This article was downloaded by: [1.121.138.24]On: 27 May 2014, At: 14:13Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Journal of Australian StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjau20

Containing Queensland prickly pear:buffer zones, closer settlement,whitenessJodi Frawleya

a Queensland University of Technology, BrisbanePublished online: 22 May 2014.

To cite this article: Jodi Frawley (2014) Containing Queensland prickly pear: bufferzones, closer settlement, whiteness, Journal of Australian Studies, 38:2, 139-156, DOI:10.1080/14443058.2014.896824

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14443058.2014.896824

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever orhowsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arisingout of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Containing Queensland prickly pear: buffer zones,closer settlement, whiteness

Jodi Frawley*

Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane

By 1925, the introduced prickly pear (Opuntia and Nopalea spp.) covered up to60 million acres of Queensland and New South Wales in what was perceived as primeagricultural land. After 40 years of experimentation, all Queensland Governmentstrategies had failed. Faced with this failure and a diminishing expectation that the landwould ever be conquered, buffer zones were proposed by the newly formed QueenslandPrickly Pear Land Commission. A close reading of government documents, newspaperreports and local histories about these buffer zones shows how settler anxieties overwho could or should occupy the land shaped the kinds of strategies recommended andadopted in relation to this alien species. Physical and cultural techniques were used tomanage the uneasy coexistence between prickly pear, on the one hand, and farmers andgraziers on the other. Furthermore, this environmental history challenges the notion ofracially homogenous closer settlement under the White Australia Policy, showing themany different kinds of livelihood and labour in prickly pear land in the 1920s.

Keywords: prickly pear; racial formations; population politics; invasive speciesmanagement; biopolitics

Introduction

Invasive species are an ongoing preoccupation in Australian historiography as a constantreminder of the ways European settlement transformed indigenous ecosystems.1 Thestories of rabbits, cane toads, prickly acacia and lantana, each with its own invasionhistory, continue to pose threats to Australia.2 Prickly pear, on the other hand, is anatypical story about invasive species. Applied science, in the form of biological control,solved this land management problem.3 The Commonwealth Prickly Pear Boardintroduced Cactoblastis cactorum in 1926 through a committed program of insectrelease. By 1933, the board declared Queensland pest free.4 From that time on eradicationbecame the narrative core of the prickly pear’s invasive species story. The scholarly andpopular treatments similarly focused on the achievements of biological control celebrat-ing the spectacular success of Cactoblastis.5 The significance of these accounts dependson science providing the means for settlers to return to imagining the productivepossibilities for prickly pear land: wheat, dairying, grazing and other small-scale farming.

Less attention is given to the preceding 50 years in which governments and settlersstruggled to live with these pest plants. In this article, I am turning away from the classicalstory about biological control to draw attention to this earlier phase in the environmentalhistory of prickly pear. In 1925, the Prickly Pear Land Commission (PPLC) proposed

*Email: j2.frawley@qut.edu.au

Journal of Australian Studies, 2014Vol. 38, No. 2, 139–156, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14443058.2014.896824

© 2014 International Australian Studies Association

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

1.12

1.13

8.24

] at

14:

13 2

7 M

ay 2

014

buffer zones as a cleared one-mile area to surround dense thickets of prickly pear. TheQueensland Government envisaged this new arrangement would enable settlers tocoexist with this invasive species. A close reading of government documents,newspaper reports and local histories relating to this strategy show the ways that theprickly pear changed land management patterns in Queensland. Buffer zones requiredintricate mapping of land, intimate knowledge of the prickly pear locations and thecapacity to inspect, patrol and enforce these boundaries. In this article, I argue that thestruggles over containing prickly pear, and who should do this gruelling work,disrupted the dominant discourses about closer settlement and whiteness in Queensland.

In the late nineteenth century, the Queensland Government looked to agricultural andpastoral development to extend the settlement of the state. This policy was called closersettlement, enacted through the Land Acts of the state legislature. Productivity rested onsuccessful land management driven by economic outputs, but this policy was laced withambitions for expanding white settler society into rural settings. The belief that closersettlement policy could realise such ambitions were petering out in other parts ofAustralia by the interwar period,6 but in Queensland, legislative techniques continued tobe exploited in pursuit of closer settlement. This scheme aimed at the full occupation ofthe land by providing settlers with blocks of land large enough to make a living but smallenough to generate close-knit regional neighbourhoods. The intention was to developself-sustaining communities where lifestyle was as important as income.7 By 1925,prickly pear had spread through 60 million acres of arable land, presenting a formidablebarrier to this policy in south-west Queensland.8

Paying attention to the use of buffer zones in prickly pear land offers a uniqueperspective on the history of attitudes to the environment in terms of population and racein Australia. Here, the combination of different expectations and lived experiences shapedan uneasy coexistence between prickly pear and settlers. Tracey Banivanua-Mar andPenelope Edmonds argue that, in Australia, race and space form at the same time,underpinned by the same logic as settler colonial violence that treated outsiders asunwelcome.9 Queensland governments looked to manage prickly pear and racial othersthrough biopolitical techniques. Biopolitics, a term coined by philosopher MichelFoucualt, refers to the way that modern states control whole populations throughtechniques that regulate the behaviours of individual subjects in line with codifiednorms.10 This article tests this logic by analysing the fences and boundaries operating tocontain both human and non-human others in an ongoing negotiation of governmentpower, settler anxiety and the presence of unwanted others.11

In exploring the ways Queensland governments managed these invasive species,I begin with a potted history of the introduction of prickly pear to Australia. The localpolitics about migration in relation to closer settlement drew on global population debatesof the interwar period. The need to create a viable rural sector for white settlers fuelledthese debates. I hope to show why the PPLC modified crown land leases in 1925 tointroduce buffer zones because examining buffer zones helps us to see how white, non-white, Asiatic and Aboriginal people lived in prickly pear land. In doing so, I challengeGavin W. Jones’s notion that the Queensland population became whiter during theseyears.12 The final section of this essay provides an account of the different non-Britishpeople active in prickly pear land. By determining the inclusion and exclusion of differentgroups, I will show how the local environmental, social, political and racial factorsundermined the construction of a homogenous white society.

