The United States’ frontier history has become legendary. Wild westerns featuring outlaws and
lawmen battling for control of the frontier are as ubiquitous as ever. But what you probably didn’t
know is that the stories of the American West aren’t nearly as wild as those from Australia.
The Land Down Under was the frontier in what was otherwise considered a hostile region.
A man with a gun was the only real law. One time, in 1883, one man decided to invade New Guinea and,
in the process, nearly started World War One thirty years early. This is that story.
In the late 1800s, Australia wasn’t one country.
Instead, it was administered by separate colonial governments on Britain’s behalf.
For major decisions, these colonial governments were supposed to wait for the go-ahead from the
British parliament, yet this didn’t always happen. It sometimes took months for letters
to travel from one corner of the world to another, if they got there at all.
The colonial regimes were, consequently, used to operating with more than a little leeway.
For a small colony with paltry earnings, this wouldn’t have been a problem, but by 1880,
the Australian colonies were growing fat on profits from sheep shearing, sugar plantations,
and gold mining. The government coffers were full, and this made officials paranoid. Russian warships
visited Australian ports semi-regularly, as did German vessels. Even though the foreign crews and
local Aussies got on very well, the media stoked fears of invasion. Articles claiming the Russians
were on the brink of invading appeared frequently in every one of the colonies’ newspapers.
Officials were scared half to death at the thought of the Tsar’s forces appearing in Brisbane harbour
and taking their newfound wealth. There was only one solution: they needed a navy.
The colony of Queensland bought two gunboats and a torpedo boat in 1882,
but it took two years for the vessels to arrive. They were commissioned into the
Queensland Maritime Defence Force and put at the disposal of the governor. This made
Queensland the second most powerful colony after Victoria, which had had its own navy since 1856.
The Aussies pretended these vessels were under British authority, but they weren’t. They flew
the flag of the colonies and had all the international authority of a pirate ship.
One man who certainly understood this was Captain Henry Townley Wright, the head of Queensland’s
fledgling navy. He wasn’t a wealthy man, but he lived extravagantly. He spent and spent until he
had nothing left, so he pinched navy supplies to cover his losses. He rang up such a massive food
and beverage bill aboard his flagship, the gunboat HMQS Gayundah, that the Queensland government got
involved. They banned him from charging purchases to the government account without approval.
Wright’s response was to demand the rest of his salary in advance and then file a request to
return to England. The government wasn’t happy with this and issued an order stating he had to
turn over command of the fleet to his deputy, Lieutenant Taylor. Taylor passed the message to
Wright onboard Gayundah, but the captain decided it was a ruse and tossed Taylor into the brig
for attempted mutiny. He then went on another spending spree, gathering three months' worth
of supplies aboard the vessel, and steamed out onto the Brisbane River.
The police chased Gayundah down but held back when Wright trained his guns on the
Queensland parliament building and threatened to blow it up if they challenged his authority.
Police eventually convinced the wannabe pirate to come ashore
with them, presumably offering a particularly lucrative incentive,
as it would have been impossible to stop Wright if he had decided to leave.
This incident illustrates just how crazy things could get in the Australian colonies,
and how powerful a few ships could be. If the head of Queensland’s navy could jump aboard a
gunboat and extort the entire colony by threatening to blow up parliament house,
then surely a foreign ship could too. At least, that’s what the newspapers said,
alongside stories of Russian and German pirate ships prowling the New Guinean coast.
At this time, the eastern half of New Guinea was unclaimed. German trading posts were dotted
around the north, and Port Moresby served as a trading base in the south. But on the
great maps of the world drawn up in the 1880s, eastern New Guinea had yet to be coloured in.
The Queenslanders were paranoid. It was common knowledge that the Germans were trading with
the Papuans and exporting copra, a valuable product made from coconut, in the north.
