It was the sugar industry that brought to a head all the tensions within the Queensland, and indeed, Australian ruling class, over “coloured labour” and
“slavery” in the north. From 1863, over 60,000 Pacific Islanders were brought to Queensland to work under three year indentures, the vast majority in the sugar plantations. In response there was a long and bitter campaign against the labour trade, and it was one of the issues that divided ruling class politics.
35 Merivale, pp. 346-7.
The campaign against Pacific Island labour was conducted within the intellectual framework of anti-slavery. One of the first petitions taken up
against the use of Pacific Islanders, from residents of Brisbane in 1869, saw “the system of importing South Sea Islanders as labourers into Queensland as a step in the direction of slavery”.36 This accusation was made repeatedly in
parliamentary debates,37 and by Queensland Governor Musgrave (1883-88), who privately told Sir Robert Herbert, the Permanent Under Secretary for the Colonies (and former Queensland Premier), that the recruitment of Islanders was “a system & arrangements wh. are as much like slavery & the slave trade as anything can well be wh. is not avowed as such.”38 These were also the terms in which the issue was debated in ruling class journals. In one debate in the
Victorian Review, John Wisker declared:
The Kanaka is brought to Queensland in the capacity of a beast of burden… When he arrives on the mainland, he is bound hand and foot to his employer. Nothing is done for his mental or moral improvement.
He performs his task when he does not die under it, which latter event is a distressingly common occurrence… His wages, should he be fortunate enough to get them, are spent upon firearms and strong drink. He is not likely to cultivate any other tastes, or, indeed, to be permitted to cultivate any... From whatever point of view this wretched business be regarded it presents the same aspect. It is a slave trade.39
36 Quoted Ruth LL Tomkys, “Queensland Immigration 1859-1901”, MA thesis, University of Queensland, 1930, p. 69
37 See for instance, debate on Polynesian Labourers Bill in Queensland Legislative Assembly, 22 May 1877, from ORDLA, vol. XXIII, pp. 50-69.
38 Letter to Herbert, 3 Jan 1884. Musgrave’s own copy is loosely inserted into the book of his private letters, Sir Anthony Musgrave’s Private Letters, Oxley Library, Acc 334, tr 1863, A2/5/2.
39 John Wisker, “The victim of civilisation”, Victorian Review, vol. 6, no. 35, Sept 1882, p. 550.
The hegemonic status of the slavery argument can also be seen in the regularity with which supporters of Islander labour felt obliged to deal with it.40 Planters and their supporters argued that Islanders had freely contracted to work in Queensland for three years, and many words were spilled debating the degree to which Islanders had understood or consented to the reality of indenture.
After the system was destroyed by the Commonwealth’s Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901, popular, academic and semi-official histories almost always presented indentured labour on the sugar plantations as a form of slavery.41
But the late 1960s saw the emergence of a revisionist current.42 Researchers such as Peter Corris, Patricia Mercer, Carol Gistitin and Clive Moore delved into the experience of Islander communities in Australia and in the Pacific, using oral history and the documentary record to put Islanders, their lives, culture and agency at the centre. These were pathbreaking histories that greatly expanded, and in many ways decolonised, understandings of Island and Islander
communities. The revisionists rejected the idea that Islanders had been slaves, arguing that this represented them as passive victims. They particularly rejected the popular view that recruitment had been little more than the kind of
40 For example, Francis M Harricks, “Coloured labour in tropical Queensland”, Victorian Review, vol. 6, no. 36, October 1882, p. 660; also George J Perkins, Mackay. An essay upon the rise, progress, industries, resources, and prospects of the town & district of Mackay, HB Black & Co, Mackay, 1888.
p. 33.
41 Thomas Dunbabin, Slavers of the south seas, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1935; Edward Wybergh Docker, The blackbirders: A brutal story of the Kanaka slave-trade, Queensland Classics edition, Angus & Robertson, London, Sydney, Melbourne, 1981 (first pub 1970); Hector Holthouse, Cannibal cargoes, Rigby, Adelaide, 1969.