140 J. Frawley

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

1.12

1.13

8.24

] at

14:

13 2

7 M

ay 2

014

Prickly pear land

The first prickly pear to arrive in Australia came with the first fleet in 1788. CaptainArthur Phillip collected provisions in Rio De Janerio on his way to the colony, includingthe prickly pear host of the cochineal insect Dactylopius coccus. Cochineal was used as ared dye. Phillip speculated that the colony could export this colourant to the textileindustry in England.13 Over a century later, Joseph Maiden, the director of the BotanicGardens, Sydney, opined that the first prickly pear was probably Opuntia monocantha, aplant that was never a problem in the humid conditions of coastal Australia.14 Otherprickly pear species continued to arrive, but no-one recorded the original arrival of theworst of the invaders, Opuntia inermis.15 By 1912, biologist T. Harvey Johnston andentomologist Henry Tryon identified 13 varieties of prickly pear, mostly Opuntia species,as problematic in Australia.16

Over the nineteenth century, a number of competing ideas emerged in Australia aboutthe usefulness of prickly pear. Some plants came as ornamentals, valued for their unusualfruit, foliage and flowers. Some settlers hedged their kitchen gardens with prickly pear,using it as a living fence to keep out predators.17 James Busby advocated their use aswindbreaks in vineyards, a practice he had seen on a tour of Spain.18 Most importantly,settlers imported prickly pear for a perceived value as a fodder plant for consumption bydomestic livestock.19 In their native lands of southern America, survival in semi-aridconditions facilitated their promotion as a plant for pastoralism in the dry inland ofAustralia. Geographer Donald Freeman has tracked the movement of these plants fromScone in New South Wales, through the travelling stock routes, north to centralQueensland. He argues the movement started in 1839. By the 1880s, the plants werewidely established and considered invasive.20

Prickly pear grew in a geographic band between the humid coastal plains and thesemi-arid interior. As invasive species, they followed a typical trajectory. Their rangeexpanded because they were devoid of native predators. Additionally, Australia’s inlandclimate generated optimum conditions for their growth. They were particularly “at home”in the brigalow belt of Queensland. This forest community, with dominant brigalowAcacia harpophylla and belah, Casuarina cristata, hosted the densest growths of theplant. Brigalow was considered impenetrable “scrub country”, synonymous with anobstruction to the development of agriculture.21 When growing within these forests, athicket of prickly pear was usually dominated by one species. It grew as low groundcover O.aurantica or mid-height bushes O.inermis to the towering O. tomentosa. Inaddition to thickets, prickly pear also grew in lower density on the open plains. Landmanagers classified lower density as “scattered” (see Figure 1).

Two competing schools of thought emerged about prickly pear over this period. In thesame vein as pastoralists in South Africa,22 a contingent of Australians saw prickly pearas a valuable reserve plant in times of drought.23 Graziers considered high water content apositive attribute of the plant. Drought episodes were largely the only time cattle wouldvoluntarily consume the prickly pear. On the other hand, the plant was seen as aproblematic invasive species blocking settlement possibilities, especially agriculture.I have shown elsewhere how the rhetoric used to describe it moved from its description asan innocuous weed to hyperbole of enemy alien as plants spread.24

By the early twentieth century, prickly pear was a social as well as environmentalproblem in Queensland. The changes to the physical environment resulted in significantramifications for settlers, especially those hoping to take up land leases for agricultural

Journal of Australian Studies 141

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

1.12

1.13

8.24

] at

14:

13 2

7 M

ay 2

014

and pastoral purposes. In places like Dulacca, Miles and Roma, settlers found the blocksthey leased covered in varying density of prickly pear. Lightly scattered prickly pearcleared easily. Even where it was not cleared, in areas of lower density, cattle could feedon the grasses growing around it. Where it was dense, no human or animal could movewithin the thickets. The continuing viability of land depended on the removal ofprickly pear.

Population politics and closer settlement

One of the enduring organising principles of this invasion ecology was the idea that stateprogress would be achieved if prickly pear could be displaced through closer settlement—that is, through increasing population. This theory was, at one level, quite simple: ifmore people could be encouraged to settle in prickly pear land, the labour would beavailable to stop the spread of the plant. The Queenslander, a populist newspaper,editorialised:

The only way to deal with the problem is to ring the infested belt with close settlement andclose settlement means strong inducements to Queenslanders to take up the land … if thepear is tackled with population, the prospects of success are not meagre.25

Finding a method of coexistence offered a means for settlers to take up leases, thusfulfilling the desire for closer settlement. As Bertram Steele said at the Royal Commission

Figure 1. Scattered prickly pear and settlers near Dulacca, Queensland, c1920. Photo held by StateLibrary of Queensland.

142 J. Frawley

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

1.12

1.13

8.24

] at

14:

13 2

7 M

ay 2

014

he chaired, “the spread of prickly pear threatens the prosperity of the whole State”.26Steele articulates the inability to settle as far more than just a problem with a pest plant.Prickly pear destabilised the future viability of Queensland.

Repeatedly, the Queensland Government, local newspapers and other commentatorspromoted increased population as the panacea solution to the problem of prickly pear.Theories of population, as Alison Bashford points out, related to territory and climate asmuch as numbers of people.27 In grappling with the idea of “global” population, theoriststhought European countries too dense with too many people, compared to Australia thatwas too sparse with not enough. Advocates proposed to redistribute people more evenlyacross the globe. Migration would flow from areas with high population to those with lowdensity. This scientific theory was global politics for late imperialism. Libby Robin showsthat, under this rubric, the inland of Australia qualified as uninhabited; deserts were“lumped together as ‘empty’, undeveloped or unproductive”.28 In his work on race inAustralia, Russell McGregor argues that official immigration policy favoured people fromBritish stock in the hope of securing a white Australia.29 Increasing population inQueensland drew on these debates. Governments targeted rural areas for relocation ofmigrant communities. The brigalow belt, an arable area with low population, matchedthese aspirations.

The presence of prickly pear, however, disrupted any neat application of thesetheories. In a strange twist on the logic of population, lobbyists saw prickly pear land asempty of people and occupied. In contrast to the empty deserts, the Brisbane Courierreported: “the pear has grip of millions of acres of fertile land”.30 At the 1923 RoyalCommission, Richard Mackie of Chinchilla gave evidence about his experience with theplant, saying, “there is no doubt that the best of our land has been claimed by pricklypear”.31 Reporters often labelled prickly pear a menace, or an enemy. The newspapercartoon in Figure 2 depicts the plant as a monstrous echo of the human form. Thisconstructed the plant as a thief, terrorising people by chasing them away from the land onwhich families might settle.32 This was a different approach to one suggesting an emptyland needing to be filled. Instead, supporters for increased population saw this land asunproductively occupied by the prickly pear. They wanted to increase population as adisplacement strategy.