What if they decided to colonise the south too? What if they decided to move into the
Torres Strait next? Then they’d virtually be in Brisbane and might threaten to blow up the
house of parliament! Before they knew it, Queensland would become Kaiserland.
Or so they thought. In reality, the Germans in New Guinea just wanted to be left alone to run
their plantations and convert the locals to Christianity. The plantation part was
working fine, but it was difficult to show the Papuans the benefits of Christianity
when less-than-scrupulous Australian ships kept appearing along the coast to kidnap them.
These were blackbirders, men who engaged in the vile practice of kidnapping islanders to work on
sugar plantations in Queensland and elsewhere for little or no pay. The German missionaries
hated blackbirders and eventually armed themselves to fend off their ships. When reports
of German weapons arriving in New Guinea reached Brisbane, they sent the government into a frenzy.
Queensland’s Premier, Sir Thomas McIlwraith, sent several urgent messages to Britain asking
permission to annex New Guinea. Like his fellow Queenslanders,
he firmly believed that if the British didn’t officially take it, someone else would, and soon.
But the Brits weren’t keen on the idea. They had a gentleman’s agreement with their
German counterparts not to extend their influence deep into the island’s interior
and for both empires to share the island as a trading base.
Borders were a very delicate issue in Europe at the time, and a spat over
New Guinea could drag the European empires, and therefore the world, into a costly war.
Both British and German leaders recognised this, so deliberately left New Guinea well alone.
The gist of this was communicated to Queensland on several occasions,
but it did nothing to quell the colony’s paranoia. Finally, in March 1883, McIlwraith
took matters into his own hands. He ordered Thursday Island’s police chief, Henry Chester,
to board a ship flying the Queensland flag and land in New Guinea with a party of armed men.
Chester did just that, and on April 4th, claimed New Guinea for Queensland and the British Crown.
Days later, the Australian blackbirding ship Stanley attacked a German trading post
in the Laughlan Islands to New Guinea’s east. After firing a few musket volleys from a boat,
a shore party landed. They had already scared everyone off, so they looted the place and set
it on fire, destroying 20 tonnes of copra in the process. As far as Stanley’s crew was concerned,
the Germans were on Australian turf. That meant they were fair game.
Officials back in England noticed an uptick in the number of grievances the Germans brought to them
but didn’t immediately connect it to the Colony of Queensland becoming a colonial power in the
South Seas. When they did find out, parliament was furious. They outright denied the Crown’s
ownership of New Guinea and rushed to appease the Germans, who half-believed the British had
just fired the first shot of a new war. A letter from the colonial office to Queensland’s governor
chastised the action as “very cocky [from] a cheeky young colony” and called the annexation
“illegal.” The Queenslanders setting up shop in New Guinea didn’t care much what the British
parliament thought, however. They just hauled down the Union Jack and raised the Queensland flag
instead. McIlwraith later said, “I believe that it was perfectly legal, and that we were fully
entitled to annex ... without formal sanction ... New Guinea. It must be a portion of Queensland.”
The Germans responded by founding the New Guinea Company and officially colonized the
northern region, naming it Kaiser-Wilhelmsland. Money and concessions changed hands in Europe,
and the British managed to prevent large numbers of German soldiers
from accompanying the New Guinea Company’s men. They worked out a border with the
Germans through the interior of the island and pleaded with the Queenslanders to stick to it.
The Aussies agreed, but on the condition that their little invasion was retroactively legalised.
In 1884, Commodore Erskine arrived in New Guinea from England to formally incorporate
it into the British Empire, as parliament was worried about what might happen if Queensland
kept it. A random Papuan man from the local church was declared the island’s official king,
and Queensland agreed to administer the colony on Britain’s behalf. McIlwraith and his mates
got away with it but presumably had to promise Erskine that they would never ever do it again.
But what do YOU think? Did you know Queensland was technically
a colonial power? Had you heard of blackbirding? What do YOU think would
have happened if the Germans had attacked the Queenslanders? Let us know in the comments!