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ABSTRACT
Defined as ‘borderlands’ by Tracey Banivanua-Mar, the sugar towns of North Queensland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were populated with a great variety of non-white ethnic minorities: Chinese, Indian, Japanese, ‘Malay’, Pacific Islander and later southern European. Instances of violence between these population groups have been recounted as if they were detached from the socio-historical conditions dictated by settler colonialism. Against this stance, this article examines the case of three South Sea Islanders attacking an Italian farmer in the city of Ingham in 1927. As the motive behind the incident remains unknown, the incident is recounted through the individual histories of those who were involved and against the wider context of anti-Italian migration sentiment. In doing this, this article demonstrates how these histories of presence in Ingham challenge the discursive rendition of the assault as a random act of violence and, accordingly, throw into sharp relief who could be counted as a permanent part of the Australian population. This article concludes by pointing to the necessity of examining similar instances of violence by setting them against migrants’ implication in the subjection of ‘natives’ and South Sea Islanders to the project of European replacement. When this implication is considered, violence can be theorised as much as a means that migrants, such as Italians, use to claim belonging as a technology settlers employ to manage ‘undesired’ populations.
Acknowledgments
Research for this article was funded by a 2018 Endeavour Research Fellowship, which allowed me to spend 2 months at the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University. I would like to thank Professor Regina Ganter for her impeccable supervision, induction into the Queensland State Archives and arrangements made to visit the North Queensland Collection at James Cook University. I would also like to thank the director, Professor Susan Forde, as well as Lee Butterworth and Robert Mason for their invaluable research advice. The whole staff of the Queensland State Archives was similarly of great assistance. I would particularly like to thank Rosemary Rennie from the Community and Personal Histories team of the Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships. My gratitude goes also to the volunteers of the Ingham Family History Association, especially Cheryl Gossner, who advised me to consult the Herbert River Express. Likewise, I would like to thank senior colleagues and peers who patiently returned my ramblings about the archive with coherent advice: Jane Carey, Catherine Dewhirst, Francesco Ricatti, Gaia Giuliani, Sukhmani Khorana, Ben Silverstein and Andonis Piperoglou. Lastly, I would like to dedicate this article to the memory of Tracey Banivanua-Mar, whom I never had the honour to meet but whose intellectual legacy I hope I carried on.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 See Jonathan Y. Okamura and Candace Fujikane (eds), Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawaii, Honolulu: University of Hawai’s Press, 2008; Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua, ‘Decolonizing Antiracism’, Social Justice 32(4), 2005, pp 120–143; Joseph Pugliese, ‘Migrant Heritage in an Indigenous Context: for a Decolonising Migrant Historiography’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 23(1), 2002, pp 5–18; and Suvendrini Perera, ‘Who Will I Become? The Multiple Formations of Australian Whiteness’, Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association Journal 1, 2005, pp 30–39.
2 See Dean Itsuji Saranillio, ‘Why Asian Settler Colonialism Matters: A Thought Piece on Critiques, Debates, and Indigenous Difference’, Settler Colonial Studies 3(3–4), 2013, pp 280–294.
3 See Shaista Patel, Ghaida Moussa and Nishant Upadhyay (eds), ‘Complicities, Connections, and Struggles: Critical Transnational Feminist Analysis of Settler Colonialism’, Feral Feminism 4, 2015.
4 Andonis Piperoglou, ‘Rethinking Greek Migration as Settler Colonialism’, Eryon. Greek/American Arts and Letters, 2018, http://ergon.scienzine.com/article/essays/rethinking-greek-migration-as-settler-colonialism.
5 Francesco Ricatti, Italians in Australia: History, Memory, Identity, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
6 See Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright, ‘Decolonizing Resistance: Challenging Colonial States’, Social Justice 35(3), 2008–09, pp 120–138; and Jared Sexton, ‘The Vel of Slavery: Tracking the Figure of the Unsovereign’, Critical Sociology 42(2), 2014, pp 1–15.
7 See Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism. A Theoretical Overview, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010; Jodi Byrd, The Transit of Empire. New Directions in Indigenous Studies, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011; Tiffany Lethabo King, ‘Dr. Tiffany Lethabo King in conversation with Feral Feminisms’ Guest Editors’, in ‘Complicities, Connections, & Struggles: Critical Transnational Feminist Analysis of Settler Colonialism’, Shaista Patel, Ghaida Moussa, and Nishant Upadhyay (eds), Feral Feminism 4, 2015, pp 64–68; and Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism, Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
8 Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos, ‘Racism, Foreigner Communities and the Onto-pathology of White Australian Subjectivity’, in Aileen Moreton-Robinson (ed), Whitening Race: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2004, pp 32–47.