Figure 2. Fears of invasion circulated through imagery and hyperbole in newspaper reportage asmuch as the experience of living with prickly pear.Source: Pictures collection of National Library of Australia.

Journal of Australian Studies 143

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

1.12

1.13

8.24

] at

14:

13 2

7 M

ay 2

014

Land management

Land inhabited by prickly pear literally blocked these governmental goals. Most of theland infected by prickly pear was crown land, with pockets held as freehold. TheQueensland Lands Department set contractual conditions in leases to ensure the removalof prickly pear. The lease conditions reflect an imagined space where lands were pestfree. Settlers had to destroy prickly pear within a specified period—often five years—orforfeit their holdings.33 The high proportion of land managed through leases increased theQueensland Government’s capacity to enforce conditions through a system of surveil-lance by land rangers and inspectors.

The popular methods for destruction of prickly pear included poisoning, digging themout, trenching then burying them, burning to use residue for potash and slashing to theground. Settlers inevitably faced regrowth after clearing, as methods were not permanent.Where they did try to fulfil the lease conditions, they lost time for other farm activities.The tension between the government’s desire for rural development and what waspossible on the ground played out in prickly pear land where settlers faced this arduouswork. Many people forfeited their holdings due to these crippling lease conditions.34

In December of 1924, John Bradshaw, a small landholder from the tiny rural hamlet ofWallumbilla, wrote to the newly formed PPLC:

I would like to draw your attention to a block of land held by W Hopewell at Wallumbilla.Said land was once clear of pear, or nearly so. At present it is becoming more infested everyday and soon will be of no use… I think the present holder should be made to clear the pearor forfeit the area, a share farmer at present is working the property and he stated that theland could be cleared, I have no doubt, given the opportunity this man would make an effortto eradicate the pear, on what is a good piece of land which soon will be useless, in thepresent holders hands.35

A visit from the local land ranger ensued, where the prickly pear on the holding wasinspected, and so too was Mr Hopewell. Hopewell countered with his own letter:

I beg to state that my freehold is not being allowed to run to pear as I clear all previouslycleared land every year. My freehold (is) bounded by three roads which are heavily infestedwith pear… I have no intention of letting the pear take possession of my farm. I have spenttoo many years here and too much money on it to allow is to go now and as soon as thewarm weather comes I will be poisoning again, in the winter months I burn it.36

By 1925, this blame game was in full swing. The commissioner of railways blamed thelocal authorities for not clearing prickly pear. He argued that his department should not beasked to do anything unless the councils were asked to do the same. While, on theBurnett River, the shire clerk argued that the problem was upstream; therefore, they couldnot be held responsible for the spread of prickly pear, especially when the rivers floodedregularly. In the midst of it all, the local land inspectors were playing referee in a policy-induced squabble over a plant that had become altogether too settled.37

With the plants extending their range every year, both governments and settlersrealised prickly pear was now a naturalised, although not a desired, feature of the land.Environmental dynamism produced anxiety about the viability of white settlement.As James Beattie notes, such anxiety facilitates a need for a change in direction.38 Facingthis failure led to a diminishing expectation of conquering prickly pear. Queenslandgovernments looked for alternate ways to create the conditions for closer settlement.

144 J. Frawley

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

1.12

1.13

8.24

] at

14:

13 2

7 M

ay 2

014

Buffer zones

In 1925, the Queensland Government established PPLC: a recommendation of the earlierRoyal Commission Appointed to Inquire into Certain Matters Pertaining to the Prickly-Pear Problem.39 Chairman of the PPLC William L. Payne proposed buffer zones in hisfirst annual report. The Queensland Lands Department set this new condition as theprimary area to be kept clear of prickly pear by leaseholders. This was a change fromearlier leases that had included a contractual obligation for leaseholders to clear allprickly pear from their block. The buffer zones represent a compromise on the part of theQueensland Government. This was as an adaptive response to the management of theseinvasive species. It meant relinquishing the desire for total eradication, instead moving toaccepting coexistence with prickly pear in agricultural and pastoral enterprises.

Although the commission started to implement this system of buffer zones, it wasnever complete. Cactoblastis’s introduction in 1926 foreclosed the need for the policy. In1925, however, governments operated under a different set of assumptions. Given thehigh turnover in leases, they were left with little choice but to abandon entire areas toprickly pear, or adjust the leases so settlers could live with the plant. Creating bufferzones acknowledged that some of this land might never be recovered for agriculture. Atthe same time, governments held fast to the notion that partial removal of prickly pearwould unlock the land’s potential for economic enterprise. Completely abandoning landwas out of the question.

The PPLC proposed a one-mile boundary between dense thickets of prickly pear andagricultural activity instead of removing all the plants. New leases concentrated onremoval activities in lightly infested areas, leaving the rest alone. Leasees were requiredto keep the zone around dense prickly pear cleared of all vegetation. We can see thiscompromise in the maps created to assist Lands Department administrators. Cadastralmaps overlaid the land with patterns of settler-colonial land tenure, marking out thefreehold, leasehold and reserves along with crown land. As Denis Byrne notes, thisschema was introduced from England as a fully formed system of managing land that didnot acknowledge, or account for, indigenous presence.40 In this instance, the LandsDepartment produced cartography titled “A Map showing Affected Prickly Pear Areas”(see Figure 3). The PPLC appended this to the annual report of 1925.41

These maps introduced colour to plot prickly pear density and represent viability forsettlement. Prickly pear occupation corresponds with the white, pink and blue categoriessuperimposed onto the map.42 Settler experience of environmental change was layeredinto these maps through shading. The white area represented light growth not expected tohinder agricultural or pastoral activity. Scattered prickly pear, targeted for removal,equated to the pink areas. The dense, impenetrable Opuntias were coloured blue,symbolising the abandoned area. The commission wanted the blue areas fenced, withbuffer zones maintained adjacent to these boundaries.

The introduction of buffer zones conjured up an imagined settler control over plants,people and environments. The land on one side of the fence could be cleared, ready foragricultural development, while, on the other side, settlers could abandon prickly pear.The commission aimed to turn all the pink and non-coloured areas within the green lineinto agricultural land. Blue areas would be held in check by fences. New leasearrangements formed by the commission only included the removal of the lighter andscattered prickly pear growths. Settlers now focused on the critical areas bordering the

Journal of Australian Studies 145

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

1.12

1.13

8.24

] at

14:

13 2

7 M

ay 2

014

Figure 3. Section of “A Map showing Affected Prickly Pear Areas”, First Annual Report of PPLC,1925. Prickly pear areas coloured according to the density of growth. Reproduced, with permission,from the library of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney.

