Sybil Nolan reviews Lyndon Megarrity’s Rex Patterson: A Voice for the North (Connor Court Publishing, 2024)
Gough Whitlam made the early 1970s an exciting time to be an idealistic teenager in country Queensland. Whenever his large head loomed into view on our small black-and-white TV at home, we waited for him to say something extraordinary, and he usually did. By extension, his aura encompassed our local MHR, Dr Rex Patterson, who became Whitlam’s minister for northern development. “Mister Patterson”, as we called him, was articulate, knowledgeable and seemed prepared to take a stand for change.
As historian Lyndon Megarrity writes in this insightful short biography of Patterson, he and Whitlam shared a vision of northern Australia as a ‘region of special national significance’ (p. 36) and campaigned hard for it in the 1960s. Their northern policy went beyond Whitlam’s platform of federal financial support for education, vital community services and the arts, and his promotion of regionalism (a concept which recognised voters beyond the cities even if its precise meaning was unclear). They believed federal investment in vital infrastructure in the north would boost the Australian economy through increased exports from primary industries.
The tension that developed between Patterson and Whitlam over the delivery of this vision provides this account’s narrative edge. Megarrity, a historian of northern Australia, shows how dramatically Patterson was prepared to change his own career and his life in order to become a ‘voice for the North’. What freedom he gained to plan and legislate for northern development was complicated by his ambiguous senior status in the Australian Labor Party; a legacy of coming late to the party’s intense internal politics, of his unexpected assignment by Whitlam to a regional portfolio rather than the national portfolio of agriculture, and of firmly held views on economic development which increasingly diverged from his party’s.
Rex Patterson (1927-2016) grew up on a farm near Bundaberg. Following service in the RAAF in 1945, he taught at Mackay State High School then studied for a Bachelor of Commerce, becoming an agricultural economist and a federal public servant. After completing his PhD in the United States as a Fulbright scholar, he was appointed director of the Northern Division of the Department of National Development but found his work stymied by Treasury’s disinclination to adequately staff the division’s work. Consequently, he threw his hat in the ring to become MHR for Dawson, a seat based on the sugar capital of Mackay.
Patterson won the seat for Labor with a stunning swing of 12 per cent at a by-election held a month after Liberal prime minister Robert Menzies’ retirement. Not only was a whiff of political renewal in the air; Patterson was already well known for his involvement in initiatives like the beef roads (development roads to transport cattle from remote areas) and the Brigalow scheme (closer settlement of a large swathe of central Queensland pastoral leases). As Megarrity notes, he was broadly respected in Dawson despite its rural conservatism due to his strong community involvements and his advocacy for measures to keep farming families on the land, including price controls in the sugar industry.
Megarrity charts how Patterson’s mild protectionism and regional perspective increasingly received ‘a cold reception’ (p. 75) from other ministers who held urban seats and resented longstanding support for farmers or were already looking to a new regime for international trade. When, in 1973, Patterson publicly resisted minerals and energy minister Rex Connor’s plan to set prices and maximum tonnages for mineral exports, Whitlam rebuffed him. In early 1974, Whitlam’s decision to end the superphosphate bounty which many farmers had long depended on must have sent a humiliating signal to Patterson. Yet the minister for northern development had some notable successes, including as a catalyst in talks that resulted in a three-year deal to sell large tonnages of sugar to China. He also secured large grants for the development of much-needed dams in north Queensland, boosting water security for agriculture, and played a significant role in organising the government’s immediate response to Cyclone Tracy’s destruction of Darwin on Christmas Day 1974.
Fifty years later, on paper Patterson might seem an isolated oddity, a Canberra “boffin” who changed careers in mid-stream to go into federal politics, where his star briefly ascended only to be snuffed out at the election following the Whitlam government’s dismissal. Such a view would be wrong. Nigel Scullion’s condolence motion in the Senate in 2016 correctly summed up Patterson as a practical intellectual who was passionate about northern Australia. Megarrity’s careful reconstruction of Patterson’s life and career is a welcome work of scholarship that revives Patterson’s place in the political history of 1970s, as well as a timely reminder to contemporary actors of the arduous road lying ahead of any regional “conviction” politician who embeds themselves in a large urban party.
Patterson came to office at a key moment for Queensland, when international coal mining companies were ramping up their activity in the Bowen Basin. Since then, the state has been transformed by the development of new primary industries including aquaculture; the explosion in international tourism in the 1980s and 90s, resulting in vast construction of tourism facilities; the development of the controversial fracking industry and the Adani coal mine, both associated with major land and export infrastructure. The list goes on: one wonders if Patterson might have been concerned about overdevelopment if he were alive now.
Surprisingly, this study has a limited amount to say about the traditional owners’ place in northern development. From the vantage point of 2024, Megarrity’s book indirectly casts valuable historical light on the character of development politics in Australia in the late 1960s and 1970s: the emerging sense of urgency in government as global trade and interest in foreign direct investment in Australia grew rapidly; the continued identification of industrial development, closer settlement and land clearing with progress; and the unthinking assumption of many governments in this country that the land was theirs to alienate in the national interest.
