The Palmer United party got a lot of publicity yesterday for highlighting a policy it has always affirmed: that north Queensland should be a separate state.

Carl Judge is now the only Palmer United party member left in the Queensland parliament, after his former leader Alex Douglas left the party, making accusations of autocracy and nepotism. The re-announcement took the edge off that story: there was now an irresistible “crazy Clive” angle.

But the idea that north Queensland should go its own way is far from new. Almost as soon as the European invasion of north Queensland began, there was an expectation that, just as Victoria and Queensland had broken away from New South Wales, the northern half of Queensland would eventually govern itself. The most significant political movements demanding it all came before Federation, from the 1860s until around 1900, peaking in the 1880s.

Brisbane’s reluctance to let go – and Britain’s repeated refusal to split the colonies – seemed perverse. Cairns is around 1,400 kilometres from the state capital as the crow flies - if you journeyed the same distance from Paris, you could make it to Algiers. It’s still a 20 hour drive today, and there was no railway connection to the capital until 1924.

How could a government tucked away in the South East corner possible serve the needs of people separated from it by days of hard travel? As one pamphlet asked in 1893:

When a wheelwright makes a wheel, does he put the hub on the rim? ... Yet the people of Queensland have placed… the hub of their government in the extreme comer of a territory of 670,000 square miles.

As Brisbane’s population grew, a long-standing suspicion grew up: that the interests of the capital were being prioritised, and that the northerners were contributing more than they were receiving. This resentment still boils over from time to time. In 2010, the north Queensland local government Association voted 98-2 to press once more for separate statehood. Bob Katter, another true believer, welcomed the news, saying northerners had had “a gutful of the blood-sucking establishment of the south”, who had “economically massacred” the region under a “tyranny of the majority”.

‘Cairns is around 1,400 kilometres from the state capital as the crow flies. Photograph: Brisbane City Council Photograph: Brisbane City Council

There was, and to some extent still is, a feeling that because of its tropical climate, geography, and land use, north Queensland was distinctive. And it was simply closer to many of Australia’s neighbours. Much more than the south, before Federation the north was integrated in a cosmopolitan South Pacific world.

In North of Capricorn, Henry Reynolds depicts a pluralist north, where European settlers frequently found themselves in a minority amidst Indigenous peoples, Chinese and Japanese migrants, and Pacific Islanders who arrived to work on cane fields, and often stayed for generations. People and goods arrived directly from all over the Pacific. After Federation this was all systematically dismantled — with measures including forced repatriations — under the White Australia Policy.

And it’s here, in the complex intersection of race, economics, and politics in colonial Australia, that we can understand a lot of the most pronounced tensions. North Queensland sugar farmers, in contrast to the more protectionist farmers of the south, wanted to negotiate free access for their products to other colonial markets. They also wanted to continue “importing” (ie kidnapping) labour from the Pacific islands — always poorly paid, often effectively slavery— without metropolitan interference. So they supported separatism.

On the other hand, local opposition to separation often included elements of the labour movement, who feared that separation would further undermine their position with “cheap coloured labour”. The separation question had no “good guys”.

Northerners voted for Federation much more readily than other Queenslanders – already under the rule of a distant capital, they had less to lose. The Constitution says that the federal parliament and the majority of Queenslanders could decide to divide the state, but neither North Queensland, nor PUP has the numbers.

It’s true that Palmer’s interests would probably benefit from a friendly northern government, but his party’s separatism is mostly a populist gesture. If Brisbane is still sometimes resented, separatism as such is a minority enthusiasm. But for some it will let them know that Clive cares about the north. It doesn’t hurt that it highlights Campbell Newman’s weddedness to Brisbane, and muscles in on Katter’s turf. It may not win him any more seats at the state election, but it’s Queensland ... stranger things have happened.