Beyond whiteness: violence and belonging in the borderlands of North Queensland

Abstract

ABSTRACTDefined 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.