It wasn’t just determination and hard yakka that built Australia’s prosperity. It was unpaid, coercive and forced labour off the backs of black workers.
Australia’s history of slavery is — as Prime Minister Scott Morrison made apparent yesterday — poorly understood and often denied. (The PM has today apologised and sought to clarify his statement.)
But the fact is, either through slavery, servitude, exploitation or stolen wages, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders — and men kidnapped from Melanesia — played a massive role in developing Australia into the wealthy country it is today.
Why the confusion?
One of the reasons for denial of Australia’s dark past was due to the legal definitions around slavery, says Monash University law professor and Castan Centre for Human Rights associate Dr Stephen Gray.
Slavery was legally abolished in 1833 in most British colonies — though the illegal slave trade was often ignored by authorities.
“Some people have debated whether what happened with Indigenous people qualified as slavery as it wasn’t actually legal,” he told Crikey. Critics argue retrospectively applying the modern United Nations definition of slavery to Australia’s history isn’t fair.
“[But] there was a body of opinion back then that what was happening was slavery. The picture shows people understood what it was,” Gray said.
For example, a newspaper excerpt from 1863 details the “first time [Queenslanders] were made aware that the slave trade had commenced”, referencing a “cargo of miserable wretches”.
“Roving stockmen driving parties of miners would get hold of Indigenous people and keep them as slaves,” Gray said.
Importantly, the definition of slavery is rubbery: “Australia’s history is not just slavery. It’s servitude and exploitation and stolen wages and stolen trust funds,” he said.
Often Indigenous people were exploited on a large scale through limited payment and no freedom of mobility.
How did slavery and exploitation contribute to the economy?
From domestic servants and sex slaves on cattle farms and cane fields, Australia’s pastoral land developed largely thanks to the exploitation of the Indigenous population.
Slaves were widely imported by Robert Towns, one of the most prolific “blackbirders” in Australian history. He has a statue in Townsville, the city which bears his name. Towns imported “many hundreds” of so-called “savages” from Melanesia, often through kidnapping and coercion.
His reasoning? “I came to the conclusion that cotton-growing upon a large scale either must be abandoned in Queensland, or be carried out by cheaper labour,” he wrote in a letter to the colonial secretary of Queensland in 1863.
His huge and profitable estate in Logan had its own cotton gin, sawmill and a small hospital.
Elsewhere, the Vestey family made its fortune in cattle farms at Wave Hill station in the Northern Territory. The family more than doubled its yield across 10 years in the 1800s, with entire families of the Indigenous Gurindji people working for rations.
A report from 1946 found those on the farm lived in squalor and were exposed to sexual abuse, child labour and unsafe drinking water.
Mistreatment of locals, along with anger over stolen land, led to the famous 1966 Wave Hill Walk-Off.
The Vastey family business is still going strong today.
But Australia’s slavery profits go back even further, says University of NSW professor of international and political studies Clinton Fernandes.
“The single largest destination of British foreign investment throughout the second half of the 19th century was Australia,” he said. The British government invested in pastoral development, the wealth of which “came out of exported colonies, through indentured labour”.
Colonist landowners would collect tax. Those unable to pay tax would be forced to work off their debt on farms — the proceeds of which would be reinvested into Australia.
“The slave trade created the basis for capital ascent in the west in Europe. It profited off and created the basis for its rise,” Fernandes told Crikey.
Why is this still not widely known?
Industry professor at Jumbunna Institute of Education and Research Nareen Young told Crikey that little of this history is taught in schools.
“I’d certainly like to see the history of the establishment of the pastoral industry, and all of the agricultural industries, taught in schools,” she said. “The loss of land and exclusion from the employment market is obviously the reason for the ‘wealth gap’ we see today.”
While a lot of Australia’s knowledge centres around the Northern Territory, Young said that Indigenous history and exploitation needed to be expanded to all states.
“For the PM not to understand the history — it speaks to the need for truth-telling. For the truth to be part of the national narrative,” she said.
Is the Australian public ignorant when it comes to the history of exploitation in our country? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say section.
When it comes to the contribution of unpaid labour – slaves and indentured servants – to the development of Australia, I’d like to make mention of the huge number of convicts shipped here to break their backs for the greater good and glory. When it comes down to who put in the hard yards creating Australia the country, the hundreds and thousands of British and Irish convicts, 160,000 in total, should not be overlooked. Slave labour conditions and brutal treatment was a feature of the colony for most of the first century of its existence. It was all very above board with the price of convict life factored into opening up the country.
I realise there’s not much traction or sympathy to be gained in the current turmoil for a population of convicts being flogged and beaten under the hot sun, but when it comes to recognising Australia’s history of exploitation it’s as well to remind ourselves that European settlement was first and foremost in the form of a savage penal colony.
Australian history is one that is repeated forgetting. I’m not sure if convicts can be referred to as slaves because they at least could earn their freedom or complete their term. They were also understood to be humans, whereas indigenous Australians were referred to as fauna. For convicts, what happened was horrific and ever since we’ve been putting people we don’t like on islands to whither away. It is a history that should be acknowledged and understood. Even for us with convict history, we have to acknowledge that whatever our family achieved after being a convict was done on stolen land. It seems to be only recently that people even acknowledge their family history having a convict, so all those stories have been lost from a family’s oral history. Australia has a lot of work to do.