146 J. Frawley

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

1.12

1.13

8.24

] at

14:

13 2

7 M

ay 2

014

densest prickly pear. The interweaving of patrolled fence lines defined habitable andinhabitable areas.

The buffer zone system promoted by PPLC was at odds with survey techniquescommonly used by Australian governments. The usual treatment of land was to produceboundaries as lines on the map that did not necessarily relate to the terrain, although onenotable exception is the New South Wales-Victoria border that follows the main channelof the Murray River.43 For the most part, however, grid patterns dominate Australiansurveys. At the nearby Darling Downs city of Toowoomba, for example, in 1853,surveyors laid out the familiar grid pattern of urban planning, ignoring the local swamp.44

The central business district of Toowoomba is prone to flooding, with present-dayresidents inheriting the ongoing consequences of such decisions.45 The straight lines ofthe survey in prickly pear land similarly ignored the underlying geography. Instead,colonial surveyors allotted land in 320 and 640 acre parcels in uniform arrays, regardlessof vegetation, waterways and topography. Buffer zones broke with this tradition. Instead,they required attention to specific instances of prickly pear density in each lease area.Geography and lived experience took precedence over the colonising cartographic eye.46

Fences, surveillance and other boundaries

Settler-colonial regimes used fences extensively to mark out areas of ownershipassociated with a sense of belonging. Governments used them to limit, control andmanage other pest species including rabbits, dingoes and emus.47 Rabbits decimatedfodder. Dingoes hunted livestock. Emus played havoc with crops up and down the inlandcorridor. Each animal or plant emerged as an agent in relation to settler concerns. Intheory, fences limit their range, in addition to stopping the damage they did to crops andlivestock.48 In practice, these fences had little effect in controlling the patterns ofmovement of these animals. Even so, a faith in the capacity of fences stubbornly persistedin this case. They represent a desire to contain alien others ignoring the biophysicalfeatures.

Colonial rule used boundaries as crucial biopolitical methods, shaping not just landbut also the management of a range of different kinds of human and non-humancommunities. Queensland governments were notorious for their use of this method inremoving Aboriginal communities to Barambah, Taroom, Woorabinda and Palm Islandover the twentieth century.49 Survey lines marked the spaces of each of these reserveswhere a fence limited movement of Aboriginal peoples. Queensland governments alsobuilt fences as devices of indigenous exclusion in the creation of the early National Parks.In the Bunya National Park case, colonial authorities denied Aboriginal people access tothe ceremonial grounds used in Bunya nut festivals.50 In a different context, theQueensland Health Department used them extensively in public health facilities, such asthe networks of asylums built across the state.51 Health authorities also housed lepers onPeel Island in Moreton Bay off Brisbane. This created a watery boundary betweenhealthy and unhealthy populations. In these examples, fences segregated one populationfrom another. It should be little surprise, then, that the Queensland Governmentreproduced this biopolitical method for these invasive species.52

While a fence provided a physical barrier to the plants, this was not enough to ensurethe success of the buffer zones. William Payne explained this in his first report to PPLC.He said:

Journal of Australian Studies 147

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

1.12

1.13

8.24

] at

14:

13 2

7 M

ay 2

014

By themselves, buffer zones can accomplish nothing. They are merely aids to administration.The idea is to proclaim a definite area on the outskirts of the pear which can be ceaselesslywatched and cleared of pear as it appears.53

Although Payne called for the surveillance of prickly pear, settler relationships with thisplant came under scrutiny at the same time. One effect of the interrelationship betweenprickly pear and settlers emerging in the buffer zone was the obligation to be goodpromoted by the state. As a result, Lands Department agents began to label settlers asgood or bad tenants after inspection for compliance with lease conditions. Industriousgood tenants kept their prickly pear under control. Bad tenants neglected their land,thereby placing the occupation of other settlers at risk.

The successful elimination of prickly pear predicted good or bad tenancy.Photographs used in the first report of PPLC leave us with no doubt about the way thatthe commissioners viewed removal (see Figure 4). Each of the three photographsdemonstrates a line dividing the land into two types. The prickly pear dwelt on one sideof the boundary. It either nestled within the brigalow scrub or spread out in an open area.This marked the unusable land in terms of agricultural production. On the other side, theopen grassland connotes the pastoral possibilities of the land. Cleared land reads as readyfor settler occupation. Furthermore, the caption “Good tenants v. Bad tenants” endorsedthe adversarial nature of the surveillance by pitting tenants against one another in thename of closer settlement. Good settlers patrolled their buffer zones; bad settlers ignoredthis edict.

The demarcation of good and bad settlers managed land and settler subjectivitythrough biopower. The buffer zone and the “out-of-control” prickly pear produced anemotional effect where settler virtue was embodied in good and bad. These were intimaterelations that shaped both settler and land. William Connelly calls this use of legislation“blunt tools” where the “moral weight of code driven techniques can easily turnobligation into duty, guilt and resentment” of the kind operating between Bradshaw andHopewell at Wallumbilla.54

Livelihood and labour

A policy seeking to supplant prickly pear with people, however, did not mean theQueensland Government encouraged just anyone to move into these areas.55 The racialformations, white, non-white, Asian and Aboriginal, typical under the White AustraliaPolicy, were critical in the kinds of occupation imagined in prickly pear land.56 The list of311 witnesses for the 1923 Royal Commission into Prickly Pear demonstrates the type ofsettler who were living examples of the codified norms associated with population inwhite Australia. A third of these witnesses were mostly drawn from different governmentdepartments, including a range of scientists looking for a scientific solution. Of theremaining participants, 215 farmers and graziers dominate the witness list. The inquiryincluded two commissioners from these same occupations. William Purcell was a farmer,and R.P. Winten was a grazier. These men inhabited a white settler identity under theWhite Australia Policy; they were the yeoman farmers, graziers, cockies, squatters,bushmen and battlers.57 If these men satisfied a racial ideal of whiteness, they alsohighlight the folding of this ideal into the Australian version of yeomanry at the heart ofcloser settlement. Richard Waterhouse details this archetype, showing the intertwinedemphasis on labour and industry that came to be included in broader ideas about

148 J. Frawley

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

1.12

1.13

8.24

] at

14:

13 2

7 M

ay 2

014

Figure 4. The eradication of prickly pear was the grounds for adversarial relations between neighbours.Source: The library of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney.

