Workers in Bondage: The Origins and Bases of Unfree Labour in Queensland 1824–1916

By Kay Saunders

Based on thorough documentary research in archives and newspapers, Workers in Bondage begins with the origins of servitude during the convict era in Queensland before its separation from New South Wales in 1859. The study then focuses in on Queensland’s Pacific Islander labor force, examining the reconstruction of the Queensland sugar industry after the withdrawal of Islander labor and describing the realities of white labor and the early trade union struggles in the sugar industry. Underlying the text is an analysis of labor manipulation by capitalism in a new colony during a time of transition from slavery to indenture in the British Empire. This is a comprehensive and insightful academic examination of the little known history of the enslavement of Pacific Island workers in Australian convict-era industries, as well as a wider study of race relations in a frontier society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Queensland Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781921902109

Book preview

Index

Tables

Adult Population of Northern Districts, March 1846

Adult Population of Northern Districts, March 1851

Distribution of Melanesian Employment for 1868

Distribution of Melanesians in Queensland, 1871–91

Wages for White Workers, 1882

Ethnic Origins of Labour Force in Queensland Sugar Industry, 1888

Number of Recruits Taken from Selected Islands, 1863–1904

Percentage of Recruits Taken from New Hebrides, Solomons, Banks and Torres after 1890

Census Reports on Chinese, Indians, Japanese and Other Asians Resident in Queensland 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901

Sexual Distribution of Melanesians in Queensland, 1871–1901

Marriage Amongst Melanesian Males in 1906

Rate of Bounty, 1901 and 1905

The Proportion of Cane Harvested by White Labour

Racial Composition in Selected Sugar Mills in 1911

Figures

1. The original Gairloch Mill, Herbert River, early 1870.

(Source: Queensland Cane Growers Council)

2. The barquentine Sydney Belle at Bundaberg.

(Source: Oxley Memorial Library)

3. Solomon Islanders bound for Queensland.

(Source: Colonial Sugar Refinery, Sydney)

4. Clearing scrub on Ingham’s plantation, Herbert River 1874.

(Source: Oxley Memorial Library)

5. Macknade Plantation, 1874.

(Source: Oxley Memorial Library)

6. The Wailer Brothers, the original owners of Macknade, crossing the Herbert River in 1874.

(Source: Oxley Memorial Library)

7. Northern separationists true motives revealed.

(Source: Judge, 29 November 1890. La Trobe Research Library, Melbourne)

8. Plantation Structure: Status and Authority

(Source: author’s own composition)

9. The Dawn Muster at Hely’s Mona estate, Halifax, 1899

(Source: Oxley Memorial Library)

10. Plantation workers and overseer, Lower Herbert, early 1870s.

(Source: Oxley Memorial Library)

11. Clearing scrub, Buderim, late 1890s.

(Source: Queensland Cane Growers Council)

12. Melanesians in the Cane fields, Buderim, late 1890s.

(Source: Queensland Cane Growers Council)

13. Melanesian huts, Mackay 1880s.

(Source: Oxley Memorial Library)

14. Married Melanesian couples’ cottages, Buderim, late 1890s.

(Source: Queensland Cane Growers Council)

15. Studio portrait of a westernized Pacific Islander, turn of the century.

(Source: Oxley Memorial Library)

16. Worker lampoons the westernized Melanesian.

(Source: Worker, 31 August 1901)

17. Melanesian women hoeing cane with ganger.

(Source: F. Curlewis, The Australian Cane Sugar Industry. Its Development in Queensland, 1936)

18. Young Islander girl.

(Source: M. Enright’s Postcard Collection)

19. Daily condition of Melanesian children in Queensland late 1880s.

(Source: F. Curlewis, The Australian Cane Sugar Industry. Its Development in Queensland, 1936)

20. Solomon Islanders dancing in north Queensland.

(Source: CSR Sydney)

21. Propaganda from Queensland Kanaka Mission.

(Source: Not in Vain. What God Hath Wrought Among the Kanakas.)

22. Boomerang opposes further indenture.

23. Evangelical activity of the Queensland Kanaka Mission.

(Source: Not in Vain. What God Hath Wrought Among the Kanakas)

24. The Worker attributes blame for the 1894 Shearers’ Strike

(Source: Worker, 21 April 1894)

25. Figaro questions Sir Samuel Griffith’s integrity on the black labour question.

26. Uncertainty about the fate of black labour during the 1889 Royal Commission to enquire into the depression in the sugar industry.