42 Clive Moore argues that “there never was a coherent revisionist school of thought relating to the Queensland labor trade”, but there is a definable group of historians, drawing on each other’s work, who make broadly similar arguments about the nature of the labour trade, and life and work on the plantations; see Clive Moore, “Revising the revisionists: The
historiography of immigrant Melanesians in Australia”, Pacific Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, June 1992, esp. p. 78.
kidnapping reminiscent of the African slave trade, which had been the central issue in debates at the time. For Clive Moore:
It is demeaning to the intelligence of the Melanesian people to presume that they presented themselves to be kidnapped from the same beaches on the same islands, generation following generation, for forty years or more. The majority made a definite decision to leave their islands to spend three or more years in Queensland: on Malaita this applies to as many as eighty percent of the recruits.43
The significance of the revisionist critique for this thesis is that it suggested that there was no real basis for fears of a slave, or semi-slave society, leaving us with the implication that the struggle against Islander labour was either nothing more than racism, or a proxy for other conflicts.44
There are major problems with the revisionist approach. It minimised the
difference between Islander indenture and wage labour in general; underplayed the role of coercion; and maximised the difference between the sugar plantation in Queensland and slavery in the American south. Thus, Queensland (and later Australian) liberals were seen to be legislating against Islanders, rather than against a danger to modern capitalism.
43 Clive Moore, Kanaka: A history of Melanesian Mackay, Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies and University of Papua New Guinea Press, Port Moresby, 1985, p. 47.
44 Saunders, Uncertain Bondage [thesis], pp. 480-81; DK Dignan, “Kanaka Political Struggle: An analysis of the attitude of conflicting groups to the introduction, and employment in
Queensland, of South Sea Island labour”, Third year honours essay, c1949, Fryer library, University of Queensland, pp. 33-37; Bryan Jamison, “Blackbirding in New Guinea waters? The 1884 voyage of the Hopeful and the Queensland labour trade”, BA (Hons) thesis, University of Queensland, 1990.
Certainly, a debunking of the mainstream and popular histories of the labour trade as little more than kidnapping was well overdue. But where the
mythologists saw only coercion, the revisionist historians admitted and
described some of it, only to generalise or periodise it away. So Clive Moore, for instance, agreed with Kay Saunders that perhaps 25-30% of recruitment
involved elements of illegality, but emphasised what he saw as the majority experience of free choice.45 Thus, as one experience was emphasised, the
opposite was neatly hidden. Neither did Moore allow for a mixture of coercion and “choice”, nor deal with the possibility that coercion coerced more Islanders than those immediately affected. When Moore pointed to the 80 per cent from Malaita who may have signed up voluntarily for plantation indenture, he left out the fact that 80 per cent of Malaitan recruitment occurred after 1885, by which point state supervision of recruitment had become fairly intense.46 Moore also tried to quarantine kidnapping and coercion to the early labour trade:
Recruiting in its early stages was primarily by deception and force. But kidnapping was not a continuing theme as the recruiting trade
progressed into the 1880s, 1890s, and 1900s. Recruiting became a
voluntary affair…as the islanders became aware of the real nature of the labour trade and life on the plantations…47
Adrian Graves rejected this explanation and periodisation:
45 Moore, Kanaka, pp. 45-7.
46 Moore, Kanaka, p. 25; Saunders, Uncertain bondage [thesis], p. 477. Peter Corris, Passage, port and plantation: A history of Solomon Islands labour migration 1870-1914, Melbourne University Press, Carlton (Vic), 1973, p. 43.
47 Clive Moore, “Used and abused: The Melanesian labour trade” in Verity Burgmann and Jenny Lee (eds), A most valuable acquisition, A people’s history of Australia, McPhee
Gribble/Penguin, Fitzroy and Ringwood (Vic), 1988, p. 156.