Journal of Australian Studies 149

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

1.12

1.13

8.24

] at

14:

13 2

7 M

ay 2

014

livelihood under these policies.58 The Royal Commission looked to the opinions offarmers and graziers to guide the management of prickly pear because these were thekinds of white settlers desired by the state.

Although the government rhetoric supported the idea of white settlement, non-Britishmigrants were also a vibrant part of the communities living in Queensland during theprickly pear invasion. The response to the call in the journal of the labour movement theWorker that Queensland organise “an active immigration policy to replenish our meagrepopulation everywhere” came to include people who did not meet the stated desire forwhiteness.59 Over the course of the 1920s, Queensland participated in the Britishmigration scheme after the disruptions of World War One. While the Enemy Aliens Actof 1920 prohibited some southern and eastern Europeans from migrating, a number ofMaltese, Greek and White Russians (displaced in the revolution of 1917) relocated toQueensland.60 Because of the seemingly generous terms offered in Prickly Pear Leases,many of these groups settled together in western Queensland. In the battle with pricklypear, the policy of increased population trumped the desire for white settlers.

In 1909, a cluster of Russian immigrants settled in the Wallumbilla district.Periodically, new arrivals joined them over the following decades. The Lands Departmentsurveyed land for the Russian Settler Group (group 76) in 320 acres lots. The Kidcaff,Zadorosky, Barding and Gray families eventually took up selections in nearby Chadfordin prickly pear land. However, in his family history, Andrew Kidcaff explains that manyRussian families did not stay. He attributes this to the impossible lease conditionssurrounding the removal of prickly pear.61 Disheartened with what they found, somemoved into familiar work in towns or on the railway; some returned to Europe, whileothers moved into alternate agricultural areas in northern Queensland.

Successful closer settlement in other areas of Queensland acted as a beacon of hopefor those dealing with the problem of prickly pear. This was the case where migrantsreplaced Kanaka labour that established sugar in north Queensland in the late nineteenthcentury.62 Between 1921 and 1927, many British and non-British migrants laboured onsugar plantations. The Italian communities were important in this change in the Herbertand Johnstone River areas.63 If the prickly pear could be managed, the land wouldbecome available for successful settlement, as it was in north Queensland. CommissionerPayne signalled this comparative aspiration when he suggested that “the question ofsettling Italians on pear lands is to receive consideration”.64 If only the land could bereleased, as one witness put it, from “the thorny clutch of the vegetable tyrant”.65 Payneaccepted that although British migrants were preferred, southern European settlers mightbe better than no settlers at all. A significant group of Italians moved into the Stanthorperegion in prickly pear land during this wave of migration. They held on until the releaseof Cactoblastis, eventually founding successful fruit and wine grape industries.66

For PPLC, the extensive growth of prickly pear became the mark of a bad tenant, butthis did not account for the reality that removal of the pear was heavy, dangerous andrelentless. The idea of the bad tenant raised anxieties about the capacity for white men toundertake manual labour. This paralleled the perceived problems of the adaptability ofwhite male bodies in tropical zones under review in medical science throughout theworld.67 Ernest Smith, a local farmer, sums up this view: “There are very few white menwho will work amongst the pear unless compelled to do so by necessity”.68 If it wasn’t tobe white men working in this area, then who would it be?

One option was a recurring call to indenture Asian workers to clear prickly pearland.69 Politicians raised the possibility of indentured workers from India as early as the

150 J. Frawley

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

1.12

1.13

8.24

] at

14:

13 2

7 M

ay 2

014

1880s, evoking a similar scheme in South Africa for comparison. Arthur Temple Clerk,a former Queensland Lands Department employee forced out of the government becauseof his fanatical obsession with prickly pear, was still advocating for indentured workers aslate as 1923.70 This idea appealed in certain quarters, but as George Knibbs, the firstdirector of the Commonwealth Institute of Science and Industry said in his response to aplea from Clerk:

With reference to the employment of Chinese labour, the proposal is one in which Chinese,indentured under proper supervision would be employed making pear country fitted foroccupation by white people, by doing work which it is now difficult if not impossible to havedone by white labour. The sooner we get this country in a position to be effectively occupiedthe better. However, that is a political question not a scientific one.71

The Queensland Government never sanctioned indentured labour for prickly pearremoval, but this did not mean that non-white labour was absent in prickly pear land.The work of removing prickly pear included both Chinese and Aboriginal labour.

Although excluded from migration as coloured aliens from 1901, descendants ofChinese who relocated during the nineteenth-century gold rush were already part of thedemographic mix within Queensland. Chinese workers, sent out in gangs by Goondiwindistorekeeper J. Lee Koo, were subcontracted for the larger stations to labour in pricklypear land. One crew of 30 to 40 men, supervised by Lou Hoy, lived in a camp on awaterhole at Wyaga. From this base, George Warby of Coomrith and Ken MacDonaldof Middle Creek employed gangs to clear prickly pear. They worked for cheap ratesdoing the hard work of using carcinogenic poisons as well as manually cutting theplants, then digging their roots out of the ground.72

Further complicating the questions of population and race in the management of thisland, Aboriginal labour also cleared prickly pear. The managers at Barambah settlementsent Aboriginal men and women of various language groups for different kinds of work,including labouring on prickly pear land.73 As Thom Blake argues, various super-intendents in the early twentieth century used Barambah as a labour depot, exploiting theresidents as slaves. In 1905, for example, the Barambah superintendent sent workers to“more than twenty selections in Murgon, Wondai and Kilkivan to clear scrub”.74 By then,clearing scrub near these towns also meant the removal of prickly pear. On anotherAboriginal Station at Taroom, dense prickly pear occupied 3,000 acres. The superin-tendent, Cecil Colledge, kept 20 to 25 men working four hours a day at the “hard labourof stacking and burning” prickly pear to ready the land for farming.75 Taroom closed in1927. Residents moved to Woorabinda, officially because of plans to dam the nearbyDawson River, but I’d speculate Cactoblastis made the land viable for farming,contributing to the decision to move Aboriginal people away from this reserve.76 Thestate imagined white people as the settlers of this land, but non-white labour prepared itfor this “rightful” occupation.