(Source: Figaro)

27. Boomerang ponders the recommendations of 1889 Royal Commission.

28. Worker infers consequences from Griffith’s volte face.

( Worker, 9 April 1892)

29. Cane farmer’s family, early twentieth century

(Source: Oxley Memorial Library)

30. Rural capitalism swimmingalong.

(Source: Boomerang, December 1895)

31. The contentious issue of black labour in the Federation debate.

(Source: Mitchell Library Cartoon Collection)

32. The Bushman’s Future.

(Source: Worker, 14 May 1892)

33. The future of black labour in the sugar industry.

(Source: Mitchell Library Cartoon Collection)

34. Melanesians on the eve of their deportation.

& (Source: F. Curlewis, "The Australian Cane &

35. Sugar Industry. Its Development in Queensland", 1936)

36. Experimental Anglo-Australian cane cutters.

(Source: F. Curlewis, The Australian Cane Sugar Industry. Its Development in Queensland, 1936).

37. Freedom of contract.

(Source: Bulletin, 11 April 1891)

38. Fears about the initial introduction of indentured Italian labour into Queensland

(Source: Bulletin, 22 August 1891)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As I have been conducting research into this and related topics for a decade now, I have consequently incurred many intellectual debts.

I should like to acknowledge the consistent encouragement and constructive criticism and advice of Peter Corris, Kathryn Cronin, Susan Gardner, Adrian Graves, Mac Hamilton, Roger Joyce, Peter Lawrence, Ann McGrath, Carmel Shute, Bill Thorpe, Jan Walker and Duncan Waterson. Lyn Abnett, Pat Dobson, Kathy Dwyer, Sue Elsom and Mary Kooyman very tolerantly typed this often unruly manuscript. I should particularly like to extend my gratitude to the latter who produced the final manuscript.

The Denmans of Mackay and Toowoomba very kindly allowed me access to their family’s papers, as well as showing me the site of the Mackay plantations in the nineteenth century.

My parents, Eric and Elizabeth Saunders, have encouraged and sustained me for many years. My daughter, Erin Evans, has lived with my professional obsessions all her life and has shown remarkable tolerance and good humour.

Without the unstinting assistance and cheerful tolerance offered by Paul Wilson, Lee Macgregor and the staff of the Queensland State Archives, I could never have embarked upon this or any other historical project. They have always displayed a professional diligence and amicability to an often demanding researcher.

The Colonial Sugar Refining Company very kindly allowed me access to their excellent archives. I should also like to thank Maureen Purtell of ANU Archives of Business and Labour for her dedicated help. The Queensland Cane Growers ‘Council very kindly allowed me access to their records and gave permission to reproduce from their photographic collection.

The various staffs of the Fryer Collection, University of Queensland, Brisbane; Reference Section, University of Queensland Library; Oxley Memorial Library, Brisbane; Mitchell Library, Sydney; National Library, Canberra; La Trobe Research Library, Melbourne; Public Record Office, London; Rhodes House, Oxford; Victorian Public Record Office, Melbourne have all been most helpful.

I should like to thank the following libraries for permission to quote from their unpublished manuscripts: Mitchell Library; Oxley Memorial Library; Fryer Collection, University of Queensland; Rhodes House, Oxford.

I should like to thank the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History for permission to quote extensively from Masters and Servants: The Queensland Sugar Workers’ Strike 1911; the Journal of Pacific History for permission to quote extensively from Troublesome Servants: The Strategies of Resistance employed by Melanesians on Plantations in Colonial Queensland; and Raymond Evans, Kay Saunders and Kathryn Cronin and the ANZ Book Co. for permission to quote from one chapter, Dawn to Dusk. The Plantation Regime, of Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination (Sydney, 1975).

I should also like to acknowledge the diligent and cheerful work contributed by D’Arcy Randall, my editor at the University of Queensland Press.

Several of my academic colleagues have given me that consistent intellectual encouragement normally reserved for bright young men and they have partially restored my faith in male academics. Glen Barclay very diligently read this manuscript and his impeccable taste saved many a clumsy phrase from being published. Likewise Denis Murphy always offered me that sound practical assistance and generosity of spirit for which I am most truly appreciative.

Lastly and always most importantly, Raymond Evans sustained me with his willing and imaginative criticism as well as his humour and affection. His own meticulous scholarship has constantly been an inspiration to me.

