Special Events
CityLibraries often provides free floor talks and other events throughout the year. Please regularly check this page for updates.
Click on the link to find out more information about upcoming CityLibraries floor talks, events, and programs, or view the entire Event Calendar.
Sir Robert Philp Lecture Series
Transcripts of delivered lectures can be found at the relevant entry below.
Audio recordings of a selection of the lectures (lectures 1, 2, 4, 5 and 8) are available on CD in MP3 format. Please email historyandheritage@townsville.qld.gov.au for further details.
Lecture 1
9 June 2008, 7pm at Riverway Arts Centre
Professor Geoffrey Bolton presenting: Why is Robert Philp worth remembering?
Robert Philp (1851-1922) was a Scotsman, and there are two sides to the Scottish character: the prudent, calculating thrifty businessman and the romantic adventurer who will stake everything on a chance. Philp found ample opportunity to display both sides of his character in the pioneering decades of North Queensland and eventually on the wider stage of a Queensland federating into the new Australian Commonwealth. He was the subject of controversy during his lifetime, but it is now timely to undertake a new assessment of Philp and the world in which he lived and worked.
 9 June 2008 Transcript (626kB)
Lecture 2
7 July 2008, 7pm at Von Stieglitz Room, CityLibraries Thuringowa Central
Associate Professor Noel Loos presenting: The History of North Queensland in Black and White: A Personal Retrospective.
Associate Professor Noel Loos reviews how, as the first research student in the new Department of History at James Cook University, he came to commit himself to the writing of the history of Black at White relations in North Queensland. He indicates how his research findings shocked him into exploring, at greater length, the nature of frontier contact and conflict in North Queensland; as well as the nature of the missionary experience taken to Aboriginal people while they were subject to what Loos calls the 'Aboriginal Holocaust' targeted in the 'History Wars', like many other historians writing in this area, his research rejects assertions made by Keith Windschuttle.
7 July 2008 Transcript (651kB)
Lecture 3
11 August 2008, 7pm at Library Lounge, CityLibraries Thuringowa Central
Dr Judith McKay presenting: Ellis Rowan: Flower-Hunting in the Tropics
Ellis Rowan was Australia's most celebrated flower painter of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Also a skilled writer and publicist, she recounted her travels in the popular press and in a book entitled A Flower-Hunter in Queensland and New Zealand, published in 1898. This lecture will focus on the artist's work in Queensland, a favourite hunting-ground, and on her association with the tropics which was an essential part of her mystique.
11 August 2008 Transcript (927kB)
Lecture 4
22 September 2008, 7pm at Library Lounge, CityLibraries Thuringowa Central
Dr Rodney Sullivan presenting: William Lennon (1849-1938): a North Queenslander of 'perpetual contradictions'?
William Lennon (1849-1938), Irish-born businessman and politician, was the member for Herbert from 1907 until 1920, and a leading figure in the Queensland Labor Government. More controversially, he was Lieutenant-Governor (1920-1929) and President of the Legislative Council from 1920 until its abolition in 1922. This lecture explores the apparent paradox of a businessman who became a Labor hero.
22 September 2008 Transcript (471kB)
Lecture 5
6 October 2008, 7pm at Library Lounge, CityLibraries Thuringowa Central
Dr Russell McGregor presenting: The White Man in the Tropics
Dr Russell McGregor explains why it had once been widely believed that white people were inherently unsuited to living and working in the tropics, and how that belief was undermined in the early twentieth century through a combination of medical research and political determination. Much of the medical research was conducted locally however the political agenda was national in scope and nationalist in tenor, focusing on the attainment of a White Australia. An examination of these entanglements at of the local with the national, and the medical with the scientific at offers rewarding insights into why north Queensland developed in the way that it did.
