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Celebrating Her First Half-Century: Queensland's Jubilee Carnival

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2016

Joanne Scott  and
Ross Laurie
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Extract

Queensland's Jubilee Carnival of 1909 was, according to Australia's Governor-General, Lord Dudley, ‘the principal and most prominent feature in the series of festivities by which the people of Queensland are seeking to celebrate the jubilee of their existence’. Indeed, with the exception of the Carnival, the ‘series of festivities’ was rather lack-lustre, offering relatively little of substance to excite the attention of contemporaries or of later commentators. Offering a distraction from the political instability of the era – between 1907 and 1909, voters had gone to the state polls three times – the Jubilee Carnival reaffirmed and reinvigorated a story that had been told and retold each year at Brisbane's showgrounds for more than three decades. The particular power of the Carnival did not, therefore, derive from its status as a unique event that commemorated a defining moment in Queensland's development: the separation from New South Wales and the beginning of self-government in 1859. Instead, the significance of the Jubilee Carnival as the centrepiece of the 1909 celebrations depended on its effective alignment with Queensland's largest annual event, the Brisbane Exhibition, and on the resulting connections between the Carnival, the Exhibition and a narrative of successful colonisation that had been celebrated each year since the inaugural Brisbane Exhibition of 1876. For many non-Indigenous Queenslanders, it was a compelling story that resolutely ignored the unsavoury aspects of the state's past and present in favour of an uplifting account of a society in which perseverance, applied to nature's bounty in the interests of the British Empire, was rewarded. It was, above all, a story of progress – that most powerful of talismans for settler societies. The Jubilee Carnival thus reiterated a familiar story; in so doing, it confirmed the iconic status of the capital city's annual agricultural show and positioned the show's host, the National Agricultural and Industrial Association of Queensland (NAIAQ), as one of the state's most important organisations.

Type
Research Article
Information
Queensland Review , Volume 16 , Issue 2: Celebrations and Commemorations in Queensland , July 2009 , pp. 43 - 56
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 

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References

Notes

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2 Apart from the Jubilee Carnival, the most important element of the 1909 celebrations was the inauguration of the University of Queensland. The Brisbane Courier, Queenslander, Truth and Week all included features on the history of Queensland. The two major anniversary publications, both of which appeared the following year, were E.J.T. Barton (ed.), Jubilee History of Queensland: A Record of Political, Industrial and Social Development (Brisbane: H.J. Diddams and Co., 1910) and Government of Queensland, Our First Half Century: A Review of Queensland Progress (Brisbane: Government Printer, 1910). The latter publication included a description of the 1909 Brisbane Exhibition.Google Scholar

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4 The phrase ‘phenomenal progress’ was part of the address of welcome to the Governor-General at the official opening ceremony, Brisbane Courier, 12 August 1909: 9.Google Scholar

5 Based on Brisbane Courier, 29 May 1908, p.6; Peter Schlenker, ‘The Exhibition: A History of the Royal National Agricultural and Industrial Association of Queensland, 1875-1974’, Master of Arts thesis, University of Queensland, 1975, 43-44; and a search of indexes of inwards correspondence to the Queensland Premier's Department at Queensland State Archives; unfortunately, the correspondence itself has not been located.Google Scholar

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