Conclusion

There is a call in Australian environmental history to be attentive to the interrelationsbetween the state, people and the variability of the environment, especially thosecircumstances where historians can tease out the ways that we faced changingenvironments. Such histories will help us to manage for “uncertain futures” according

Journal of Australian Studies 151

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

1.12

1.13

8.24

] at

14:

13 2

7 M

ay 2

014

to environmental historian Ruth Morgan.77 Understanding the ways we have faced theproblems arising from introduced biota seem critical to these debates. Such scholarshipwill also enable environmental historians to contribute to emerging work about adaptationin a climate-changing world. It has always been important that we analyse the biophysicalaspects of invasive ecologies. Land managers certainly used these tools to recognise thescale of prickly pear land. Maps and other documents recorded the manner and the rangeof the plants extended year by year. However, similar to most circumstances of biologicalinvasion, assessments were not enough to create the grounds for meaningful intervention.

The invasion of prickly pear is a story of disrupted environments, of a human-non-human ecology fundamentally changed by the introduction of an exotic plant. Introducingbuffer zones was one way of opening up the possibility of closer settlement in these partsof Queensland. In prickly pear land, there was a conflation between the invasionanalogies used to “other” both human and non-human actors. As Gilbert Caluya argues,“such analogies are not simply linguistic but carry material weight when applied insystems of control”.78 Fences, though flawed in literally containing prickly pear (or any“othered” group), hone the eye to the way that race shaped relations between differentkinds of people in prickly pear land. In contrast to earlier policies, whose goal wascomplete eradication, these intertwined physical (fences) and cultural (good and badtenants) management techniques produced a pattern of uneasy coexistence with pricklypear. Prickly pear troubled the assumption of “rightful” agricultural occupation by whiteAustralians, but the buffer system allowed governments to continue to imagine the landfor its agricultural potential.

The biopolitical management of prickly pear reveals some of the key features of theparadox of whiteness as a core value in the policy of closer settlement. The statenaturalised white ownership at the same time that it made prickly pear strange. The desirefor closer settlement was simultaneously a desire for white settlers of British heritage.While governments held fast to idealised notions of the white yeoman farmer, this articledemonstrates the active presence of Russians, Italians, Chinese and Aboriginal peoples inprickly pear land. Government rhetoric about settling in prickly pear land ignoredmarginalised groups, but the story of buffer zones shows the ironies of the WhiteAustralia Policy in action. Environmental histories of invasive ecologies must alsoinclude careful analysis of the biocultural aspects of these events, especially racialformations, to demonstrate that these complex interrelations have never been simplyabout nature.

AcknowledgementsThank you to all the people who talked to me about prickly pear and read drafts of this paper,especially Adam Gall, Cate Thill, Jess Weir, Elspeth Probyn, Shannon Crangasi and the anonymousreviewers. The Australian Research Council generously supported this research.

Notes1. Jodi Frawley and Iain McCalman, eds., Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental

Humanities (London: Routledge-Earthscan, 2014); Libby Robin, How a Continent Created aNation (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2007); Tim Low, Feral Future: TheUntold Story of Australia’s Exotic Invaders (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books, 2001).

2. Eric C. Rolls, They All Ran Wild: The Animals and Plants That Plague Australia, new ed.(London: Angus & Robertson, 1984); Nigel Turvey, Cane Toads: A Tale of Sugar, Politics and

152 J. Frawley

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

1.12

1.13

8.24

] at

14:

13 2

7 M

ay 2

014

Flawed Science (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2013); Haripriya Rangan and ChristianKull, “The Indian Ocean and the Making of Outback Australia: An Ecocultural Odyssey,” inIndian Ocean Studies: Cultural, Social and Political Perspectives, ed. Shanti Moorthy andAshraf Jamal (New York: Routledge, 2009).

3. Alan Dodd, “The Biological Control of Prickly-Pear in Australia,” in The Control of Weeds, ed.R.O. Whyte, Bulletin No 27 (London: Herbage publications series, 1940).

4. The plants were biologically controlled by the introduction of the insect Cactoblastis cactorum,a “natural” predator, from 1926. The Commonwealth Prickly Pear Board (CPPB) introducedthe moth as part of a large-scale program seeking a solution in partnership with thegovernments of Queensland and New South Wales. Aided by the United States Departmentof Agriculture, the CPPB supported experimental stations in Uvalde, Texas and Sherwood,Brisbane.4 A range of insect larvae transited from Argentina through these stations where theywere quarantined for testing. If viable, scientists then released insects into prickly pear land.The successful transit in 1926 established the moth in Queensland. Upon release, the mothconsumed enough prickly pear that it no longer posed a threat to settlers. By 1933, the LandsDepartment declared the land pest free.

5. Charles Fenner, “The Prickly Pear - Advance and Retreat,” Walkabout, 1937, 46; Donald B.Freeman, “Prickly Pear Menace in Australia 1880-1940,” The Geographical Review 82.45(1992): 413–28; Edward Samuel, “Fighting the Prickly Pear,” Walkabout, 1936, 18–22; W.Wynne Williams, “The Conquest of the Prickly-Pear,” The Australian Quarterly, 1941, 67–72;Ian R. Tyrrell, “Blasting the Cactus,” in True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-AustralianEnvironmental Reform, 1860-1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 200–15;W.R. Johnston and P. Lloyd, “The Fight against Cacti Pests in Queensland,” QueenslandAgricultural Journal 108. 4 (1982): 215–22.

6. Richard Waterhouse, The Vision Splendid: A Social and Cultural History of Rural Australia(Fremantle, WA: Curtin University Books, 2005), 26–33.

7. Jodi Frawley, “Poison Plots and Prickly Pear: Dr Jean White and the Prickly Pear ExperimentalStation 1912-16,” in Outside Country: A History of Inland Australia, ed. Stephen Atkinson andAlan Mayne (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2011), 45.

8. W.L. Payne and F.D. Power, Annual Reports of PPLC (Brisbane: Queensland Department ofLands, 1925–1930).

9. Tracey Banivanua-Mar and Penelope Edmonds, “Making Space in Settler Colonies,” in MakingSettler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity, ed. Tracey Banivanua-Marand Penelope Edmonds (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1–24.

10. See Michel Foucault, Alessandro Fontana, David Macey, and Mauro Bertani, “Society Must BeDefended”: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975-76 (London: Allen Lane, 2003); ThomasLemke, “‘The Birth of Bio-Politics’: Michel Foucault’s Lecture at the College De France onNeo-Liberal Governmentality,” Economy and Society 30.2 (2001): 190–207.

11. On whiteness in the Australian nation, see Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of WhiteSupremacy in a Multicultural Society (Sydney: Pluto Press, 1998).

