Historians who overstate the difference between indentured labour and slavery, also tend to misunderstand the nature of liberal objections to indenture, and why liberals feared a semi-slave regime. Rather than focus on extravagant
72 Quoted in Saunders, Uncertain bondage [thesis], p. 10.
statements made in election campaigns, the liberal position can best be understood by looking at more careful formulations. One of the most sophisticated expositions of the liberal position came in a speech made by Queensland Opposition Leader, Samuel Griffith, in an 1882 debate over
proposals to introduce indentured labour from British India. Griffith centred his argument on the dangers of a racially divided working class, a situation which would give rise to servile labour. By this, he meant
the labour of a class different from that of the ruling class in the country, and who were not admitted to the same political rights as the ruling class. That was servile labour. It was the labourer being held to do duty by stringent penal laws, and being carefully supervised and looked after by the Government. In a word, it was the opposite in every respect of free labour done by persons holding equal political rights with their governors, and who had a share in the management of the country. It sometimes took the form of slavery, by which was meant a form of labour in which the servant got no wages and was obliged to serve for life. That, he supposed, was the definition of slavery in its essence, but there was not much distinction whether the servitude was for life or for a term of years.73
The experience of other countries was that “in every case the existence of a large servile population was inconsistent with the existence of free institutions.”
Getting rid of slavery had involved “a great convulsion” in the United States, and, he might have added, a great social struggle in Britain as well. For Griffith as for Merivale, the issue wasn’t as narrow as slavery; indeed the social and economic structure of the former slave colonies was just as much to be rejected.
Jamaica and the other West Indies Islands “were not fit for free institutions…
73 ORDLA Qld, 1882, vol XXXVII, pp. 188-9, my emphasis.
and they were reduced to the position of a Crown colony, which was practically an official oligarchy.” British Guiana:
was a very rich country, he believed, with a comparatively small number of large plantations, a large population mostly of servile labour, and the government of the country was in the hands of something less than 200 persons; and it was perfectly clear that so long as the civilisation of that colony went on in that way free institutions could not be applicable to it.
If they turned to Mauritius they found very much the same state of things. The European population, he believed, was something under 20,000—not much over 10,000—and the Indian population was a quarter of a million. They were governed by what he called just now “an official oligarchy.” Of course free institutions such as they had in the Australian colonies could not possibly be applied to a state of society like that.74
William Brookes, a Brisbane ironmonger, was perhaps the most famously obsessive campaigner against Pacific Island labour in Queensland. In an 1884 debate on the new Liberal government’s Pacific Islands Labourers Act of 1880 Amendment Bill, Brookes attacked the high mortality rate of Islanders, arguing that they had been worked to death.
The evil of coloured labour was that it placed the servile labourer too much under the control of the white man. They might not call that slavery, but it was akin to it—cousin to it; and unless they were very careful it would soon degenerate into slavery.75
The liberal attack on “slavery” was in reality an attack on the building of an unfree, racialised workforce, a structure which had chattel slavery at its
74 ORDLA Qld, 1882, vol XXXVII, p. 189.
75 ORDLA Qld, 1884, vol XLI, p. 355.
extreme. The dangers that earlier theorists had seen in slavery were extrapolated to become problems with any racialised society, and the intellectual structure of anti-slavery was thus mobilised.
So when debating the 1877 Polynesian Labourers Bill in Queensland, Albert Hocking argued that, “When those men were exclusively employed in manual labour, it also had the effect of degrading manual labour in the eyes of
Europeans.”76 Queensland Premier, Sir Samuel Griffith, made the same point to Governor Musgrave in 1885: “the function of manual labour is regarded as degrading, and if any numbers of the white race continue to be engaged in it, they degenerate in social estimation, and are looked down upon as ‘mean whites’.”77 It is important to note that this is not an argument that Islanders competed with white labourers, although that point too was made. This is an argument that manual labour became racialised by the use of indentured,
“coloured” labourers, and the result was that manual labour was no longer acceptable to white workers.
A second major element to this argument revolved around the idea that a racially divided society would give rise to caste distinctions, with society
tending to divide “into distinctly marked upper and lower classes, and superior and inferior races, and hence to acquire aristocratic habits and institutions”, as AJ Ogilvy put it.78 Again, this was an idea directly inherited from the anti-slavery movement and Ogilvy made an explicit connection, warning: “As the
76 ORDLA Qld, 1877, vol XXIII, pp. 50-69.
77 Quoted in Saunders, Uncertain bondage [thesis], p. 229.
78 See, for instance, AJ Ogilvy, “National Character--Part 1: A sketch. By an evolutionist”, in The Sydney Quarterly, vol. III, no. 11, Sept 1886, p. 535.
Northern States of America were to the Southern, so are Victoria and South Australia on the one hand to Queensland and Carpentaria on the other”.79 For Brisbane’s liberal paper, The Week, McIlwraith’s conservatives and their
campaign for Indian coolie labour for the sugar industry, “aimed to build up an aristocracy on a basis of cheap labour; criminal expirees, Chinamen,
Polynesians, East Indians, Malays”.80 Such commentary was racist, but there was far more than racism involved here.
The argument about an incipient aristocracy tapped into a rich vein of mainstream, bourgeois thought in Australia, which celebrated the struggle against the “slavery” of convictism, imposed by would-be squatter aristocrats.
The 1870s and 1880s saw much local literature on the theme of convict life, the highpoint of which was Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life. Clarke’s politics are suggested by his long association as a writer for the conservative Argus newspaper in Melbourne. In an obituary for Clarke, the Melbourne banker, Henry Gyles Turner, described one of the main themes of His Natural Life as,
“The dehumanizing effect upon the officials, of the exercise of arbitrary, irresponsible despotism”.81
79 Ogilvy, National character, 535. According to David Brion Davis, Sir James Stephen, later British Prime Minister, had argued that, “the root of the problem [with slavery] was the existence of a master class which was allowed to play the part of despot over what are in effect British subjects.” pp. 166-7.
80 The Week, 5 January 1882, p. 12. It is worth noting that The Week opposed the seamen in the 1878 strike over the ASN replacing Anglo-Australian with Chinese labour, on the kind of liberal grounds argued by the Sydney Morning Herald.
81 in “Marcus Clarke”, Melbourne Review, vol. VII, no. 25, January 1882, p. 12.