Under a Modern Sun: Art in Queensland 1930s–1950s

61 Promotional booklets about Queensland always focused on sunshine, with matching titles, such as The Land of Sunshine (1930). This sunny nomenclature was reinforced by the opening of the ‘Sunshine Route’ railway, which turned north Queensland, previously marketed as a paradise for migrant workers, into a paradise for tourists as well. If you couldn’t afford to travel by boat from Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane to north Queensland, you could catch the train instead — a long trip, but still quicker than the boat. Tourist posters commissioned by the Queensland Government Tourist Bureau could be cruel to southerners, with Melbourne railway stations, in the winter months, sporting Percy Trompf’s poster showing a family of penguins migrating to north Queensland with the slogan, ‘Off to the North for Warmth’. Eileen Mayo, an accomplished botanical artist, created images of Great Barrier Reef fish and coral, alive with colour. While the Reef featured on almost a third of all of Walkabout travel magazine covers (1934–74), cattle, cotton, sugar and mining became more prominent in the 1950s and 1960s with the growth of Mt Isa and the expansion of coalmines west of Gladstone. World War Two had a dramatic impact on Queensland, as tens of thousands of American troops were stationed in the state, especially in Brisbane and Townsville which became vital bases for the counterattack on Japanese forces in the Pacific. Official war artists and photographers, including Max Dupain, caught the atmosphere of a state at war. Many more women entered the workforce at this time, including in munitions plants, and there were opportunities to travel, especially in the armed services. In a state whose own Indigenous population’s movement was still restricted to mission settlements, African American troops were confined to the southern side of the Brisbane River. The outback Both Labor and conservative state governments had overseen a repressive system in which most Indigenous Australians continued to live on missions, from Hopevale, north of Cooktown, to Palm Island, as well as in the huge mission town of Cherbourg, at Murgon and in another large community on Stradbroke Island. Many had been forcibly removed from their homelands and often separated from their children, some of whom were fostered out to white families. Queensland, with its conservative government, did not grant Indigenous peoples the right to vote until 1965, and was the last state in Australia to do so. Kenneth Macqueen , (Great Barrier Reef) (detail) c.1938 Percy Trompf , ‘Off to the North for Warmth’ poster for Queensland Government Tourist Bureau c.1935