The Valley of for Canberra?

Geoffi:ey Bolton was the 1998 Harold The Valley of White Fellow at the National Library ofAustralia and is currendy senior in residence at Murdoch University. He Lagoons: A Rehearsal has previously held chairs of history at Western Australia, Murdoch, the Institute of Commonwealth Studies for Canberra? (London), Queensland, and Edith Cowan. He was general editor of the OJifind Hist01y ofAustralia and 1992 On an English spring evening in 1856 two young men were Boyer Lecturer for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. He is engaged in an animated discussion in the common-room ofAll currendy working on a biography of Souls, that Oxford college where, without the distractions of Edmund Barton. undergraduates, some ofBritains' finest intellects devote themselves to research and thought. Failing to reach agreement, they called for the College Betting Book, and there recorded the subject oftheir disagreement. brother Walter as manager, and himself ' cott bets Herbert £5 that the country gentleman. returned to England with grandiose Empress Eugenie is more than The property, situated on the upper schemes for the development of his new five foot four inches in Burdekin was all that Herbert had empire. height.' I claimed for it. It had been first described As Arthur Scott wrote to his third Herbert was Robert Herbert, the by Leichhardt during his overland brother, Charles: 'You'lllmow the way to clever younger son of a younger son, who expedition of 1845 [4 May]: make a fortune is to find out a want and three years later found himself bound for About five miles north-west by west from supply it. Now the great want in England Australia as private secretary to Governor our camp, we discovered an extensive among the Upper Classes is how to Bowen and, for over six years, to serve as valley with large lagoons and lakes, and a dispose of its sons without a great outlay Queensland's first and most unlikely most luxuriant vegetation, bounded by of capital. This is the want which Premier. Having the good fortune to blue distant ranges, and forming the preside over a period of pastoral boom, he most picturesque landscape we had yet Queensland is adapted to meet.'4 returned on leave to England in 1862 and met with. A chain oflagoons connected An elegant scheme there sought out his old friend Arthur by a reedy brook followed the outlines of to the ignorant Scott with a proposition. Small fortunes the tableland along the foot of its steep were to be made through judicious slopes. Water, grass, hills, mountains Arthur Scott proposed that plains, forest land; all the elements of a investment in pastoral properties aristocratic families should send their on the expanding Queensland surplus younger sons to the Valley of Lagoons to work as frontier, and Herbert, through a jackaroos for three years learning convenient intermediary, had an the art of managing a sheep option on a splendid prospect. ... a city situated at station and in the process Would Scott be interested in the Valley ofLagoons building up flocks of their own. visiting Queensland and coming During this period they would in as senior partner in the might well have pay for their keep and tuition and property?2 allocate one third of their profits Scott came. Not quite thirty anticipated Canberra ... to the Scott brothers. Mter three years of age, he was the eldest of years each would be allocated a four sons of a rich Hampshire block of land on the outskirts of squire whose family had prospered a fine pasturing country were here united.3 the Valley of Lagoons, thus creating in generation or two earlier as builders and time a kind ofWhite Highlands society of property developers in the western Raising £51,000 from his father, like-minded English gentlemen whose suburbs of London, and who had then Arthur Scott became senior partner in the exile would be alleviated by congenial followed the classic road to respectability property which came to be known as the neighbours. It must have seemed an by purchasing an estate and turning Valley of Lagoons. He installed his elegant scheme to anyone entirely All Souls Common Room Betting Book, Private Printed, Oxford, 1915, April1856. 2 The Scott brothers enterprise is desc.ribed more fully in G. C. Bolton, 'The Valley of Lagoons: a study in exile', Business Archives and Hist01y, 4, 1964, pp. 99- 116. All extracts from the Scott fam1ly correspondence are taken from the Scott Papers, Rotherfield Park, Hampshire, England, and reproduced by permission of the late Sir Jervoise Scott. A microfilm copy is held at theN. G. Budin Archives, Australian National University, Canberra. 3. L. Leichardt]oumal OJ An Ecpedition From Moreton Bay to Port Essington London 1847 p.250. 