White Gold

Bundled together on the back of a bullock dray, the Anthony family swayed through the scrubland of Queensland’s Scenic Rim. The wheels creaked, the animals strained, and the air was alive with the calls of cockatoos and magpies. At last William Anthony pulled out his map, checked the surveyor’s marks, and knew they had arrived. This was it: 500 acres of scrubland, granted by the colonial government. His wife and children clambered down to look over their new land. To own such space was beyond anything they could have imagined back in Ireland. For William, one of hundreds of thousands who had fled the devastation of the Potato Famine, this was more than a farm. It was proof that his family had a future, and that Australia might deliver on its promise.

The promise of the land was bound up in a single crop: cotton. Known at the time as “white gold,” cotton was in demand across the world in the 1860s. When the American Civil War (1861–65) cut off much of Britain’s supply from the southern states, the Queensland government saw an opening. Leaders from Governor George Bowen down to local settlers argued that their new colony could step into the breach. “Nothing more fortunate for the steady prosperity of Queensland could occur,” Bowen declared in 1860.  

Cotton had been tried before. Experiments in the Moreton Bay district in the 1840s showed that Sea Island cotton grew vigorously in the subtropical soil. Reverend Dunmore Lang, the fierce Scottish reformer, was thrilled by the sight of the tall plants heavy with white pods in Brisbane gardens. He imagined cotton as the crop that would anchor his dream of a Protestant yeoman society. In his words, Queensland could show “the most convincing of all proofs that our cotton supply is not dependent on slavery.” It was a moral as well as economic vision: free British labour producing clean cotton, untainted by the stain of America’s slave system.

Caption: In 1863, 67 South Sea Islanders were first brought to Queensland to work in the cotton and sugar industries. Over the next forty years, more than 62,000 men, women, and children from the Pacific Islands were transported, many kidnapped or “blackbirded,” others misled. Despite occasional government efforts to curb abuses, many endured harsh, coercive conditions. The Pacific Island Labourers Act of 1901 eventually required much of this population to be deported, though thousands remained behind, their lives and labour woven into the fabric of Australian colonial labour history.

By the time William Anthony and other immigrants arrived in the 1860s, these visions had become urgent. Lancashire mills were shutting down, British manufacturers were desperate, and cotton was promoted in newspapers and government circulars as the crop that could make small farmers prosper. The colonial parliament even offered land bonuses for every bale of Sea Island cotton exported to England.

For a short while, it seemed to work. Ipswich, where William Anthony and his family lived for a time, was briefly hailed as the “cottonopolis” of Australia. Robert Herbert, the colony’s first premier, had shares in the Cabulture Cotton Company. Robert Towns, the Sydney entrepreneur whose name would later be given to Townsville, speculated heavily on cotton. Across southern Queensland, from Caboolture to the Logan River, settlers cleared scrub, planted fields, and waited for their fortunes to grow.

Yet the dream soon frayed. The Queensland climate that made cotton a perennial crop also brought floods, droughts, grubs, and weeds. A drought in 1862, followed by destructive floods in 1863 and 1864, devastated crops. “We have been woefully disappointed,” Herbert admitted in a private letter, “what with weeds, drought, floods, hail, grubs, and bad management, the crop will be very small and will not pay for the labour.”

In 1863, 67 South Sea Islanders were first brought to Queensland to work in the cotton and sugar industries. Over the next forty years, more than 62,000 men, women, and children from the Pacific Islands were transported, many kidnapped or “blackbirded,” others misled. Despite occasional government efforts to curb abuses, many endured harsh, coercive conditions. The Pacific Island Labourers Act of 1901 eventually required much of this population to be deported, though thousands remained behind, their lives and labour woven into the fabric of Australian colonial labour history.

The deeper problem was labour itself. Cotton demanded intensive hand-picking just as the pods ripened, and there were never enough willing European workers. Many immigrants from Britain were artisans and shopkeepers with little farming skill. They struggled with the discipline of agriculture, and some sold their land orders for cash rather than persisting on the land.

Towns and other planters turned to imported labour. At first there was talk of Indian or Chinese “coolies,” but negotiations dragged. In 1863 Towns acted on his own, bringing in South Sea Islanders on the ship Don Juan. Their arrival in Brisbane stirred immediate controversy. Supporters argued that Islanders were industrious and well suited to tropical fieldwork; critics saw it as a betrayal of the vision of free labour. In truth, this marked the beginning of the Pacific Islander labour trade, soon central to Queensland’s sugar industry. Cotton’s failure left a legacy that would shape the north for decades: a system of plantation agriculture built on imported, coercive labour.

By the late 1860s the optimism had collapsed. The American Civil War ended, southern cotton flowed back into Britain, and Queensland’s “white gold” withered on the bush. Farmers abandoned the crop in droves. In 1864 there were over 1,000 cotton growers in Queensland; by 1870 fewer than 150 remained. Within a generation cotton had slipped into obscurity, displaced by sugar and wool as the true staples of the colony.

Still, for families like the Anthonys, those few years mattered. Cotton was the crop that drew them onto the land, even if they soon turned to other pursuits. Their labour cleared scrub, fenced paddocks, hauled supplies along rough bush tracks laid the foundations for settlement in the Scenic Rim and Darling Downs of Australia. Cotton did not deliver the prosperity its advocates promised, but it set in motion the transformation of landscapes and lives.

Today, when we think of Queensland agriculture, we think of cattle, sugar, and grain, not cotton. Yet for a brief moment, cotton carried the hopes of a colony. It was imagined as both an economic salvation and a moral enterprise: proof that free settlers could succeed where slavery had disgraced the old world. Its failure tells us much about the harsh realities of climate, labour, and distance, and about the gap between vision and reality in the colonial project.

My family survived. William and his sons continued as farmers in the region, and in recognition of their contribution, the locality where they first came in search of ‘white gold’ was named after them — Anthony.”

Has your own family story been shaped by global forces like these? The Anthonys’ lives were caught up in the world cotton shortage of the 1860s. Perhaps your ancestors, too, were drawn to Australia by economic shifts far beyond their control.

Further Reading

Farnfield, J. (1971). Cotton and the Search for an Agricultural Staple in Early Queensland. Queensland Heritage, 2(4), 20–25. University of Queensland. [Link to PDF]

Camm, J. C. R. (1973). The Cotton Industry in Queensland, 1860–1865. Queensland Geographical Journal, 3(3), 43–59.

Lawson, K. (2011). The history of the Queensland cotton industry. Department of Employment, Economic Development and Innovation, Queensland Government.

Evans, R. (2007). A History of Queensland. Cambridge University Press. (Chapter sections on early agriculture and labour).

Waterson, D. B. (1968). Squatter, Selector and Storekeeper: A History of the Darling Downs 1859–1893. University of Queensland Press.

Reynolds, H. (1981). The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia. Penguin. (For broader context on land and labour).

Image Source: National Museum of Australia. (n.d.). Islander labourers. Australia’s Defining Moments Digital Classroom. Retrieved from https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/islander-labourers