coercion was not confined merely to an “early and brief” period of the labour trade. The best documented cases of kidnapping, involving more recruits and recruiters than previously, occurred in the 1880s, twenty years into the system, and there were isolated instances reported in the 1890s.48
He argued, instead, that the methods of recruitment reflected changes in the recruiting industry, and the demand for labour on the plantations. The period of the worst abuses, around 1883-4, coincided with the height of a sugar boom, when recruitment into Queensland reached record levels. Deryck Scarr
described an intensification of Melanesian Islanders’ “long-standing attitude of alternate attraction and repulsion in relation to labour vessels…during the 1890s [when] [i]nstances of firing on the boats greatly increased,” the reason being the resentment of the elders at the recruitment of the young men.49
Graves saw this new Pacific history as lurching into the methodology of neo-classical liberalism, assuming that “the decision to migrate was rational and progressive, the operation of free choice in the context of a competitive labour market.”50 So Carol Gistitin, for instance, saw Islanders as “migrants by
choice…attempting to maximise their opportunities,”51 with little
acknowledgment of the structural constraints within which any choices were made. Graves argued instead that “expansive, intrusive capitalism” disrupted
48 Adrian Graves, “The nature and origins of Pacific Islands labour migration to Queensland, 1863-1906” in Shula Marks and Peter Richardson (eds), International labour migration: Historical perspectives, Maurice Temple Smith, Hounslow (UK), 1984, p. 114.
49 Deryck Scarr, Fragments of empire: A history of the Western Pacific High Commission, 1877-1914, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1967, p. 160.
50 Graves, Nature, pp. 113-4
51 Carol Gistitin, Quite a colony: South Sea Islanders in central Queensland 1867-1993, Aebis Publishing, Brisbane, 1993, p. 4
the traditional Islander economy and society, which in turn created both personal and social crises that drove many individuals to either seek or accept indenture. As part of this process, the recruiters found compradors within the coastal communities of the Melanesian Islanders, who used a mixture of coercion and the manipulation of traditions of reciprocity to mobilise new recruits for the labour trade from inland villages. For this they were rewarded with tobacco, guns and other commodities, items that further strengthened their local and regional position and their ability to produce further recruits. It also deepened the dependence of Islanders on this trade, perpetuating the cycle of labour recruitment.52
But if Graves gave us a subtle analysis of structure and agency in recruiting, he joined the revisionists in rejecting any comparison with the slavery of the American South, which was the approach taken in Kay Saunders’ celebrated PhD thesis.53 Graves made essentially two arguments: firstly that the legal status of slaves and indentured Islanders was fundamentally different, that the Islanders “were both treated and behaved essentially as wage labourers”; and secondly that planters were “enthusiastic profit-maximisers”.54 The latter is, of course, no argument against the idea that Queensland saw something akin to slavery. Robert W Fogel and Stanley L Engerman, in their controversial book Time on the Cross made the same claim for the ante-bellum planters of the American South,55 and critics of slavery hostile to Time on the Cross have not
52 Graves, Nature, pp. 124-38. Graves’ critique has been replied to by Clive Moore,
Historiography, and Ralph Sholomowitz, Marx and the Queensland labour trade, Working Papers in Economic History, No. 54, May 1992, Flinders University of South Australia.
53 Saunders, Uncertain bondage [thesis].
54 Graves, Nature, pp. 224-5. See also Clive Moore, Kanaka, pp. 153-5, 197-9.
55 Fogel and Engerman, Time on the cross, vol. 1, esp. pp. 67-78.
disputed the profit-seeking orientation of the slave-owners. Even Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Fox-Genovese, who opposed any notion that planters were capitalists, situated New World slavery as one of the projects of profit-seeking merchant capital; the American South was “in but not of the capitalist world”;
its plantation economy “embedded in a world market”, based on relations of production that were pre-capitalist.56
There is, of course, no argument that the legal status of slaves was radically different from that of indentured labourers, nor that the indenture system in Queensland was not chattel slavery. Moreover, historians as varied as Moore, Saunders and Graves have pointed to the increasing role played in the sugar industry, from the late 1880s to 1906, by so-called “time expired” labourers who had served out their indentures, stayed in Queensland and became wage
labourers. But for the period covered by this thesis, most Islander labour in the sugar industry was provided by indentured labourers. The relevant question is not: were indentured Islanders slaves? but, Did the coercion and unfreedom involved in the indenture system create economic, social and political structures that involved a dynamic similar to that of slavery? Moore, for instance, has acknowledged that the legal end of slavery in the British empire in the 1830s did not necessarily lead to any significant change in “the related socio-economic and concomitant juro-political structure of an ex-slave society”.57
56 Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D Genovese, Fruits of merchant capital: Slavery and bourgeois property in the rise and expansion of capitalism, Oxford University Press, New York, 1983, pp. 16-18.
