Geography, race and nation: remapping "tropical" Australia, 1890-1930.

In March 1885, the government Resident of the Northern Territory of Australia issued a report on the problem of tropical development. "To the ordinary English emigrant", wrote J Langdon Parsons, "the bare mention of 'the tropics' is sufficient to create a scare, and conjure up visions of pasty-faced children, delicate women, and men with bad livers".' But in 1925, Sir James Barrett, a leading figure in the medical school of the University of Melbourne, could declare: "The deliberate opinion of the vast majority of medical men and physiologists is, that so far as climate is concerned, there is nothing whatever to prevent the peopling of tropical Australia with a healthy and vigorous white race."2 It is between these two quotations, between the voice of the administrator and the voice of the medical expert, between environmental determinism and cultural autonomy, between colonial pessimism and national optimism, that I would like to frame this essay. What had happened to ideas of man and ideas of nature in northern Australia during this period? Throughout the nineteenth century medical geographies of northern Australia had reiterated that the tropics were no place for permanent European settlement. And yet, with the federation of the colonies in 1901, Australia was committed politically to the exclusion of non-Europeans and to the forced repatriation of the Pacific Islanders who had been compelled to labour in tropical