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(itself a fairly new and relatively impecunious colony), ‘where ministries were in and out with flagrant frequency’,
and almost immediate loss of support by the South Australian administration. Parsons had to preside over
retrenchments and his administration was soured by continued backbiting amongst factions in Palmerston. His own
popularity suffered due to what were perceived by local residents as the delays and the mistakes of South Australia.
Parsons himself said that ‘the Northern Territory was not forgotten, but was left unattended’.
As Government Resident of the Northern Territory, Parsons, a man of the imperialist and Eurocentric times,
found his own cultural values confronted and challenged by the conditions over which he presided. His attitude
to racial groups other than European was that of assumed superiority and his belief that the ‘white man was
unfitted’ for work in the tropics was a continuous thread in all his proposals for development. This prompted
his championing of the Indian Immigration Act as a source of cheap coloured labour for the construction of
his much vaunted transcontinental railway line. So suspicious was he of the motives of the Chinese that, whilst
maintaining the necessity of their labours for the development of the Northern Territory, his view that they should
be repatriated to their homelands on the termination of their employment was definite. The paradox of the man and
perhaps his vision is best demonstrated by his conviction that ‘Australia geographically belongs to [the Asians] for
Australia is South Asia’. However, in the context of the times it also led him to believe that the Northern Territory
was ‘the white man’s burden’.
Whilst believing the question of Chinese and Indian immigration to be easily solved, he was increasingly to find
that the question of Aboriginal-white relations was not. One of his first dealings with Aboriginal people, and no
doubt the most infamous, occurred shortly after arriving in Palmerston in 1884. His implicit official involvement
in the punitive expedition against the murderers of four Daly River miners, where as many as 150 Aborigines
were rounded up and shot, earned him the official and documented condemnation of the government surgeon and
Protector of Aborigines in Palmerston, Dr Morice, who Parsons subsequently dismissed from office. Irreconcilable
with these actions, yet indicative of a growing awareness of the magnitude of the values and mores inherent in
European occupation of the Territory, were Parsons’s subsequent reports to the South Australian Parliament.
The tenor of these reports acknowledged Aboriginal ownership of land and the problem arising from the conflict
of interests between pastoralists and Aborigines. From the Aboriginal point of view he saw the coming of the white
man as being an ‘act of invasion’ or a ‘declaration of war’. While not committed to vigorous personal advocacy
of Aboriginal reserves he recommended that it was the ‘first duty of the State to declare reserves, and within these
reserves to give native tribes absolute rights and sole control’, stating that ‘the bullocky and the blackfellow cannot
live and drink at the same places’. While holding the popular view that the fate of the Aborigine was eventual
extinction, he questioned the lack of legislation regarding their treatment and advocated that special provisions
be promulgated for their giving evidence before a court and for being brought to trial, as well as those relating
to employment conditions and payment by Europeans. The rationale for Parsons’s thorough, ongoing and often
expensive endorsement of development projects in the Territory can be seen in his belief that ‘use... was the
only justification for a white race to retain tropical land’. However, the projects that Parsons so enthusiastically
supported often ended as fiascos. The Delissa Sugar Company, after capital investment of 20 000 Pounds produced
only 12 tonnes of sugar before being abandoned, and the railway which was to open the land to development
financed by the land grant system, lost money and was never completed. While Parsons cannot be entirely blamed
for the failures it can perhaps be said, as did the Northern Territory Times, ‘that his word paintings... were the
superficial and glowing presentiments of an imaginative mind, rather than a clear, penetrative and logical summing
up of the probabilities as deduced from actual facts and figures’, although others hold the almost contradictory view
that Parsons was an ‘extremely good administrator’, one ‘whose reports show a grasp of the problems equalled by
none of his predecessors’.
Parsons’s period as Government Resident in the Northern Territory ended in January 1890, when he and
V L Solomon, a prominent Palmerston merchant, were elected Northern Territory representatives to the South
Australian House of Assembly. Parsons assumed his seat in April of that year and held it until April 1893, following
which he was appointed commissioner to inquire into the prospects of establishing trade relations with Japan,
China and the Philippines. In 1896, he was appointed Consul for Japan (a position subsequently held by his son,
H A Parsons), and in 1901, he was elected to the Legislative Council as Member for the Central District of South
Australia. He successfully introduced another Transcontinental Railway Act in 1902, though his proposals for the
introduction of indentured coloured labour into tropical areas were rejected. Parsons held both his consular and
Legislative Council appointments until his death in August 1903 at Kensington, South Australia.
H T Burgess, The Cyclopedia of South Australia, 1903; P F Donovan, A Land Full of Possibilities: A History of South Australia’s Northern
Territory, 1981; A Grenville-Price, The History and Problems of the Northern Territory of Australia, 1930; W Harcus (ed), South Australia,
1878; H A Parsons, The Truth about the Northern Territory, 1907; J L Parsons, The Northern Territory with a Glance at the East, 1901;
C Price-Conigrave, North Australia, 1936; W J Sowden, The Northern Territory as It Is, 1982; The Northern Territory of South Australia:
A Brief Historical account Pastoral and Mineral Resources, 1901; J L Parsons, Papers Read Before the Royal Society of Australasia, SA
Branch; P F Donovan, ‘Land of Promise’, MA Thesis, 1976; Northern Territory Commission, Minutes of Evidence, February 1895, June 1895;
Northern Territory of South Australia, Government Residents’ Reports 1884–1889 inclusive.
MARY DORLING, Vol 1.
PARTRIDGE, KINGSLEY FOSTER (‘SKIPPER’) (1892–1976), Presbyterian minister, was born on
1 June 1892 at Bulga, near Singleton, New South Wales. His father’s family had migrated from Craigford in
Kent and settled in the Hunter Valley as builders and carpenters. His father Peter was born in 1859 in Singleton.
His mother Amy Hilton, nee Clark, came from a family with strong links with Yorkshire and Scotland and
especially with the land and horses. She was a woman with a strong personality and she had a profound influence