For forty-two years, broken only by the brief Country Party ministry of A.E. Moore between 1929 and 1932, the Australian Labor Party governed Queensland. The Moore Government arrived in time to meet the Depression and achieved little before being swept out again; otherwise Labor's run was the longest continuous governing arrangement of any party in any Australian state. When it ended in August 1957, it ended in spectacular fashion. The Premier, Vince Gair, was expelled from his own party on the floor of caucus, took a handful of MPs with him, and walked out into a splinter group called the Queensland Labor Party. The election that followed six months later returned a Country Party / Liberal coalition led by a Palmwoods pineapple farmer named George Francis Reuben Nicklin.
Nicklin governed for almost eleven years, until his retirement in January 1968. By any reasonable measure his government remade Queensland: it built the dams, it expanded the universities, it electrified the state, it brought industry north of the Tweed for the first time. And yet, almost sixty years on, no historian had written a substantive account of what his ministry actually did, or why it mattered. The 1957 split is a famous moment in the textbook narrative — the long Labor period and the Bjelke-Petersen era that followed are exhaustively covered. The eleven years between them are largely a gap.
I went into that gap for my Master's thesis, completed at the University of New England in 2014. An abridged version was published in the Queensland History Journal in May 2014. Before it, the only other published work on the Nicklin Government was a chapter by Brian Stevenson in The Premiers of Queensland, edited by Denis Murphy, Roger Joyce, Margaret Cribb and Rae Wear (University of Queensland Press, 2003).[^1] Stevenson, so far as I know, remains the only other academic who has shown any sustained interest in Nicklin, and the present account is indebted to his work.
The thesis was awarded 96 per cent. A few years later a Queensland publisher with Catholic links offered to bring it out as a book. The condition was that I remove the chapter on the Catholic Church. The publisher's objection, put plainly, was that my principal source on the Church's political role was the historian Humphrey McQueen, and that McQueen's reading of Australian Catholicism was too radical to be relied on. I declined the condition. The book did not appear.
This article sketches what the thesis found, and why I think the gap in the literature was not accidental.
Queensland in 1957
The Queensland inherited by the Country Party / Liberal coalition was, in relative terms, an under-developed Australian state. It had the lowest per capita income of the mainland states, the smallest manufacturing sector, and an economy still anchored to agricultural commodities, mining, and the primary processing of both. Sir Leo Hielscher, later one of the architects of the Queensland Treasury, would describe the Queensland of the 1960s as "a Third World economy" — a description that sounds rhetorical until you read the comparative national accounts of the period.[^2]
The reasons were partly geographic and partly historical. Queensland's population was thinly distributed across an enormous land area, the infrastructure of the south-east was anchored on the Brisbane River rather than a deep-water port, and the long Labor administration had concentrated on rural settlement, returned-soldier schemes, and protecting the established sugar and dairy industries from competitive pressure. Industry, in the southern manufacturing sense, had largely passed Queensland by.
Nicklin's modernisation agenda
The Nicklin Government's response had three planks: industrialisation, education reform, and infrastructure. The three were linked. Industry needed power, water, and skilled labour. Power and water meant dams, generation capacity, and rail. Skilled labour meant a secondary and tertiary education system that did more than train clerks for the Government Printing Office.
Industrialisation was the most visible. The Nicklin Government brokered the deals that brought aluminium smelting to Gladstone, oil refining to Brisbane, and the great central Queensland coal contracts that opened the Bowen Basin to Japanese steel. The Country Party pragmatism that has been caricatured by later historians was, in this period, a willingness to do business with foreign capital and unionised heavy industry that earlier Queensland governments had not entertained.
Infrastructure followed. The Tully Falls and Kareeya hydro projects, the expansion of the Callide power complex, the Burdekin investigation, and the early designs for what became the Wivenhoe scheme all date from this period. The standard-gauge interstate rail link to New South Wales was finally driven through. The first stages of the Gateway Arterial in Brisbane were planned under Nicklin's Minister for Local Government, the Hon Charles Porter, Liberal.
Education was the third plank, and it was the most politically delicate.
