Repositioning Resistance

This article investigates expressions of ethnic difference amongst the Basque community of north Queensland. Large numbers of Basques migrated to north Queensland during the 1920s and 1930s, and remained in contact with family members in the Provinces themselves. Few Australian Basques were present during the bombing Guernica in 1937, but all were aware of the event and believed it proved the perfidy of Nationalist Spain. The highly symbolic nature of the violence wrought at Guernica exposed Australia’s Basques to a form of cultural trauma, and emphasised their difference from Castilian Spaniards. Within Queensland, the trauma was experienced as a distancing from Spanish identities and an attempt to accrue a whiteness that could be recognised and validated by local Anglophone communities.