Media: BOOK - paperback, 432 pages
Author: J. Cross
Year: 2011
ISBN: 9781862548770
Other: b&w photos, sketches, index
Publisher: Wakefield Press

The Northern Territory's first European decades were an extraordinary mixture of grand vision and human folly, peopled with larger-than-life characters.

In 'Great Central State', Jack Cross tells the story of South Australia's ambitious - or foolhardy - plan to become the premier colony of Australia using its own unique experience in planned colonisation, and its bid to develop the north coast as an integral part of South-East Asia. Bitter feuding abounds alongside admirable efficiency, while tales of courage and sacrifice are matched by episodes of sad ignorance and abuse. This is a history strange but true.

Great Central State is a result of the most sustained historical research on a South Australian subject since Douglas Pike's Paradise of Dissent published in 1957. In his wry, meticulously researched book, Jack Cross demonstrates that already before 1911 when the Northern Territory was ceded to the Commonwealth, it had a sophisticated history of its own. He looks forward to the day when it will become the seventh Australian state.

REVIEW:
'From its murky beginnings during the 1860s, the Northern Territory became the exotic locus of South Australia's best utopian dreams and worst administrative nightmares. Jack Cross has trawled through the record of this extraordinary colonial venture, sorting folly from foresight and identifying pioneers and villains, opportunists and adventurers. He has given us a frank, unrestrained history of Australia's own frontier colony.' - Philip Jones

Contents:

Preface

1. The Great Central State

- The Dream of the Great Asian Market

- A Confused Axquisition

- The Northern Territory Plan

- The Wakefield Background

- Plan in Detail - in Parliament

- An Unequal Partnership

2. Caesar and his Fortune

- The Banquet

- First Northern Territory Expedition 1864

- Relief Ships 1865

- The Winding Up

- Retribution

3. The Intervention of the Partners

- Other Partners

- The Great Debate

- The Second Northern Territory Expedition 1868-1869

- Restitution

4. A Second South Australia

- Complications

- The Indies Governor

- The Indues Governor in Decline

- The 'Resulting Land Imbroglio'

- 'Two Main Streets and a Chinese Quarter'

- Crisis in Law and Order
- Law and Aborigines

5. Extreme Solutions

- The Discovery of Lochac

- 'That Insatiable Maelstrom'

- 'The Laissez-Faire' - Let the Market Decide

- Dutch Response - and the Misadventures of Captain Cadell

- Plan Misfires

6. The Mormon Pattern

- Santals

- Munnonites

- Japanese

- An Alternative Israel

7. Coming of the Gauchos

- Other Colonisers: Different Stories

- Ralph Milner and the Southern Route

- Dillon Cox and the Queensland Side

- Two Territories

8. Conceding Defeat

Epilogue

Documentation: Abbreviations

Author's Note

Index