6 October 2008 Transcript (565kB)
Lecture 6
17 November 2008, 7pm at Library Lounge, CityLibraries Thuringowa Central
Dr Cheryl Taylor presenting: The World's Great Age... the Golden Years: Queensland's Miners, Poets and Story-Tellers
This lecture explores selected fiction and poetry that stemmed from the mining industries of tropical Queensland. Mount Isa, Charters Towers and the gold fields of Cape York are the chief geographical focus points. The discussion uncovers some of the conscious and unconscious assumptions of the early mining industry, as revealed for example by short stories and poems published in the 1880s and 1890s in the Sydney Bulletin. It further considers how later novelists, such as Vance Palmer, Betty Collins, Kay Brown, Sarah Campion and Elizabeth O'Conner, adapted these assumptions for consumption by urban readers in Australia and overseas. The lecture thus draws attention to the important contribution that mining in the region made to the development of Queensland, not only materially, but also psychologically and ideologically.
17 November 2008 Transcript (599kB)
Lecture 7
23 February 2009, 7pm at Von Stieglitz Room, CityLibraries Thuringowa Central
Dr Janice Wegner presenting: Industrial treasure: North Queensland's mining heritage
Mining was vital to the development of North Queensland, creating many of its ports and towns, bringing settlement inland, and providing infrastructure for other industries. While it is less significant now in the region's economy it has left an important heritage which is undervalued in Queensland today. This lecture shows some of the outstanding mining heritage places surviving in North Queensland and explains their significance.
23 February 2009 Transcript (829kB)
Lecture 8
9 March 2009, 7pm at Von Stieglitz Room, CityLibraries Thuringowa Central
Dr Claire Brennan presenting: Livestock and Landscape: a history of the settlement of Queensland by cattle
Livestock are integral to European attempts to settle the Australian continent, but the introduction of sheep and cattle has not been a straightforward or easy process. The First Fleet arrived with animals picked up from the Cape Colony on the way to Australia, but these animals did not populate the continent with their offspring. Instead a far more complex process of introduction and adaptation took place, complicated by the emergence of registered breeds and ideas about how their presence reflected on their local landscape. This lecture explores the issues of the introduction of livestock to new environments and the significance of ways of defining and controlling breeds with particular reference to the interesting situation of North Queensland.
9 March 2009 Transcript (644 kB)
Lecture 9
6 April 2009, 7pm at Von Stieglitz Room, CityLibraries Thuringowa Central
Dr Nigel Chang presenting: Archaeology and the Historic Past in Townsville
This lecture explores the potential of archaeology to extend our understanding of the historic past in North Queensland. Archaeological evidence can even be used to challenge versions of the past based on documentary evidence alone. For example, it is often said that history is largely ‘written by winners’ and as a result has the potential to be co-opted to suit particular agenda. On the other hand, the illiterate, the poor and the mundane have had little opportunity for their voices to be heard within documentary versions of the past. By concentrating on material culture (such as artefacts) archaeology can investigate these lost voices.
Currently no transcript has been made available to CityLibraries.
Lecture 10
11 May 2009, 7pm at Library Lounge, CityLibraries Thuringowa Central
Dr Dorothy Gibson-Wilde presenting: Townsville's neglected founder: the mysterious Mr Black
One good result of the amalgamation of Thuringowa and Townsville is that John Melton Black must now be acknowledged as unquestionably the founder of Townsville. The first settlement in Cleveland Bay was Woodstock Station, the precursor of both Townsville and Thuringowa. The Application for Woodstock was lodged on 9 April 1863, the Licence was granted the same day, and the Lease issued from 1 January 1864. The sole name on those documents was John Melton Black. As Woodstock is now part of greater Townsville, Black is without doubt the founder of the city. But who was John Melton Black? He remained in north Queensland for only five years, but in that brief period he created a lasting legacy. What happened to him? This lecture examines the Australian career and subsequent English activities of this most enigmatic north Queensland pioneer.
11 May 2009 Transcript(143 kB)
For more information, please contact CityLibraries.
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