What’s in a name? If that name happens to be Townsville, the coastal north-east Queensland city, the answer is: slavery.

While he scarcely went to the place that still bears his name, Robert Towns, the 19th century British-born Australian colonist, has largely been warmly and sentimentally regarded as a genteel, civic-minded merchant and entrepreneur. Like so many bastards of Australian colonisation, history has coddled him in soft biography, and continues to celebrate him in nomenclature and statuary.

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