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Cilento's Centenary: The Triumph of His Topics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2016

Geoffrey A.C. Ginn
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Extract

The 1959 celebration of the Centenary of self-government in Queensland presented organisers with an opportunity to showcase the state at large, together with its character and potential. Public works – a supremely tangible stamp of governmental achievement – were foremost in two new facilities for approved culture and recreation: the new library on William Street and the Brisbane City Council's Centenary Pool on Gregory Terrace. Abiding links with Britain were evoked by the royal visit of Princess Alexandra, a service in Westminster Abbey and the ‘Centenary voyage’ of a British immigrant ship. Other aspects of the program celebrated Queenslanders simply being Queenslanders. Day-to-day events from local carnivals and festivals to sporting competitions were embraced by the Centennial organisers. The resulting celebrations revealed a state in transition, its abiding affection for royalty and the ties of Empire happily coexisting with a new relish for American leisure culture. They reveal more than that when we consider the execution of Centenary activities in more detail, and particularly those that sought to present an account of how and why the state had come to be as it was. The 1959 celebrations provided a moment when, in the full light of public interest and attention, a ‘sense of the past’ was mobilised in both formal and informal terms in an attempt to account definitively for the Queensland historical experience.

Type
Research Article
Information
Queensland Review , Volume 16 , Issue 2: Celebrations and Commemorations in Queensland , July 2009 , pp. 57 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 

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References

Notes

1 Fitzgerald, Ross, Megarrity, Lyndon and Symons, David, Made in Queensland: A New History (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2009), 139–41.Google Scholar

2 This approach addresses constructions of history as both a critical and professional concern and a more universal, socially constructed form of knowledge. See Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Volume 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, 1994); David Glassberg, Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001); and Chris Healy, From the Ruins of Colonialism: History as Social Memory (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997) for relevant implications in British, American and Australian modes of ‘public history’.Google Scholar

3 See Fisher, F.G., Raphael Cilento: A Biography (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994) and Finnane, Mark, ‘Cilento, Sir Raphael West’, Australian Dictionary of Biography Online (2006), www.adb.online.anu.eu./biogs/A170212b.htm, accessed 8 April 2008.Google Scholar

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8 QSA 6717 A/6546 B/107/3/0 minutes of Historical Sub-Committee dated 22 October 1957. Alongside Cilento and Lack, the original committee comprised Arthur Laurie (Historical Society of Queensland), Martha Young (Queensland Women's Historical Association), Allan Morrison (Department of History, University of Queensland) and librarians Colin Austin of the Historical Society, J.C.H. Gill of the Oxley Memorial Library and Parliamentary Librarian S.G. Gunthorpe, joined by representatives of the Royal Geographical Society, the Department of Lands Place Names Committee, and the Authors and Artists Association.Google Scholar

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44 Cilento and Lack, Triumph in the Tropics, 159.Google Scholar

45 ‘Pageant Led to “Havoc" in Gardens’, Courier-Mail, 12 December 1959.Google Scholar

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47 QSA, minutes of Historical Sub-Committee dated 16 December 1959: 1.Google Scholar