12. Gavin W. Jones, “White Australia, National Identity and Population Change,” in Legacies ofWhite Australia: Race, Culture and Nation, ed. Laksiri Jayasuriya, David Walker, and JanGothard (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2003), 111–13.

13. Lionel Gilbert, The Little Giant: The Life and Work of Joseph Henry Maiden 1859-1925(Sydney: Kardoorair Press in Association with Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney, 2001).

14. Joseph Maiden, “A Preliminary Study of the Prickly-Pears Naturalised in New South Wales,”Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales 9. 9 (1898).

15. To date, I have not been able to locate primary sources that would provide accounts of howAboriginal peoples dealt with prickly pear prior to 1900. After that time, most people from thisarea suffered forced removal to Barambah. It must have disturbed some foraging, but huntedanimals like emu and snakes increased as a result of prickly pear.

16. T. Harvey Johnston and Henry Tryon, Report of the Queensland Prickly-Pear TravellingCommission 1st November 1912-30th April 1914 (Brisbane: Queensland Dept. of PublicLands, 1914).

17. It is unclear from the primary sources how long people continued to use prickly pear forwindbreaks and as fences.

Journal of Australian Studies 153

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

1.12

1.13

8.24

] at

14:

13 2

7 M

ay 2

014

18. James Busby, Journal of a Tour of through Some of the Vineyards of Spain and France(Sydney: Stephens and Stokes, 1833).

19. Maiden, “A Preliminary Study,” 978–1008.20. Freeman, “Prickly Pear Menace,” 415.21. Cameron Muir, “Broken Country: Science, Agriculture, and the ‘Unfulfilled Dreams’ of Inland

Australia, 1880 to Present” (PhD Thesis, Australian National University, 2011).22. William Beinart and Luvuyo Wotshela, Prickly Pear: The Social History of a Plant in the

Eastern Cape (Johannesberg: Wits University Press, 2012).23. The question of developing appropriate plants that would protect livestock during times of

drought held the interest of the scientific community over the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth century. For the parallel case of a native plant, see Jodi Frawley and Heather Goodall,“Transforming Saltbush: Science, Mobility and Metaphor in the Remaking of IntercolonialWorlds,” Conservation and Society 11.2 (2013): 176–86.

24. Jodi Frawley, “Prickly Pear Land: Transnational Networks in Settler Australia,” AustralianHistorical Studies 38.130 (2007): 323–39.

25. “The Prickly Pear Commission,” Queenslander, 1923, 9.26. Bertram Steele, “Minutes of Evidence and Exhibits,” in Royal Commission Appointed to

Inquire into Certain Matters Relating to the Prickly-Pear Problem (Brisbane: Department ofLands, 1923), 674.

27. Alison Bashford, “World Population and Australian Land: Demography and Soveriegnty in theTwentieth Century,” Australian Historical Studies 38.138 (2007): 211–27; “Nation, Empire,Globe: The Spaces of Population Debate in the Interwar Years,” Comparative Studies inSociety and History 49.1 (2007): 170–207.

28. Libby Robin, How a Continent Created a Nation, 101.29. Russell McGregor, “A Dog in the Manger: White Australia and Its Vast Empty Spaces,”

Australian Historical Studies 43.2 (2012): 157–73.30. “Prickly Pear Pretence,” Brisbane Courier, February 7, 1923, 4.31. Steele, “Minutes of Evidence and Exhibits.”32. “The Invasion of Australia. A Silent Terror That Has Captured 29,000,000 Acres of

Our Inheritance,” Sydney Mail, February 28, 1923, accessed February 12, 2014, http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/17273996?q= invasion+of+australia+ inland+mission&c=picture&versio-nId=20258318.

33. Alan Dodd, The Biological Campaign against Prickly-Pear (Brisbane: Commonwealth PricklyPear Board, 1940).

34. John Mann, Cacti Naturalised in Australia and Their Control (Brisbane: Department of Lands,Queensland, 1970), 4–5.

35. Letter from J. Bradshaw to PPLC, 31 December 1924. Queensland State Archives LAN 195.25.00124.

36. Letters from W. Hopewell Wallumbilla to PPLC, 18 February, 30 July 1925. Queensland StateArchives, LAN 195.25.00124b & 195.25.31634.

37. Each of these examples were found in Lands Department records regarding complaints aboutclearing prickly pear, Queensland State Archives, Lands Department, LAN 207.

38. James Beattie, Empire and Environmental Anxiety: Health, Science, Art and Conversation inSouth Asia and Australasia 1800-1920 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

39. W.L. Payne, First Annual Report of PPLC (Brisbane: Queensland Department of Lands, 1925);Betram Dillon Steele, The Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire into Certain MattersRelating to the Prickly-Pear Problem (Brisbane: Queensland Legislative Assembly, 1923).

40. Denis Byrne, “Nervous Landscapes: Race and Space in Australia,” Journal of Social Archae-ology 3 (2003): 170.

41. Payne, First Annual Report of PPLC, Appendix 7.42. I have used the term white here even though the colour is actually more like light tan typical of

an aging map folded and kept at the back of these reports. The point being that it is a neutral,nondescript colour. Scholarship on whiteness rightly points out that the term white equates to arange of actual colours—light brown, beige, pink and so forth—that are important because of akind of neutrality that makes the power structures associated with them disappear. See Hage,White Nation; Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997).

154 J. Frawley

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

1.12

1.13

8.24

] at

14:

13 2

7 M

ay 2

014

43. For urban grids and their aesthetics, see Jodi Frawley, “Campaigning for Street Trees, SydneyBotanic Gardens, 1890s to 1920s,” Environment and History 15 (2009): 303–22.

44. “Toowomba City Hall,” Queensland Heritage Register entry 600865, accessed December 2,2013, https://heritage-register.ehp.qld.gov.au/placeDetail.html?siteId=15640.

45. In January 2011, Toowoomba experienced a devastating flash flood that residents call an“inland Tsunami”. After months of steady rain, a particularly heavy downpour occurred. In thespace of 20 minutes, this old swamp filled and overflowed, flooding the central business districtand killing a number of locals who were caught out by the speed of the rising water.

46. Simon Ryan, The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1996).

47. R.J. Downward and J.E. Bromell, “The Development of a Policy for the Management of DingoPopulations in South Australia” (paper presented at the Vertebrate Pest Conference, Universityof Nebraska-Lincoln, 1990).

48. See Lesley Head’s work on the ways that garden weeds develop agency in domestic spaceswhen they infringe on the plans of gardeners: Lesley Head, “Living in a Weedy Future: Insightsfrom the Garden,” in Frawley and McCalman, Rethinking Invasion, 87–99.