9 Day, Alien Capital, p 20.
10 Byrd, Transit of Empire, p 53.
11 Byrd, Transit of Empire, p 54.
12 This definition avoids using voluntarism as a criterion to define the status of settlers while retaining that racialised subjects’ exclusion and/or disposability is integral to the project of Indigenous dispossession. In this regard, using the concept of ‘arrivants’ implies not so much considering settler colonialism as the matrix from which all forms of domination stem as positioning it, echoing Glen Sean Coulthard, as the ‘inherited background’, where all forms of racial oppressions ‘converge’. See Iyko Day, ‘Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and Settler Colonial Critique’, Critical Ethnic Studies 1(2), 2015, p 111.
13 See Rob White and Santina Perrone, ‘Racism, Ethnicity and Hate Crime’, Communal/Plural 9(2), 2001, pp 161–181.
14 See George Yancy, ‘Trayvon Martin: When Effortless Grace Is Sacrificed on the Altar of the Image’, in George Yancy and Janine Jones (eds), Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynamics, Plymouth: Lexington Books 2013, pp 239–240.
15 Yancy and Jones, Pursuing Trayvon Martin, p xxxix.
16 Francesco Ricatti, ‘Decolonising Italian Migration History, Roundtable: Italian-Indigenous Relationships: Towards a Decolonial Approach, Diaspore Italiane – Italy in Movement’, A Symposium on Three Continents: Australia, United States and Italy, Melbourne, 4–8 April 2018. Available at: https://www.diasporeitaliane.com/melbourne-4-8-april-2018/videos-of-presentations/24-italian-indigenous-relationships-towards-a-decolonial-approach-round-table?fbclid=IwAR0uBeQCOxXZ_p2fZj-mr55UMx-dJIcw0V4ZGmeTUb80C7bJ7k4Yx_25BPc.
17 Francesco Ricatti, Italians in Australia. History, Memory, Identity, Palgrave Pivot, 2018, p 67.
18 Ricatti, Italians in Australia, p 67.
19 Tracy Banivanua-Mar and Penelope Edmonds, Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identities, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p 6.
20 Mark Rifkin, Settler Common Sense. Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance, University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2014, pp 12–13.
21 Tracey Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: the Australian-Pacific Indentured Labor Trade Honolulu: University of Hawai’s Press, 2007, p 11.
22 Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, pp 11–12.
23 Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, pp 10–11.
24 Banivanua-Mar and Edmonds, Making Settler Colonial Space, p 3.
25 Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, p 3.
26 Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, p 42.
27 Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, pp 11–13.
28 Frantz Fanon’s theorisation of colonialism as a totalising system of brutal force constitutes an obvious reference for Banivanua-Mar, who, however, prefers to conceptualise violence in a way that historicises the interplay between institutional and individual actions. Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, p 10. For further information see Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press, 1963, pp 1–52.
29 Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, 14.
30 Several key historians have examined the operations of violence in the Australian colonial context. Among them, Henry Reynolds pioneered this field of study at a time when historical evidence demonstrating uncountable massacres of Aboriginal populations was still denied. More recently, Amanda Nettelback, Robert Foster and Penelope Edmonds have conducted extensive research on the violence of European settlement across the whole of Australia. However, these scholars have been mostly concerned with the violence characterising the frontier stage of settlement or the relationships between white settlers and local Indigenous populations. See Henry Reynolds Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers and Land, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987; Penelope Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers, Indigenous People and Settlers in the 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities, Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010; and Robert Foster and Amanda Nettelbeck, Out of the Silence: South Australia's Frontier Wars in History and Memory, Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2012. Conversely, when scholars have taken relations between Indigenous populations and differently racialised ‘arrivants’ into consideration, these studies have been concerned with either the victimisation both suffered at the hands of settlers or the intimate relations they had established. See Henry Reynolds (ed), Race Relations in North Queensland, Townsville: History Department, James Cook University, 1978; and Regina Ganter, Mixed Relations: Asian-Aboriginal Contact in North Australia, Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2006. In this regard, Banivanua-Mar’s work represents the most relevant study so far conducted on colonial violence that considers both the interrelations between Indigenous populations and arrivants and the persistence of violence beyond the frontier stage of settlement.
31 Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism. A Theoretical Overview, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
32 Cynthia Skove Nevels, Lynching to Belong. Claiming Whiteness through Racial Violence, Texas A&M Universities Press, 2007.
33 It must be noted that Reddick was lynched only 18 months after Palazzo had accused him. Despite Italians in Brazos having called for his lynching, this occurred only when George Johnson and Louis Whitehead were found guilty of the assault of a 12-year-old white girl and, consequently, removed from prison and killed by a mob of angry white residents. Nevels, Lynching to Belong, pp 64–94.
