History
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Main article: History of Queensland
Pre-European contact[edit]
Main article: History of Indigenous Australians
Queensland was one of the largest regions of pre-colonial Aboriginal population in Australia. The Aboriginal ownership of Queensland is thought to predate 50,000 BC, and early migrants are believed to have arrived via boat or land bridge across Torres Strait. Through time, their descendants developed into more than 90 different language and cultural groups.
During the last ice age, Queensland's landscape became more arid and largely desolate, making food and other supplies scarce. The people developed the world's first seed-grinding technology. The end of the glacial period brought about a warming climate, making the land more hospitable. It brought high rainfall along the eastern coast, stimulating the growth of the state's tropical rainforests.
The Torres Strait Islands is home to the Torres Strait Islander peoples. Torres Strait Islanders are ethnically and culturally distinct from mainland Aboriginal peoples. They have a long history of interaction with both Aboriginal peoples of what is now Australia and the peoples of New Guinea.
European colonisation[edit]
Captain James Cook claims the east coast of Australia for the Kingdom of Great Britain at Possession Island in 1770
The peninsula of Seventeen Seventy, Queensland, where Captain Cook landed in 1770
Fighting between Burke and Wills's supply party and Aboriginal Australians at Bulla in 1861
In February 1606, Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon landed near the site of what is now Weipa, on the western shore of Cape York. This was the first recorded landing of a European in Australia, and it also marked the first reported contact between Europeans and the Aboriginal people of Australia. The region was also explored by French and Spanish explorers (commanded by Louis Antoine de Bougainville and Luís Vaez de Torres, respectively) before the arrival of Lieutenant James Cook in 1770. Cook claimed the east coast under instruction from King George III of the Kingdom of Great Britain on 22 August 1770 at Possession Island, naming eastern Australia, including Queensland, New South Wales.
The Aboriginal population declined significantly after a smallpox epidemic during the late 18th century and massacres by the European settlers.[page needed]
In 1823, John Oxley, a British explorer, sailed north from what is now Sydney to scout possible penal colony sites in Gladstone (then Port Curtis) and Moreton Bay. At Moreton Bay, he found the Brisbane River. He returned in 1824 and established a penal settlement at what is now Redcliffe. The settlement, initially known as Edenglassie, was then transferred to the current location of the Brisbane city centre. Edmund Lockyer discovered outcrops of coal along the banks of the upper Brisbane River in 1825. In 1839 transportation of convicts was ceased, culminating in the closure of the Brisbane penal settlement. In 1842 free settlement, which had already commenced, was officially permitted. In 1847, the Port of Maryborough was opened as a wool port. While most early immigrants came from New South Wales, the first free immigrant ship to arrive in Moreton Bay from Europe was the Artemisia, in 1848.
Earlier than this immigrant ship was the arrival of the Irish famine orphan girls to Queensland. Devised by the then British Secretary of State for the Colonies, The Earl Grey Scheme established a special emigration scheme which was designed to resettle destitute girls from the workhouses of Ireland during the Great Famine. The first ship, the "Earl Grey", departed Ireland for a 124-day sail to Sydney. After controversy developed upon their arrival in Australia, a small group of 37 young orphans, sometimes referred to as The Belfast Girls or the Feisty Colleens, never set foot on Sydney soil, and instead sailed up to Brisbane (then Moreton Bay) on 21 October 1848 on board the Ann Mary. This scheme continued until 1852.
In 1857, Queensland's first lighthouse was built at Cape Moreton.
Frontier wars and massacres[edit]
Further information: Australian frontier wars § Queensland, and List of massacres of Indigenous Australians § Queensland
The frontier wars fought between European settlers and Aboriginal tribes in Queensland were the bloodiest and most brutal in colonial Australia. Many of these conflicts are now seen as acts of genocide.
The wars featured the most frequent massacres of First Nations people, the three deadliest massacres on white settlers, the most disreputable frontier police force, and the highest number of white victims to frontier violence on record in any Australian colony. Across 644 collisions, 66,680 were killed — with Aboriginal fatalities alone comprising no less than 65,180. Of these deaths, around 24,000 Aboriginal men, women and children were killed by the Native Police between 1859 and 1897.
