FRECKLINGTON
YOU have read it before in this column and now you can read it again. Why isn’t David Crisafulli the leader of the Queensland LNP?
Even rusted-on LNP voters out in the bush roll their eyes and look to the heavens when you ask them how they think Deb Frecklington is performing.
“Nice person,” they will say. “But, she is not havin having any impact”. And n now a poll by the Courier C Mail has found 75 per cent of Queenslanders Q think M Ms Frecklington is not up to the job. David Crisafulli ( pictured) will not call for a spill himself himself, but if others o in the party tap him on the shoulder it will be game on. There is still time before the October election for a fresh, new LNP Leader to emerge. I’m tipping it will be Ingham-born Crisafulli and that it will happen within days.
No axe to grind here
TOWNSVILLE founding father Robert Towns has so far escaped the attentions seeking to heap retribution on those accused of alleged misdeeds in the past. The most famous in recent days dominated by the Black Lives Matter movement has been the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston into Bristol Harbour in the UK. Colston, we learn was a slave trader and important business figure in Bristol. Our own Robert Towns, a man whose entrepreneurship helped give birth to Townsville, is often described as a blackbirder, which is a roundabout sort of way of saying “slaver”. Mr Towns and his fellow blackbirders supplied South Sea islanders – known as Kanakas – to Queensland and northern New South Wales’ sugarcane farmers in the 19th and early 20th century. In all, 60,000 South Sea islanders were shipped to Queensland and New South Wales to work on farms. They worked as indentured labour and were ‘owned’ by the farmer who bought them from the blackbirder. Wiki, cutely, describes Towns as a “Kanaka labour importer”. If he was setting up shop today, Mr Towns would most likely call his firm, Kanaka Labour Hire Pty Ltd with the motto “if you’ve got the knack for growing it, we’ve got the ‘kanak’ to harvest it”.
North Queensland’s descendant South Sea islander community, surprisingly, as a collective, has never waged a loud war of words against Towns. I’ve spoken to members of this community about Towns several times over the years. You wouldn’t call it ambivalence about him on their part, but there is a tendency not to dwell or to get angry about the past. This is probably why his statue in Ogden St has survived a dunking in Ross Creek. There is another, much older monument to Robert Towns atop Castle Hill. As Michael Roddan pointed out on Twitter this week: “If we are going to tear down statues of old guys who haven’t aged well, can we also tear down the colosseum (slaves, murder etc) and the pyramids (slaves, just a tomb for a rich guy) and also Chichen ltza (sacrifice children)?
I double-checked all of this again this week with Starrett Vea Vea, chair of the Mackay District Australian South Sea islander Association. He is fifth generation, Australian, his mother’s side of the family tracing back to the Solomon Islands and his dad’s to Vanuatu. Starrett told me South Sea islanders had no axe to grind with what happened in the past and were now proud Australians.
Fari deserves his gong
AND from the South-sea Islands we jump to Iran. Travelling outback grocer Fari Rameshfar, 70, who came to Australia from Iran when he