49. Thom Blake, A Dumping Ground: A History of the Cherbourg Settlement (St Lucia: Universityof Queensland Press, 2001).

50. Tracey Banivanua Mar, “The ‘Bunya Black’: Fear and Loathing on Queensland’s RacialBorderlands,” in Historicising Whiteness: Transnational Perspectives on the Construction of anIdentity Conference Proceedings (Melbourne, 2007), 329–30; Tracey Banivanua-Mar, “CarvingWilderness: Queensland’s National Parks and the Unsettling of Emptied Lands, 1890-1910,” inBanivanua-Mar and Edmonds, Making Settler Colonial Space, 73–94.

51. Thom Blake, Margaret Pullar, and Michael Kennedy, Health Buildings in Queensland: AnHistorical Overview (Brisbane: Queensland Health, 1997).

52. Biopolitics also refers to liberalism operating through the codification of norms, along withhierarchical segmentation separating the abnormal through this process. This type of governancerelies on the self-regulation of individuals to these norms (Lemke, 2011). These techniquescombine the micropolitical of individual bodies with the macropolitical social body orpopulation.

53. Payne, First Annual Report of PPLC, 35.54. Connelly cited in Gay Hawkins, “More-Than-Human Politics: The Case of Plastic Bags,”

Australian Humanites Review 46 (2009).55. The distinction between good and bad tenants can also be found within broader contemporary

discourses concerning population, race and territory. Scholarship on whiteness and geographyin Australia has turned on the medicalisation of white male bodies in tropical environments.Public health measures were shaped by this same set of global concerns I am discussing here:population, race and territory. In different ways, Alison Bashford, David Walker and WarwickAnderson’s work in this area show the complicated ways these racial formations were apeculiarly Australian form of biopolitics under the White Australia Policy. The imaginednational ideal was a white Briton, if not born here, then arriving under sympathetic immigrationrestrictions—and nuanced by distinctions under these discourses as desirable and undesirable.In prickly pear land, this manifested as good and bad tenants.

56. Alison Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and PublicHealth (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 138–41.

57. See Ann Curthoys, “Expulsion, Exodus and Exile in White Australian Historical Mythology,”Journal of Australian Studies 23.61 (1999): 1–18; Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, “‘No Last Word’:Postcolonial Witnessing in Jackson’s Track and Jackson’s Track Revisited,” Antipodes 22.2(2008): 123–28.

58. Richard Waterhouse, “The Yeoman Ideal and Australian Experience, 1860-1960,” in Exploringthe British World: Identity, Cultural Production, Institutions, ed. Kate Darian-Smith et al.(Melbourne: RMIT Publishing, 2004), 440–59.

59. “Prickly Pear Commission,” Worker, March 8, 1923, 6.60. Charles Price, “Immigration and Ethnic Origin,” in Australians: Historical Atlas, ed. Wray

Vamplew (Sydney: Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates), 12.61. Andrew Francis Kidcaff, Journey to Hardship: A Russian in Prickly Pear Country

(Wallumbilla: Andrew Kidcaff, 2011), 117–22.

Journal of Australian Studies 155

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

1.12

1.13

8.24

] at

14:

13 2

7 M

ay 2

014

62. “Prickly Pear Commission,” 6.63. With a second, larger wave in the post-World War Two period, Queenslanders now view sugar

growing as a successful example of the twinning of migration and agricultural development.See J.A. Hempel, Italians in Queensland: Some Aspects of Post-War Settlement of ItalianMigrants (Canberra: Australian National University, 1959); Division of Migrant Services, WithCourage and Hope: The Contribution of Six Migrant Communities to Life in Queensland(1938-1945) (Brisbane: Queensland Government Divsion of Migrant Services, 1983).

64. Payne, First Annual Report of PPLC, 20.65. Ernest Smith, “The Prickly Pear Problem,” Brisbane Courier, 1923, 13.66. Ian Bonaccorso, Addio Italia - Hello Australia: Stanthorpe Italian Pioneers (Brisbane: Ian

Bonaccorso, 2008).67. Alison Bashford, “‘Is White Australia Possible?’ Race, Colonialism and Tropical Medicine,”

Ethnic and Racial Studies 23.2 (2000): 248–71; Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation ofWhiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (New York: Perseus Books, 2003);Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory,1880-1939 (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1997).

68. Smith, “The Prickly Pear Problem,” 13.69. Most work on indentured workers in Australia revolves around Chinese workers introduced to

work in the gold fields and the Kanaka labour in the sugar plantations; see Ann Curthoys,“‘Men of All Nations, except Chinamen’: Europeans and Chines on the Goldfields of NewSouth Wales,” in Gold: Forgotten Histories and Lost Objects of Australia, ed. Iain McCalman,Alexander Cook, and Andrew Reeves (Cambridge: Cambridge Unversity Press, 2001), 103–23.

70. Letter from A.T. Clerk, River Road Dinmore Qld to Hon L.E. Groom 15 October 1923,National Archives of Australia series number A8510 Prickly Pear Investigations, Loose Papers.

71. Letter to Hon L.E. Groom, Attorney General, Commonwealth Offices Melbourne from G.H.Knibbs, Director Institute of Science and Industrial Research, 13 November 1923, NationalArchives of Australia, series number A8510 Prickly Pear Investigations, Loose Papers.

72. J.H. Travers, Bull Dust on the Brigalow (Toowoomba: Local History and RobinsonCollections, Toowoomba City Library).

73. This settlement is now better known as Cherbourg and was a centralised reserve where theAboriginal people of southern and southwestern Queensland were forcibly taken.

74. Blake, A Dumping Ground, 122.75. Steele, “Minutes of Evidence and Exhibits,” 465–67.76. Scott L’Oste Brown et al., Living under the Act: Taroom Aboriginal Reserve 1911-1927,

Cultural Heritage Monographs Series (Brisbane: Queensland Department of Environment andHeritage, 1995).

77. Ruth A. Morgan, “Histories for an Uncertain Future: Environmental History and ClimateChange,” Australian Historical Studies 44.3 (2013): 354.

78. Gilbert Caluya, “Fragments of a Postcolonial Critique of the Anthropocene: Invasion Biologyand Environmental Security,” in Frawley and McCalman, Rethinking Invasion, 37.

156 J. Frawley

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

1.12

1.13

8.24

] at

14:

13 2

7 M

ay 2

014