INTRODUCTION

From the commencement of free settlement in 1842 in the northern districts of New South Wales until 1906, the institution of indentured service provided the mainstay for certain sections of rural industry. Its beginnings were hardly auspicious, for indenture had evolved in these northern districts in conjunction with the system of assignment of felons and the widespread reliance of pastoralists upon the unfree labour of ticket-of-leave holders and exiles. Like the convict, the indentured servant was legally bound in servitude to his or her master. Both of these categories were confined within highly authoritarian social structures. The situation where the white population was rigidly divided into the categories of free or bond was intensified by the brutal exigencies of the frontier where the invading British settlers fought the Aborigines for control of the land. Ultimately the blacks lost control and ownership of their vital land, and in many areas, where pastoralism replaced the traditional mode of production, they were forced to work for their conquerors. Their status resembled that of slaves, though they lacked what the moderate protection, the investment of capital in human resources, conferred upon chattels in societies such as the American Ante-Bellum South. Settler societies, particularly those containing plantation economies like Queensland, soon found that the conquered indigenous people could not provide either the large numbers or the consistency of application to work for the new proprietors. The problem of securing and maintaining a viable labour force which could be controlled and regimented could be solved, firstly, by using slaves or, secondly, by engaging coolies or other forms of imported bonded workers.

When indenture was established in what was to become Queensland, slavery in other English-speaking colonies or nations had become increasingly moribund and anachronistic. In Mauritius and in the West Indies, the particular forms of indenture which were substituted for outright chattel bondage differed only in legal definition. In certain respects, too, assignment in New South Wales operated as a variant of the slave mode of production where masters owned both the forces of production (the land, equipment, grain and livestock) and the labour power of their convict servants. These masters could not extract labour permanently from felons, as they owned property in the services rather than property in the person and only for the duration of the transportee’s sentence. This did not, however, alter the basic structure of the master-servant syndrome. In two vital regards – the existence of a modified system of slavery of felons and later the reliance upon imported non-European indentured servants-Queensland contained within it some elements that locked it unequivocally into patterns established in the slave-holding regions of the Empire. The successful if short existence of a classical plantation economy, at least with regard to the sugar industry until 1885, further intensified and reinforced these structural similarities.

Yet, despite these particular affinities, Queensland was never another British Guiana. Essentially, it presented a unique development among tropically-located settler societies. Unlike societies such as Mauritius, Fiji or Jamaica, Queensland never possessed a monocultural economy. In the nineteenth century the pastoral, sugar, mining and later wheat industries sustained the nascent economy. The survival of a classical plantation system depends upon its being part of an overseas economy, dominated by a metropolis where finance is generated, decisions made and managerial and technical skill recruited. The colonial segment merely provides the locus of production. Secondly, plantation economies are segmental, consisting of large numbers of independent estates each operating as a self-sufficient unit.¹ Certainly these characteristics were fully developed in the Queensland sugar industry until the depression of the 1890s. Most significantly, however, unlike the Third World, Queensland’s sugar industry was only one component within a diversified economy. The racial composition of Caribbean societies likewise differed markedly from that of Queensland. The form of a small European elite of owners or managers and technical officers and large numbers of non-white servile workers was largely confined in Queensland to the early pastoral industry and the plantation system. Other very significant segments within the society such as the capital and major provincial cities contained few non-Europeans. These patterns of urbanization contained a highly structured class system rather than the complex class/caste model which operated on the sugar estates and pastoral stations. Though the sugar industry was reconstructed on the basis of both plantations and central mills/small farms in the late 1880s for economic reasons, the crucial decision to transform the basis of labour from black to white workers was political in nature. Petit-bourgeois and working class political organizations, which were based upon ideological premises quite distinct from those of the sugar planters, were able to mobilize successfully against the substantially weakened ruling class’s ideology. Proprietors of large sugar estates throughout the 1890s and into the twentieth century clung tenaciously to the doctrine that sugar could only be profitably produced on the basis of the continued maintenance of widespread legal servitude of non European workers. They wanted to perpetuate the system whereby their profits could be maintained by keeping their non-European servants in appalling material conditions in an extremely morbid physical environment. Particularly when labour supplies were plentiful and their level of profit was high, they regarded these workers as expendable and replaceable. Only when the labour market diminished at a time when the industry was entering a highly speculative expansive period in the early 1880s, did they begin to reassess their methods. The solution was to locate and exploit new sources of labour rather than to improve the living standards and health of their existing workforce. Yet to regard bonded workers as passive, compliant individuals who meekly accepted their enforced situation is both naive and erroneous. Beyond the life imposed by the master through the daily work regimen and the meagre allocation of material resources, workers, particularly Melanesians who formed the largest numerical category, were able at first to maintain their own communities where their values and preferences predominated. Masters reluctantly regarded these sub-cultures within the plantation or pastoral station as necessary in order to maintain a viable labour force. But they did not so indulgently view the various strategies of resistance perpetrated by their bonded workers which challenged and undermined the smooth operation of the estate. They resorted to bullying, physical chastisement, violence and the legal system to enforce their wills upon their recalcitrant or rebellious servants. As the Melanesians who had served one term of indenture transformed themselves from servile bonded workers to wage-labourers, so too did their strategies alter. Instead of absconding from the plantation or farm, the usual practice of the indentured servant, the wage-labourer would negotiate demands and if unsatisfied, employ strike action.