The military force of the Queensland Government in this war was the Native Police, who operated from 1849 to the 1920s. The Native Police was a body of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander troopers that operated under the command of white officers. The Native Police were often recruited forcefully from far-away communities.
Aftermath of the 1861 Cullin-La-Ringo massacre in which 19 settlers were killed by Aboriginal people, the deadliest attack on settlers in the frontier wars
Conflict spread quickly with free settlement in 1838, with settlement rapidly expanding in a great rush to take up the surrounding land in the Darling Downs, Logan and Brisbane Valley and South Burnett onwards from 1840, in many cases leading to widespread fighting and heavy loss of life. The conflict later spread north to the Wide Bay and Burnett River and Hervey Bay region, and at one stage the settlement of Maryborough was virtually under siege.
The largest reasonably well-documented massacres in southeast Queensland were the Kilcoy and Whiteside poisonings, each of which was said to have taken up to 70 Aboriginal lives by use of a gift of flour laced with strychnine. At the Battle of One Tree Hill in September 1843, Multuggerah and his group of warriors ambushed one group of settlers, routing them and subsequently others in the skirmishes which followed, starting in retaliation for the Kilcoy poisoning.
Central Queensland was particularly hard hit during the 1860s and 1870s, several contemporary writers mention the Skull Hole, Bladensburg, or Mistake Creek massacre on Bladensburg Station near Winton, which in 1901 was said to have taken up to 200 Aboriginal lives. First Nations warriors killed 19 settlers during the Cullin-La-Ringo massacre on 17 October 1861. In the weeks afterwards, police, native police and civilians killed up to 370 members of the Gayiri Aboriginal people in response.
Frontier violence peaked on the northern mining frontier during the 1870s, most notably in Cook district and on the Palmer and Hodgkinson River goldfields, with heavy loss of Aboriginal lives and several well-known massacres. Raids conducted by the Kalkadoon held settlers out of Western Queensland for ten years until September 1884 when they attacked a force of settlers and native police at Battle Mountain near modern Cloncurry. The subsequent battle of Battle Mountain ended in disaster for the Kalkadoon, who suffered heavy losses. Fighting continued in North Queensland, however, with First Nations raiders attacking sheep and cattle while Native Police mounted heavy retaliatory massacres.
Blackbirding[edit]
Further information: Blackbirding § Queensland
Kanaka workers in a sugar cane plantation, late 19th century
Tens of thousands of South Sea Islanders were forced, deceived or coerced into indentured servitude on Australia's agricultural plantations. The practice persisted despite slavery being outlawed in Australia and other parts of the British Empire by the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. This was known as blackbirding. The appalling conditions have been compared to slavery, or for Brooke Kroeger, slavery's 'just-as-evil twin' . This trade in what were then known as Kanakas was in operation from 1863 to 1908, a period of 45 years. Some 55,000 to 62,500 were brought to Australia, most being recruited or blackbirded from islands in Melanesia, such as the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), the Solomon Islands and the islands around New Guinea.
Blackbirded South Sea Islanders on a Sugarcane plantation in Queensland
The majority of those taken were male and around one quarter were under the age of sixteen. In total, approximately 15,000 South Sea Islanders (30%) died while labouring in Queensland – excluding those who died in transit or were killed in the recruitment process – mostly during three-year contracts. This is similar to the estimated 33% death rate among enslaved Africans in the first three years of arriving in America, Brazil, and the Caribbean; the conditions were often comparable to those of the Atlantic slave trade.
The trade was legally sanctioned and regulated under Queensland law, and prominent men such as Robert Towns made massive fortunes through blackbirding, helping to establish some of the major cities in Queensland today. Towns' agent claimed that blackbirded labourers were "savages who did not know the use of money" and therefore did not deserve cash wages.
Following Federation in 1901, the White Australia policy came into effect, which saw most foreign workers in Australia deported under the Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901, which saw the Pacific Islander population of the state decrease rapidly.