34 Nevels, Lynching to Belong, p 85.
35 Nevels, Lynching to Belong, p 72.
36 Nevels, Lynching to Belong, p 85.
37 Nevels, Lynching to Belong, pp 79–93.
38 Nevels, Lynching to Belong, pp 65–67.
39 Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, p 71.
40 Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, p 71.
41 Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, p 71.
42 Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, p 9.
43 William A. Douglass, From Italy to Ingham. Italians in North Queensland, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1995, p 103.
44 See Vanda Moraes-Gorecki, ‘“Black Italians” in the Sugar Fields of North Queensland: A Reflection on Labour Inclusion and Cultural Exclusion in Tropical Australia’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology 5(1–2), 1994, pp 306–319; and Helen Andreoni, ‘Olive or White? The Colour of Italians in Australia’, Journal of Australian Studies 27(77), 2013, pp 81–92.
45 Andreoni, ‘Olive or White?’, pp 61–92.
46 Douglass, From Italy to Ingham, pp 13–25.
47 Douglass, From Italy to Ingham, pp 28–31.
48 Douglass, From Italy to Ingham, p 9.
49 Douglass, From Italy to Ingham, p 10.
50 In Queensland, closer settlement was a long-standing land management policy that attempted to twin land development with population growth via granting settlers blocks of land big enough to make a living but small enough to create self-supporting in-land communities. See Jodi Frawley, ‘Containing Queensland Prickly Pear: Buffer Zones, Closer Settlement, Whiteness’, Journal of Australian Studies 38(2), 2014, p 40. As Alison Bashford has argued, this policy also had the objective of proving white settlers’ suitability for living in tropical lands, thus legitimately preventing other populations from putting those same lands to use. See Alison Bashford, ‘World Population and Australian Land: Demography and Sovereignty in the Twentieth Century’, Australian Historical Studies 38(130), 2007, pp 221–223.
51 Douglass, From Italy to Ingham, p 35.
52 Douglass, From Italy to Ingham, p 35.
53 Catherine Dewhirst, ‘Colonising Italians: Italian Imperialism and Agricultural “Colonies” in Australia, 1881–1914’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 44(1), 2016, pp 28–30.
54 Dewhirst, Colonising Italians, p 28.
55 Dewhirst, Colonising Italians, p 28.
56 Dewhirst, Colonising Italians, pp 29–30.
57 Catherine Dewhirst, ‘The Anglo-Italian Treaty: Australia’s Imperial Obligations to Italian Migrants, 1883–1940’, in Gianfranco Cresciani and Bruno Mascitelli (eds), Italy and Australia: An Asymmetrical Relationship, Ballarat: Connor Court Publishing, 2014, p 88.
58 Dewhirst, The Anglo-Italian Treaty, pp 90–92.
59 Dewhirst, The Anglo-Italian Treaty, pp 92–94.
60 Dewhirst, The Anglo-Italian Treaty, pp 94–97.
61 Dewhirst, The Anglo-Italian Treaty, p 8.
62 Catherine Dewhirst, ‘Collaborating on Whiteness: Representing Italians in Early White Australia’, Journal of Australian Studies 32, (1), 2008, p 40.
63 Dewhirst, Collaborating on Whiteness, p 40.
64 Thomas Arthur Ferry, Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire into the Report on the Social and Economic Effect of Increase in Number of Aliens in North Queensland, Brisbane: Government Printer, 1925, pp 6–7.
65 Douglass, From Italy to Ingham, p 125.
66 ‘Greeks in North. Mr. Ferry’s Report Prompts Reply’, Daily Standard, 9 June 1925, p 4, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/rendition/nla.news-article185189726.4.pdf?followup=d081b9673d0a1c475b4d7d42bb95b907.
67 See Douglas, From Italy to Ingham; Dewhirst, The Anglo-Italian Treaty.
68 ‘The South Johnstone Hold-up. Last Stand of Brainless Directorate’, Worker, 20 July 1927, p 11. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/rendition/nla.news-article71136486.4.pdf?followup=10860dd0a10360c767d7c3debdc04890.
69 See ‘The Italians and the Far North’, Daily Mercury, 17 January 1924, p 2.
70 Ferry, Report of the Royal Commission, pp 15–16.
71 This differentiation was originally drawn by American anthropologist William Z. Ripley on the basis of head shape but popularised by intellectuals Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard, Clinton Stoddard Burr, William McDougall, Henry Pratt Fairchild and Henry Fairfield Osborn. Their theories of Nordic racial superiority over the so-called ‘Alpine’ and ‘Mediterranean’ types informed the1924 Immigration Act’s casting of ‘new’ Southern European immigrants to the United States as inferior. See Thomas A Guglielmo, White on Arrival. Italians, Race, Color and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp 60–63. In Australia, the same classification was replicated to determine what biocultural types should be encouraged to mix to obtain the right class of settlers. See Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness. Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia, Durham: Duke University Press; 2006, pp 160–162.