It’s more the basis for our law and order attitude to crime.
The convicts did the crime, so should do the time, even though the time would be today’s equivalent of sending people to Mars for downloading a tv show or jaywalking.
The crime of the Tolpuddle Martyrs was to talk about their wages. The crime of the Glasgow Corresponding Society was to send each other letters discussing democracy. Most of the women transported on the Second Fleet were simply kidnapped. I’m not sure the colonial authorities regarded Fenians as human.
Oh when that we were landed upon that fatal bay
The planters they came flocking round full twenty score or more
They ranked us up like horses and sold us out of hand
They yoked us up to the plough my boys to plough Van Diemen’s Land
Speaking of Fenians.
As a young Tasmanian lad visiting Ireland, I certainly was re-educated on real Irish history and the transportation of Fenians to Van Dieman’s Land.
Quite embarrassing for a bright young lad who studied hard on the other side of the world.
And don’t mention Oliver Cromwell in Cork.
NSW, Victoria, Tasmania and later W.A. were initially built on the back of convicts. Some of the early wealthier South Australian settlers benefited from generations of slavers and British payouts to slave owners when they “abolished” slavery but that was overseas so that was OK apparently. ScoMo’s free farmer ancestors would have used free convict labour on their land grants. Most of the convicts were of Irish ancestry. The Irish have been regarded as subhuman and oppressed by the English since from about 1170 until 1922. They were used as cheap, disposable labour in England. They built the canal and railway systems. When economic times didn’t require underpaid labourers for dangerous work they were regarded as part of the criminal class and part of the excess population. Being classed as a criminal because of your ancestry and supposed crimes in your attempt to survive and being sent to the other side of the world for an average of 14 years (though few ever returned) and being made to labour for the government and settlers through threats and actual violence sounds a lot like slavery to me just with a layer of convenient spin. And yes some of the convicts were actual criminals (antisocial but didn’t need to be) but most were just guilty of being Irish.
Hardly comparable the plight of Irish people stealing a loaf of bread to survive the tyrannical British rule through the centuries being sent to Van Diemens land and flying someone to Mars for downloading a movie! Your ignorance is revolting!
The slavery is happening again now with us underpaying and taking ridiculous expenses out of the meagre pays of Pacific Islanders currently working on our farms and employed through labour hire companies. Appalling!
Not only was the slavery described above a key driver of early capital accumulation, the whole convict system was a form of slavery. Convicts were assigned to various masters, as well as to Government work teams, to work at their direction for no pay. Interestingly the colonial state paid the cost of their food, clothing, chains, floggings and executions, so the people who had assigned convicts got their labour for nothing, without even having to buy them at auction. If the convict died, or ran away, or got sick or injured, a new one could be obtained under the same conditions. A key difference from other forms of slavery is of course, that most convicts’ sentences eventually expired, whereupon many took advantage of the system to build fortunes on the labour of other assigned convicts.
Slavery in one form or another was a critically important source of labour to the colonial project at least until the great strike in the Pilbara which started (I think) around 1946.
Alright, the first 2 got in with their chop, about convicts, in the slavery & indentured labour sweepstakes . And i’ll put back on the bottom rung, the aborigines,..as per usual ..Yes, it was sure a bloody hell penal colony for some, that’s for sure…..and then there were even the losers, further down, out of that…
It’s not a competition. Slavery (of black, white, and probably others) was a feature in the history of Australia. Fact.
For further details about ‘blackbirding’ read Cyril Pearl’s “Morrison of Peking” published by Angus & Robertson 1967, which goes into some detail about Morrisons reporting for the Age in Melbourne about his experiences as an ordinary seaman aboard “The Lavinia”, which sails from Port Mackay to the New Hebrides in 1882 to return to the islands a batch of sick ‘Kanakas’ and to pick up ‘new recruits’. Morrison wrote six instalments in the Leader under the heading “A Cruise in a Queensland Slaver, by a Medical Student”. The practice of ‘blackbirding’ is a gruesome and shameful episode in our history.
The failure for Australian’s to know about the genocide and slavery of indigenous people is another great example of the failure of the main stream media to educate Australians about our egregious past. It’s also an indictment on our public education system.
The Australian Indigenous people are in good company. The Savage Europeans have been raping and pillaging the globe for the last 500 years. Africans, Indonesians, Filipinos, South Americans, Mexicans Afghans, North Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Indians Pakistan all have been the subject of persecution by the white race.
The thing that the descendants of these white barbarians don’t realize is that it has always been the elites of the whites who are the real perpetrators of these crimes and through their media propaganda they have always been able to garner the support and the taxes of the Great Unwashed to execute their abuse and exploitation of the other races.
There is little left to rape and pillage now, and like Rome, the violence of the state will be turned inward against the ordinary person who questions the greed and power of the elites.
Marx was right. Capitalism is a revolutionary force. I is unsustainable on a planet with abundant, but still limited finite resources and so it cannot last forever. Things that can’t last forever don’t.
The ONLY resource that for all practical purposes unlimited, is sun light and that comes for free so the rent seekers who predominate in the elites can’t make a buck out. That’s why they hate it.
Sun light is free. That’s why they block it out – slip slop slap. They block it out, deny us the vitamin D, and make us look white in the process. It’s a win/win.