Independent governance[edit]
Further information: Colony of Queensland
Sheep shearers and farm hands at Jondaryan Woolshed, c. 1872
Parade of troops in Brisbane, prior to departure for the Boer War in South Africa
A public meeting was held in 1851 to consider the proposed separation of Queensland from New South Wales. On 6 June 1859, Queen Victoria signed letters patent to form the separate colony of Queensland as a self-governing Crown colony with responsible government. Brisbane was selected as the capital city. On 10 December 1859, a proclamation was read by George Bowen, the first Governor of Queensland, formally establishing Queensland as a separate colony from New South Wales. On 22 May 1860 the first Queensland election was held and Robert Herbert, Bowen's private secretary, was appointed as the first Premier of Queensland.
In 1865, the first rail line in the state opened between Ipswich and Grandchester. Queensland's economy expanded rapidly in 1867 after James Nash discovered gold on the Mary River near the town of Gympie, sparking a gold rush and saving the Colony of Queensland from near economic collapse. While still significant, they were on a much smaller scale than the gold rushes of Victoria and New South Wales.
Immigration to Australia and Queensland, in particular, began in the 1850s to support the state economy. During the period from the 1860s until the early 20th century, many labourers, known at the time as Kanakas, were brought to Queensland from neighbouring Pacific Island nations to work in the state's sugar cane fields. Some of these people had been kidnapped under a process known as blackbirding or press-ganging, and their employment conditions constituted an allegedly exploitative form of indentured labour. Italian immigrants entered the sugar cane industry from the 1890s.
During the 1890s, the six Australian colonies, including Queensland, held a series of referendums which culminated in the Federation of Australia on 1 January 1901. During this time, Queensland had a population of half a million people. Since then, Queensland has remained a federated state within Australia, and its population has significantly grown.
20th century[edit]
Returned World War II soldiers march in Queen Street, Brisbane, 1944
In 1905 women voted in state elections for the first time. The state's first university, the University of Queensland, was established in Brisbane in 1909. In 1911, the first alternative treatments for polio were pioneered in Queensland and remain in use across the world today.
World War I had a major impact on Queensland. Over 58,000 Queenslanders fought in World War I and over 10,000 of them died.
Australia's first major airline, Qantas (originally standing for "Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services"), was founded in Winton in 1920 to serve outback Queensland.
In 1922 Queensland abolished the Queensland Legislative Council, becoming the only Australian state with a unicameral parliament.
In 1935 cane toads were deliberately introduced to Queensland from Hawaii in an unsuccessful attempt to reduce the number of French's cane and greyback cane beetles that were destroying the roots of sugar cane plants, which are integral to Queensland's economy. The toads have remained an environmental pest since that time. In 1962, the first commercial production of oil in Queensland and Australia began at Moonie.
During World War II Brisbane became central to the Allied campaign when the AMP Building (now called MacArthur Central) was used as the South West Pacific headquarters for General Douglas MacArthur, chief of the Allied Pacific forces, until his headquarters were moved to Hollandia in August 1944. In 1942, during the war, Brisbane was the site of a violent clash between visiting US military personnel and Australian servicemen and civilians, which resulted in one death and hundreds of injuries. This incident became known colloquially as the Battle of Brisbane.
Queen Elizabeth II visited Brisbane in October 1982 for the Commonwealth Games
The end of World War II saw a wave of immigration from across Europe, with many more immigrants coming from southern and eastern Europe than in previous decades.
In the later decades of the 20th century, the humid subtropical climate—regulated by the availability of air conditioning—saw Queensland become a popular destination for migrants from interstate. Since that time, Queensland has continuously seen high levels of migration from the other states and territories of Australia.
In 1966, Lyndon B. Johnson became the first U.S. president to visit Queensland. During his visit, he met with Australia prime minister Harold Holt.[citation needed]
The end of the White Australia policy in 1973 saw the beginning of a wave of immigration from around the world, and most prominently from Asia, which continues to the present.
In 1981 the Great Barrier Reef off Queensland's northeast coast, one of the world's largest coral reef systems, was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
21st century[edit]
In 2003 Queensland adopted maroon as the state's official colour. The announcement was made as a result of an informal tradition to use maroon to represent the state in association with sporting events.
After three decades of record population growth, Queensland was impacted by major floods between late 2010 and early 2011, causing extensive damage and disruption across the state.
In 2020, Queensland was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite a low number and abrupt decline in cases from April 2020 onward, social distancing requirements were implemented from March 2020 including the closure of the state borders.