72 Felice Regazzoli working the land on a horse-drawn plough on the family’s property at Mt. Cordelia, 1899, Co.As.It. – Italian Historical Society, https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/157882326?q&versionId=172106968.
73 Douglass, From Italy to Ingham, p 88.
74 Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, p 8.
75 Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, p 8.
76 See ‘Hotel Disturbance’, Johnstone River Advocate and Innisfail News, Innisfail: Queensland, 1929, 28 May, p 1.
77 See ‘Another Affray’, Cairns Post, Cairns: Queensland, 20 October 1928, p 5.
78 See. ‘Innisfail Uproar’, Cairns Post, Cairns: Queensland, 1 February 1929, p 7.
79 Douglass, From Italy to Ingham, p 152.
80 Douglass, From Italy to Ingham, pp 154–155. See also ‘South Johnstone Trouble’, Queensland Times, Ipswich, Queensland, 16 July 1927, p 16.
81 ‘The South Johnstone Hold-Up’, The Worker, Brisbane: Queensland, 20 July 1927, p 11.
82 See Kett Howard Kennedy, ‘The South Johnstone Strike and Railway Lockout’, Labour History 31(1), 1976, pp 1–13.
83 Hotel Disturbance, p 1.
84 Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, p 97.
85 Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, p 17.
86 ‘Assaulted and Robbed, Kanakas Attack Farmer’, Telegraph, Brisbane: Queensland, 30 July 1927, p 19.
87 ‘Brutal Assault. Three Savage Kanakas, Farmer Attacked near Ingham’, Cairns Post, Cairns: Queensland, 30 July 1927, p 5.
88 ‘Assaulted and Robbed’, p 19.
89 Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, p 159.
90 The mass deportation of South Sea Islanders in 1906 was decreed during the first sitting of the new-born Australian Federal Parliament in 1901. Together with the Immigration Restriction Act, the Pacific Island Labourers Act was passed with the objective of securing the country as a white possession. For a full chronology of the history of legislation on South Sea Islander labourers, see Myra Willard, History of the White Australia Policy to 1920, London: Frank Cass and Company Limited, 1967 Reprinted Edition, pp 135–187.
91 Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, pp 98–100.
92 According to the indigence allowance application of his biological father, Bobby Tanna had a brother by the name of Willie. See Queensland State Archives, Item ID 18076, Tom Nehow – Indigence Case File 1638.
93 For further details on Tanna’s criminal record, see Queensland State Archive, Series ID 798, Queensland Police Gazette, 1922, 1925, 1926, 1927, 1928 and 1936.
94 Queensland Marriage Certificate, 1927/C1156, Robert Tanna and Vera Bessie Puller.
95 Queensland State Archives, Item ID 336449, Marriages, 1912/1116 – Tommy Quetta and Minnie, letter dated 6 June 1912, pp 133–135.
96 Queensland State Archives, Item ID 336449, Marriages, 1912/1116 – Tommy Quetta and Minnie, Letter dated 27 May 1912, pp 133–135.
97 Queensland Death Certificate, 1935/C2278, Andrew Puller.
98 Queensland State Archives, Item ID 18076, Tom Nehow – Indigence Case File 1638.
99 Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, p 113.
100 Queensland State Archives, Series ID 8586, Register of Firms.
101 Following the Sugar Cultivation Act of 1913, only ‘exempted’ South Sea Islanders could either farm or work in the sugar industry. The certificate of exemption, in turn, could only be obtained if applicants had successfully passed the Dictation Test. See Patricia Mary Mercer, The Survival of a Pacific Islander Population in North Queensland, 1900–1940 (Unpublished Thesis), Australian National University: Canberra, pp 215–216.
102 Mercer, The Survival, p 298.
103 Queensland State Archive Queensland, Item ID 519940, Queensland Police Gazette Police Gazette 1927, p 478.
104 Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, p 3.
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Maria Elena Indelicato
Maria Elena Indelicato received her PhD from the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney. Besides her monograph Australia’s New Migrants: International Students’ History of Affective Encounters with the Border (Routledge 2018), she has published in race, feminist and cultural studies journals such as Outskirts: Feminism Along the Edge, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, Chinese Cinemas, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and Transnational Screens and Paedagogica Historica. She is also the editor of the ACRAWSA blog.