Australia’s history with slavery

A recent Red Flag article (“Labor’s PALM scheme is modern slavery”, by Priya De) outlines the PALM scheme, a policy facilitating agricultural production based on nearly slave conditions for many immigrant labourers. This is far from the only instance of unfree labour in Australian history.

The use of highly exploited, unfree labour in Queensland is as old as the state and former colony itself. From the mid-1860s until 1906, the indentured labour trade, also known as “blackbirding”, was one of many foundational crimes in the history of early White Australia.

In his 2006 doctoral thesis, The making of White Australia, historian Phil Griffiths writes that colonial planners and agriculturalists “were convinced of the racist myth that ‘white men’ could not safely do manual labour in tropical climates”. The high instances of disease and exhaustion, owing to the arduous work of plantation production, would be too high a barrier for white farmhands, they believed. A better acclimatised labour force appeared as the logical alternative: Pacific Islanders.

There was an economic logic to this racist idea. Islander labour, especially if indentured, was far cheaper than hiring whites. Workers from Vanuatu, Kanaky (New Caledonia) and Papua New Guinea, as well as some from Indonesia, Malaysia and south Asia, were brought to Queensland in the tens of thousands.

The Queensland government estimates that, of the approximately 65,000 brought to Australia, one-third died on plantations, not including those killed during “recruitment” and transport. Three-year, locked-in contracts with an employer bound Islander workers. They were to be paid at the end of their contract, and only then were they allowed to find employment elsewhere.

Workers performed a range of tasks, predominantly on sugar plantations. They cultivated fields, planted sugarcane, cut and harvested, refined and milled. The workers also maintained the plantations and performed laborious tasks such as fencing and tree felling. Domestic tasks were often undertaken by women workers, who were responsible for sustaining the workforce as well as the landlords and plantation owners.

Living conditions were squalid: cramped living quarters, minimal leisure time and little access to the world beyond the plantation. Workers faced harsh restrictions, often being confined socially and financially to the plantations and beaten if “out of line”.

In her book Workers in Bondage, Kay Saunders writes about two Islanders, nicknamed Tom and Dick, who received rations of maize meal and pollard, which is usually fed to animals, instead of flour. “When we spoke to Captain Whish about it he said ‘maize meal is good enough for blackfellows, flour for white men”, one of the Islanders is quoted as saying.

In his 1993 book Cane and Labour, Adrian Graves notes that resistance was not uncommon, often by feigning sickness, working extra slowly and, occasionally, going on strike. However, when bosses triumphed, workers faced the lash.

Indentured labour was chosen because it enabled the Queensland sugar industry, and the colonial economy more broadly, to remain profitable and competitive with its rivals in southern Asia and elsewhere within the British Empire.

While economic competition initially led to the demand for cheap labour, it later drove technical changes in the industry, which, from the 1880s, ultimately contributed to the abolition of indentured contracts. For instance, advances in milling resulted in the rise of small-farm production and reduced the demand for labour as the industry became more capital intensive.

Importantly, there were also political factors behind the abolition. Indenture had always been controversial within liberal ruling class circles. And the mistreatment of Islander workers sometimes sparked outrage. In 1885, the Brisbane Courier deemed the trade a “scandal to the Empire ... The labour trade must cease”.

Beyond moral objections, liberal opposition was also motivated by a desire for social stability and economic development. By the 1890s, with federation around the corner, the existence of a large, “backward” tropical plantation economy in the north of the continent was a sore point for leading parliamentarians and businesspeople who wanted Australia to develop a modern, industrialised economy. Brisbane’s The Week, a business journal, accused supporters of indenture of trying “to build up an aristocracy on a basis of cheap labour”.

A racially homogeneous society was considered essential to establishing a new federal government and a united Australia. A nationalism founded on Anglo-identification was created to instil fears of racial disloyalty from Asian and Islander populations, and to unite the white population.

By 1901, indentured labourers, brought to Australia by racist employers for exploitation, were being deported under the White Australia policy. Between Federation and 1906, roughly 7,500 workers were shipped back to the Pacific, many to islands they or their families had not come from.

As Labor continues to promote the exploitation of Islander workers today, we must not forget how the PALM scheme echoes one of Australia’s founding colonial crimes.