‘From the dreaming to 1915: a history of Queensland’ by Ross Fitzgerald

Investing has an element of mythologizing previous wealth creation events so that people often mimic prior investment approaches because they are ‘proven’. Investing, therefore, is an amalgamation of stories from multiple wealth creation and destruction events.

How regions develop is very similar in that the development of the region is the result of multiple wealth events that happen unevenly across the landscape. The resulting pattern of development may look like an efficiently run system but its origins are a series of unrelated booms and busts.

Ross Fitzgerald’s first book on Queensland captures the Queensland development zeal and how the state’s development at any cost was a clear principle from the day that graziers pushed cattle up from New South Wales. It suggests that there is a deep need for Queenslanders to ‘make it rich’ and that the government should clear out when times are good and send help when things are tough.

The dark side to this development zeal ranged from the destruction of 85% of indigenous people within 60 years of European arrival and the Kanaka trade to deep racism towards Chinese migrants. Police were also aggressively used to quash labor issues.

These stores were common on the European settlement frontier across the world. Queensland, its counterparts like Texas, California and Western Australia, created a myth of development at any cost that continues to say, in a frontier-less world, that ‘you have to make it’. High risk/high return and boom/bust focused workers who are always looking for the next thing.

I suspect that my own area of sustainable investing could be developed into a high risk/high return type investment and Queenslanders might become quite interested. But if I maintain a steady, low risk/low return profile, it won’t speak to how this state developed.

It is the hunger from ‘making it’ that permeates that state and it is this underlying mythology that might be worth exploring as a catalyst for growing sustainable investing.