Yet the white working class’s racist ideology did not allow them to regard these non-Europeans as fellow workers. Throughout the late 1880s and 1890, as the labour movement structurally organized and various newspapers such as the Bulletin, the Worker and the Boomerang became popular, they articulated an extreme manifestation of xenophobia and racism towards all non-white workers. Queensland, and the sugar industry in particular, were scrutinized carefully as the colonies began moves to federate. For the multi-racial communities in the sugar centres were seen as politically contaminating plague-spots in an otherwise democratic and progressive Australia, containing only sturdy people of British stock. The Melanesian and the Asian workers, regardless of any attempts on their part to trans form themselves into wage-labourers who were enthusiastic unionists, were characterized as forms of cheap and servile labour. Not only did they racially pollute and contaminate an otherwise healthy body politic, but they undercut heroic white workers. The hysterical and often pathological agitation aginst non-Europeans culminated in the expulsion of Melanesians and Asians by the newly-formed Commonwealth government and the dedication to a white and preferably British Australia.

Just as black workers had valiantly fought to transform themselves into wage-labourers who could employ the industrial tactics sui table to their status, such as collective bargaining and striking, white workers in the 1890s and sugar workers two decades later waged a similar struggle against employers who regarded themselves paternalistically still as masters. In the case of the shearers, the State mobilized itself in concert with the masters and used highly repressive legislation to defeat the strikers in 189. But though pastoralists were able to defeat and crush shearers in the short-term, they were not so successful in any permanent manner. For gradually they had to come to terms with an industrially organized and often militant white workforce. At the same time, Aboriginal workers on pastoral stations were unable to make any changes in their quasi-chattel status. In the sugar industry white labourers had been organizing into unions at the same time as the Melanesians were being deported. The 1911 strike effectively operated as a test case for two separate union ideals: the white workers were not indentured servants who obediently toiled for their masters and, secondly, the sugar industry was the preserve of the British labourer not the coloured alien. As the AWU gathered momentum and strength, it was able to enforce its rigid policy of white only upon employers. The struggles which workers regardless of colour were able to mount and sustain were indeed hard-fought and often relentless. Ultimately, the black workers’ endeavours were in vain, for the Melanesians were exiled and the Aborigines increasingly segregated. Having supposedly defeated their superior enemies, the non-European worker, the more organized sections of the white working class were thus forced to enter into ideological and industrial battles with the ruling class through the traumas of the War years.

NOTE

George Beckford, Persistent Poverty. Underdevelopment in Plantation Economies in the Third World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972).Back

CHAPTER I

Inescapable Exile

The Origins and Patterns of Servitude in the Moreton Bay District and the Darling Downs 1824–59

A decade before the emancipation of the slaves in the British Empire and during the post-Napoleonic war disorders in Britain, a penal settlement was established in Moreton Bay. Indeed, this settlement existed on the very limits of civilization where any sense of normalcy and human decency was abrogated.¹ It was inhabited by outcasts and their gaolers. All arrived compulsorily but for varying reasons. The felons were transported to atone for their transgressions. Through manifold and excruciating suffering they would expiate their sins. Their keepers too were essentially exiles: career soldiers who did their duty where slaves rebelled, when other nations were to be vanquished and when colonized peoples were to be subdued. The paths of the soldiers were chosen and Moreton Bay was only another step. Later, when free settlement was proclaimed in 1842, they were followed by those ambitious scions of the British aristocracy who came to make their fortunes in the hostile territory. These new settlers followed the instincts of the members of their class who had previously enriched themselves in the slave colonies of the Caribbean. Residence in the colonies might for them prove relatively short and extremely profitable. Wealth could be made from the profits extracted from the labour of assigned and ticket-of-leave convicts, the colonized blacks and indentured servants. These various forms of servitude, whether directly penal or me rely contractual, linked pre-separation Queensland with the slave and emancipist colonies within the British Empire.

In 1822 Commissioner Bigge, having thoroughly investigated the operation of transportation in Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales, recommended increased retribution, as it no longer possessed that special terror which alone might act as a deterrent against criminal disorder. The numbers of convicts sent to the Australian colonies had multiplied three-fold in the years from 1810 to 1820. In order to reaffirm that sense of grim dread and hopelessness, Bigge recommended that three new convict settlements should be established at Moreton Bay, Port Curtis and Port Bowen. Effectively he was disavowing the whole system of rehabilitation sponsored by Governor Lachlan Macquarie. The implications of this repudiation were both crucial and far-reaching for what later became Queensland.