The Catholic Church section
The cleanest way to describe what the thesis found is this. Between 1915 and 1957, the Queensland Labor Party governed in part by maintaining an unwritten understanding with the Roman Catholic Church about secondary education. The understanding was straightforward: Labor would not extend the state secondary system in a way that competed with the Catholic schools, and the Catholic schools would deliver the working-class secondary education that the state otherwise would have had to provide. In the Queensland of the inter-war years, with a heavily Irish-Catholic Labor caucus and a small state secondary sector confined largely to the cities, this arrangement held without much strain.
The Nicklin Government broke it. It expanded the state secondary system substantially, doubled the number of public high schools in the decade after 1957, and introduced the funding settlement that allowed Queensland to participate in the post-war expansion of the Australian universities. The Catholic system was not legislated against. It was simply no longer the only path to a school certificate for a working family north of the Tweed.
This is the section the publisher asked me to remove. I will not speculate in public as to why a Queensland house with strong Catholic links might have wanted that chapter cut, except to note that the documentary record sits in Hansard, in the Queensland Catholic Education Office archive, and in the Catholic press of the period, and that any historian writing seriously about Queensland secondary education in the twentieth century will eventually have to deal with it.
Why no one wrote about it
There is a simpler explanation than political sensitivity, and it is probably the right one. The Nicklin period falls in a difficult historical position. It is too late for the colonial and Federation historians, who treat 1901 as the closing date. It is too early and too undramatic for the Bjelke-Petersen historians, who arrive in 1968 with the Cedar Bay raid, the moratorium marches, and the Fitzgerald Inquiry already on the horizon. Nicklin retired peacefully, was succeeded briefly by Jack Pizzey, and then by Joh. The drama is on either side. The substance is in the middle.
The Queensland history community is also small. Most of the serious academic work on twentieth-century Queensland has been done by a generation of historians at the University of Queensland and Griffith whose research agendas were set in the 1970s and 1980s, when the dominant story to tell about Queensland politics was Bjelke-Petersen. By the time the Bjelke-Petersen story had been thoroughly written, attention had moved on.
The Brisbane question
There is a settled view in later Brisbane commentary that the city was a backwater under Nicklin and under Bjelke-Petersen, and that modernity arrived only with the Goss Labor government at the end of the 1980s. The documentary record is harder on that view than the received story allows.
The Queensland Nicklin inherited in 1957 was, by Australian standards of the day, a backward place. An under-capitalised manufacturing base, a small state secondary system, a single metropolitan university, a sugar-and-dairy economy that had been protected from competition for a generation. What his government and its successor bequeathed to Labor in 1989 was not a pre-modern city. It was a city with an aluminium smelter in Gladstone, central Queensland coal flowing to Japanese steel mills, expanded universities, a funded state secondary system, and an infrastructure backbone — rail, power, dams, arterials — built or begun in the Nicklin period. The Goss government did consequential things, but it did them in a state whose modern foundations had already been laid.
The legacy
What the Nicklin Government built is still in use. The Gladstone industrial complex, the central Queensland coal export economy, the early Brisbane arterials, the expanded state high school system, the increased university funding settlement, the Burdekin investigation that became the Burdekin Falls Dam — these are the bones of the modern Queensland economy. The political consequences were also substantial. The Country Party / Liberal coalition that Nicklin assembled held office for thirty-two years, until the Goss Labor victory in 1989. No other premier in Queensland history delivered a longer-running governing arrangement.
I do not want to claim too much for one thesis, or for one premier. The Queensland that emerged from the 1960s had many fathers, and Nicklin was one of them. But the historiographical gap is real, and it has had consequences for how we understand the rest of the century. If you do not know what was built between 1957 and 1968, you cannot accurately describe either what was inherited by the Bjelke-Petersen government in 1968, or what was lost when the long National Party era ended in 1989.
The Country Party pineapple farmer from Palmwoods did more for Queensland than the textbook tells you. That is worth saying out loud.
[^1]: Brian Stevenson, "George Francis Reuben Nicklin: Honest Frank the Gentleman Premier", in The Premiers of Queensland, ed. Denis Murphy, Roger Joyce, Margaret Cribb and Rae Wear, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 2003. See also Reeves, T., "Queensland's Nicklin Government 1957–68: Modernisation, Industrialisation and Education", Queensland History Journal, May 2014.
[^2]: Sir Leo Hielscher, in conversation, cited in the author's Master's thesis, University of New England, 2014.