Building Queensland

Before fresh produce could reach a Brisbane kitchen, someone had to coax it from the soil. Chinese gardeners leased land beside creeks, tended vegetables and carried their harvest to customers. Water, organised labour and knowledge of growing conditions sustained this everyday trade.

The State Library’s research follows gardens along Enoggera, Kedron Brook, Breakfast and Ithaca creeks. The Kalinga photograph invites us to look past the rows of crops towards the work and shelter that made a garden possible. These were productive places within the city’s life, even when the people who worked them were recorded only imperfectly.

For people leaving the northern goldfields, a new livelihood did not necessarily mean a new country. Chinese settlers reached the Atherton area in the early 1880s, working in timber and then farming. Fruit, vegetables and maize connected their labour to the needs of nearby settlements.

A Chinatown developed beside this farming life. Its shops and temple served a wider district, bringing people together beyond individual holdings. The heritage record also describes the loss of Chinese agricultural leases after the First World War, as land passed to soldier settlement. The story of cultivation is therefore also a story of insecure tenure: years of work did not guarantee the right to remain.

A merchant’s shelves brought distant places into everyday Queensland life. The Brisbane firm On War Tai advertised tea, groceries, rice, Chinese goods and household wares. Its Wickham Street premises formed part of a commercial world extending beyond a single shopfront.

Brisbane City Council’s heritage history follows the business through trade, expansion and attacks on its premises. Success did not put a Chinese merchant beyond racism. Read the building as a place where enterprise and vulnerability met: goods arrived, customers came through the door, and a business had to continue within a society that could turn against it. The same address also leads into the story of resistance in Room 03.

Building Queensland also means building knowledge. At the University of Queensland, Jian Zhou worked with Ian Frazer, Xiao-Yi Sun and colleagues on human papillomavirus research. Their work produced virus-like particles: structures resembling the virus’s outer shell that helped underpin HPV vaccine technology.

The team filed an initial patent in 1991. Further development and clinical trials followed before vaccination began in 2006, beyond this room’s main period. This was collaborative work, carried across laboratories and borders rather than achieved in isolation. Zhou’s story connects Chinese migration with Queensland research, while reminding us to distinguish the discovery of a technology from the later testing and delivery of a vaccine.