Under the Transportation Act of 1717 (4 Geo. I.c.11) and later the Transportation Act of 1824 (5 Geo. IV.c.84) the property in the services of each transported offender was transferred directly to the Governor. He was also empowered to reassign or to deploy this property right at his own discretion. For the first thirty years of settlement in New South Wales, the state retained the services of a significant proportion of felons for subsistence agricultural labour, the construction of public roads, utilities and buildings. Though this was the dominant pattern until the early 1820s, another mode was also present. Governor Arthur Phillip had commenced the practice of assignment for private service. This relieved the British Treasury of expense and simultaneously endowed the colonial elite with free labour. The system of assignment essentially allowed the master to own property in the services of the felon for the duration of his or her sentence. Assignment most specifically represented a variant of the slave mode of production, with the master effectively owning the services of the convict for the duration of his term.² In Jamaica or Mauritius labour was compulsorily extracted from black slaves; in New South Wales it was extracted from British felons. Macquarie had not favoured this system, preferring that the state retain its overriding property rights. To this end, he sponsored and implemented an ambitious plan for the construction of public works. Essentially this meant a concentration of transportees in Sydney itself, for it was here that the public infrastructure was to be established.

When Macquarie assumed control on 1 January 1810, Sydney was relatively free of serious disorder. The metropolitan population had increased from around six thousand in 1810 to eight thousand twelve years later and the number of convicted offences in Sydney had risen from 380 in 1817 to 1369 in 1820.³ It was within this social milieu that Commissioner Bigge investigated colonial conditions and made his recommendations for future policy. In his estimation, Macquarie had erred with his concentration upon public works, for this had ensured that felons remained clustered in the metropolis. Furthermore, if the prosperity of the colony lay in the development of extensive agricultural and pastoral pursuits by well-endowed Britons untainted by the stigma of convictism, then the available labour force would be diverted from the public to the private sector. This policy seemingly contained some obvious advantages: the British government would be relieved of the financial burden incurred in the maintenance of its outcast felons; the colonial elite would be able to extract the entire profit from the convicts’ labour power and thereby would accumulate more capital.

Two basic policies emerged from recommendations contained in the Bigge Report. Firstly, further secondary detention centres for recalcitrant convicts reconvicted in the colonial courts were necessary. Some location in the Moreton Bay district was ideal, with its isolation, distance from Sydney and the virtual impossibility of escape.⁴ The proposal to send only short-term prisoners to Moreton Bay was not adhered to, for even in the first batch of convicts there was one man sentenced for life. Overall, the settlement was to receive eighty-eight persons with life sentences and a further eighty-one with fourteen year terms.⁵ The second policy, which affected the region particularly after the penal establishment had been removed in 1842, involved the assignment of convicts to wealthy rural land-holders. This would both ensure the removal of felons from the more comfortable metropolis and also aid in the establishment of viable capitalism, geared specifically to the export of merino wool for the expanding British market. Only in the northern district were both these recommendations applied. No more than a brief analysis of the operation of the Moreton Bay Penal Settlement is necessary, for it did not contribute directly to the subsequent development of bonded labour patterns. It existed for the sole purpose of severe and unmitigated punishment in the closed institutions of the gaol, whereas transported felons in the southern districts created viable economic infrastructures for both the private and public sectors. Rather, punishment instead of punishment and profit was the sole consideration.

On 1 September 1824 the Moreton Bay Penal Settlement was established at Red Cliff with twenty-nine prisoners. Its social structure was extremely hierarchical and authoritarian. The commandant was vested with total control over every person, whether military or bonded felon, and over every department of the establishment. He was assisted by about seven officials and soldiers, designated inferior free persons. Up to 100 enlisted soldiers might be stationed as guards. Below them were ranged various categories of bondsmen and women, ranging from the constables and overseers down to the punishment gangs.⁶ It was clearly impossible to distinguish between the punishment system and the labour system in general. Hard labour itself constituted punishment, inflicted with varying degrees of severity.

When settlement for free persons was finally declared in February 1842, vestiges of the penal regime remained. Even in October 1844, there were 114 convicts in the Moreton Bay district and fifteen months later 81 were still attached to the government offices.⁷ Furthermore the almost indescribably brutalizing hard work of those bondsmen and bondswomen physically tamed the environment for subsequent British habitation and partially established a public economic infrastructure.

Though Commissioner Bigge had presented his crucial report two