'Contested Territory'
Colonial Queensland in the Writings of the Late Bill Thorpe (1943-2009)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1321816600005213Keywords:
Colonial Queensland, Bill Thorpe, Raymond Evans, Ipswich Aboriginal community, social and economic historyAbstract
This article provides an overview of the contribution to colonial Queensland studies by the late Bill Thorpe, explaining the reasons for his enduring association with Queensland, and reviewing his long-standing collaborations with former PhD supervisor Raymond Evans and members of the Ipswich Aboriginal community. It argues that the belated appearance of his doctoral thesis on the subject was a significant intellectual event in seeking to theorise colonialism in Queensland, drawing upon interdisciplinary insights and examples. The article spans his career, from the ambitious class analysis of his early writing to an assessment of his local study of the Deebing Creek Reserve in late career, in order to identify his strengths as a social and economic historian, and to situate his work in the context of generational change and the reconceptualisation of Queensland studies.
References
Raymond Evans, 'History on the Edge', in Craig Munro (ed.), The Writers Press 1948-1998 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1998), pp. 187-89.
Bill Thorpe, Colonial Queensland: Perspectives on a Frontier Society (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1996).
Bill Thorpe, Remembering the Forgotten: A History of Deebing Creek Aboriginal Mission in Queensland 1887-1915 (Adelaide: Seaview Press, 2004).
See, for example, Bill Thorpe and Ray Evans, "'Frontier Transgressions": Writing a History of Race, Identity and Convictism in Early Colonial Queensland', Continuum 13(3) (1999), pp. 325-32; Ray Evans and Bill Thorpe, "'Commanding Men": Masculinities and the Convict System', Journal of Australian Studies 56 (1998), pp. 17-24.
Thorpe, Colonial Queensland, p. 186
Raymond Evans, Kay Sanders and Kathryn Cronin, Race Relations in Colonial Queensland: A History of Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination, 3rd ed. (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1993).
Thorpe, Colonial Queensland, pp. 27-30.
R.W. Connell and T.H. Irving, Class Structure in Australian History: Documents, Narrative and Argument (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1980).
Ronald Lawson, Brisbane in the 1890s: A Study of an Australian Urban Society (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1973).
Thorpe, Colonial Queensland p. 148.
Thorpe, Colonial Queensland, Table 2.1, p. 70.
Ross Fitzgerald, A History of Queensland: From the Dreaming to 1915 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1982) and Ross Fitzgerald, A History of Queensland from 1915 to the 1980s (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1984).
Thorpe, Colonial Queensland, p. 197.
Thorpe and Evans, '''Frontier Transgressions"', pp. 325-32.
Evans and Thorpe, '''Commanding Men''', pp. 17-24.
Bill Thorpe, '''Frontiers of Discourse": Assessing Revisionist Australian Colonial Contact Historiography', Journal of Australian Studies 46 (1995), pp. 34-45.
Richard Broome, 'Aboriginal Victims and Voyagers: Confronting Frontier Myths', Journal of Australian Studies 42 (1994), pp. 70-77.
Thorpe, 'Frontiers of Discourse', p. 36.
Thorpe, 'Frontiers of Discourse', p. 41.
Thorpe, 'Frontiers of Discourse', p. 39.
Evans and Thorpe, 'Commanding Men'.
Thorpe and Evans, "'Frontier Transgressions"', p. 325.
Raymond Evans, A History of Queensland (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Thorpe, Remembering the Forgotten, p. v.
Thorn Blake, A Dumping Ground: A History of the Cherbourg Settlement (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2001).
Ros Kidd, The Way We Civilise: Aboriginal Affairs - The Untold Story (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1997).
Thorpe, Remembering the Forgotten, p. ix.
Thorpe, Remembering the Forgotten, p. ix.
Thorpe, Remembering the Forgotten, p. 67.
R.D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1965). Cited in Thorpe, Colonial Queensland, p. 184.
Thorpe, 'Frontiers of Discourse', p. 45.
