Introduction: a new state
On Monday 6 June 1859, Queen Victoria signed a new colony into law in the district of Moreton Bay – named Queensland in her honour. This came as somewhat of a relief after nearly a decade of persistent lobbying by the Moreton Bay and Northern Districts Separation Association for independence from its parent colony of New South Wales.
Moreton Bay had been a penal colony since 1824, when Lieutenants Oxley and Murray had been sent to establish a prison for recalcitrant convicts. After some false starts they settled on the banks of the Brisbane River. Early settlement was based on the distinction between convicts and free settlers, with no free settlers allowed within a 50-mile (80-kilometre) radius of Brisbane or Ipswich. In 1839 Governor Gipps decided to open the whole area to free settlement. The lands were sold at public auction in Sydney and realised £4637 10s. The first Police Magistrate, Captain W Wickham, arrived in December 1839 and various other government appointments were soon made.
By 1856, the New South Wales Governor, Sir William Denison, had been told that separation was ‘desirable’ and that Her Majesty’s Government was determined to create the northern colony along the lines suggested by ‘the strong and repeated representations of parties possessing the confidence of the inhabitants of those Northern Districts’.
The Colonial Office then set about resolving the problem of appointing appropriate men to govern the fledgling colony with George Ferguson Bowen given the post of Queensland’s first Governor. He offered the newly created post of Colonial Secretary (Premier) to Robert George Wyndham Herbert, the grandson of the Earl of Carnarvon and, like Bowen, a classicist from Oxford. In effect, Bowen was making ‘a colonial aristocracy’ where, despite the appearance of emerging democracy, the elite few could govern the compliant many.
As the colony was created under British law rather than by a coup or revolution, only two other positions were officially designated by the Colonial Office. They were Treasurer and Attorney-General. Having been created by an Act of Parliament, the new colony would be subject to the rule of law from the outset. Ratcliffe Pring, QC, was appointed as Queensland’s first Attorney-General.
On 10 December 1859, Bowen and Herbert arrived at Brisbane to the welcome of 4000 people gathered together in a show of patriotism and gratitude to Her Majesty’s Government. Along with Ratcliffe Pring, QC, as Attorney-General, RR Mackenzie as Treasurer and only seven pence, ha’penny in the Colony’s Treasury, these men began the difficult task of transforming the newest of Her Majesty’s colonies into ‘smiling forms and fruitful fields’.