race, and of those women who travelled the wilderness in a spring cart with their babies on their knees, some of them never seen by woman-kind again. These are the traditions dearest to their hearts at the centenary time. Endeavour is the watchword and the national ideal, to try rather than succeed. The “hard yakker” of a new country that has fallen to their lot they take in their stride, and with zeal. So they milk the cows of a thousand farms, cut the sugar-

Inspiring Story Of Progress And Adventure HAPHAZARD COLONISATION

Ernestine Hill, author of “The Great Australian Loneliness,” “My Love Must Wait,” and other books, probably knows more about her native continent—and particularly the ordinarily inaccessible parts of the outback—than any other contemporary Writer. Mrs Hill now lives in Cairns, Queensland, where she is engaged on sorting out the enormous amount of material she has collected during her travels, and which will be the basis for a number of novels, short stories and articles which she has planned.

cane of a thousand miles of coast, shear their 20 million sheep—as they will to the end of time. The miracle age of the last 10 years has brought them an unforeseen reward in expansion and affluence now reflected for the first time in their lives and their home throughout the length and breadth of the State. The homeless of other nations, as ever, are welcome to share their infinite heritage and many thousands have settled among them to share the labour and the recompense—as ever with outstanding success.—Associated Newspapers Feature Services.