4 Arthur Scott to Charles Scott, 18 February 1865. if;}/f" ffiHE M!LX.I.Jl.JEM IDF"l.J!JX.CliiDID'N"S· ~~ ~""'«"' ~ ;;; continued to misbehave: He and the Banker, Scougall, do not spealc now, Bathurst having thrown a banana into Scott's lavish eye for some private reason. He can have no one now to speak to: his last impressions of 'the land of misery' will not be cheerful) Bathurst was the last of his kind. During the remainder of the 1870's and the 1880's the Valley of the Lagoons functioned as a conventional cattle station, breaking even in good years, accumulating deficit in bad. Because of the Scotts' lavish investment the quality of the cattle was regarded as one of the best in the district, especially by unscrupulous neighbours with branding irons at the ready on dark nights. The Valley of Lagoons was also noted as one of the finest pieces of country, probably the finest on the upper Burdekin. This pre eminence had unexpected implications for the wider history of North Queensland, to which we must now turn. Queensland was separated from New South Wales in 1859, just in time to benefit from a major push forward by pastoralists. In the five years of 1861-65 the frontier of invasion and settlement advanced nearly 2000 kilometres from ignorant of the environment, the strength tell the story of a young man named Mackay to the Gulf country beyond of the Aboriginal resistance and the Barrett, he reported: Burketown. Cattlemen, sugar planters practicalities of pastoral life. and goldminers established themselves in ...a career of stupidity and forgetfulness the first decade, the sugar industry ue to the quality of the Valley without parallel, laid poisoned baits one introducing a contentious element of Lagoons country and the night and never thought of fastening up through the use of indentured D perseverance ofWalter Scott as the Station dogs. He succeeded in Melanesian labour - the so-called manager the venture survived for thirty poisoning all of mine, three in number, 'Kanakas' brought more or less willingly and a favourite and most useful cattle years, but only at the price of lavish from Vanuatu and the Solomons. Almost dog of Stone. fu he was useless for all unprofitable investment and the gradual immediately some North Queenslanders station purposes, he is now in the Native abandonment of Arthur Scott's Police, where I believe he is far better. 5 began to demand separation into a new elaborate schemes. Like the rest of colony. Partly they were simply Northern Queensland, the Valley of the The Duke of Northumberland's great complaining about remote Lagoons had to change from sheep to nephew, Edward Henry Percy, fell victim administration, just as Queensland itself cattle. to 'the colonial weakness' and was had complained of the parent colony of New South Wales, but the racial factor As Walter Scott wrote: 'Cattle are dismissed: injected an additional sharpness into the certain ruin, but sheep are a little quicker', He is now one of the road-party on the debates over north Queensland and during the 1870s the gold rushes at Gap, a pick-and-shovel man at 5/- a day. separation. After a period of recession Charters Towers and the Palmer provided He has sold all his clothes in Cardwell; during the mid-1870s, sugar shared in the a welcome local market for beef. Arthur and I hear every other man has 'E G H 'Mcllwraith booms' of 1879-83, Scott remained unwilling to give up his Percy' across the pit of his stomach. 6 generating a demand for plantation plan for developing the Valley into what labour from new sources. The original Walter disparaged as 'a Seminary for Then there was Bathurst, a baronet's Melanesians were reinforced by Chinese. Young Gentlemen.' A succession of son, who quit after an altercation when he from the Palmer and Hodgkinson gold inexperienced young dudes arrived for told the head stockman that he was 'not a rushes, Japanese, Sri Lankans, even supervision by an increasingly exasperated bloody stockman' and received the reply recruits from the islands off that scarcely Walter Scott, and the results were 'That's what you're paid for anyway.' opened field of enterprise eastern New uniformly disastrous. Walter Scott's letters Waiting for a ship at Cardwell, Bathurst Guinea. Liberal politicians responded Walter Scott to Arthur Scott, 7 December 1877. 6 ibid., 22 May 1874. ... 7 ibid., 15 March 1880 . readily to working-class alarm lest this a member for Townsville, Macrossan had changed his mind on a number of underpaid alien labour should not be advocated the formation of an entirely issues. He was, for instance, prepared to confined to sugar and other forms of new capital city. As he said in the 1886 countenance the re-introduction of the tropical agriculture, but might come to debate, it was necessary to overcome traffic in Melanesian labour.

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