57 Moore, Kanaka, pp. 197-8.
In order to better understand the dynamic of plantation production in
Queensland, it is worth reviewing the general nature of wage labour, and its importance for capitalists and the capitalist system. For Marx, wage labourers are completely dispossessed of any means to sustain themselves outside wage labour. They must find the means to keep themselves alive—food, shelter, clothing, and the means to reproduce their ability to work—by purchasing commodities in the market place. Wage labourers have no means of raising the money required to buy those subsistence commodities other than to offer for sale their capacity to labour, their labour-power, to an employer. The “freedom”
of free labour lies in the freedom the worker has to dispose of their labour power as their own commodity, which includes the freedom to choose the employer to whom they sell it.58 The corollary of this freedom for the worker is the freedom of the employer to stop purchasing a worker’s labour power, to quickly get rid of surplus or unsuitable employees. All the traditional
obligations and bonds which tied ruler and ruled to each other are broken by a relationship that embodies both “freedom” to move jobs, and the tyranny of insecurity for the worker. The dynamism and extraordinary productivity of capitalism are inseparable from these relations. For the worker there is also the freedom to choose from competing subsistence commodities. Indeed the ability to choose the nature of one’s subsistence, although limited in reality, represents one of the major incentives for workers to offer employers careful and intense labour. The business of producing commodities for the subsistence of the working class thus became an arena for capitalist enterprise, competition and profit-making, and a central part of the Australian colonial economy.59
58 Robert Miles, Capitalism and unfree labour: Anomaly or necessity?, Tavistock Publications, London and New York, 1987, pp. 20-26.
A brief consideration of these basic propositions immediately exposes severe problems for the idea that indentured labour in some way resembled wage labour. Queensland sugar planters turned to indentured labour precisely to avoid “free labour” relations of employment. They constantly complained that white labourers were “unreliable” because they would move on if they found conditions intolerable or go on strike when the planter was most vulnerable.
Sugar cane must be crushed within hours of harvesting or else a large
proportion of the sugar is lost.60 Strategically timed strikes are a problem faced by all employers, but the sugar plantations were mostly in areas without a
“mature” labour market. One of the fiercest critics of indentured labour was the southern Queensland sugar planter, Samuel Grimes, who was able to find employees from the general labour market in and around Brisbane.61 But most plantations were in the north, and the sugar industry was central to the
colonisation of coastal Queensland, constantly pushing the frontier of European settlement further north. The solution of the planters was to staff their
plantations with labourers who could not go on strike, who could not be
dismissed, who had to be given the means of subsistence every day, whether or not they worked or worked well, and who had to be paid in full at the end of
59 Of course there is not a lot that is genuinely free about this arrangement. Marx has eloquently described the violence and state intervention used to forcibly dispossess millions of their means of making a living, and to impose on them the obligation to offer themselves for employment to capitalists; see Karl Marx, Capital: A critique of political economy, vol. 1, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1954, pp. 667-93.
60 Evidence of William Langdon, manager at the Pyramid Plantation, Cairns, Mon 14 Jan 1889,
“Report of the Royal Commission appointed to inquire into the general condition of the sugar industry in Queensland, and to report upon the causes which have led to the present
languishing condition of the industry throughout the colony, the best means to be adopted for reviving and maintaining its prosperity, and generally, upon the prospects of tropical
agriculture in Queensland: Together with minutes of evidence and the proceedings of the Commission and appendices”, Queensland, V&P Legislative Assembly, 1889, vol. IV p. 126.
61 Hume Black speech in debate on Pacific Islands Labourers Act Amendment Bill, Tues 5 Feb 1884, in ORDLA Qld, vol XLI, p. 253.
their three years’ indenture however well or badly they worked. Virtually none of the mechanisms of incentive or self discipline which are so fundamental to free wage labour were at work here.62
Having resolved that reliable and cheap labour was essential, the planters copied the indenture system of the post-slavery colonies. The Pacific Islanders they imported were bound to an employer for a full three years, had no right to change masters, and were distributed to employers largely according to deals made with shipping companies and recruiting captains.63 Employers claimed they tried to keep Islanders from the same village or Island together to ensure greater harmony and productivity, but this was essentially their choice. Clive Moore and others have documented the many ways in which this bondage was (very) partially circumvented by employers, including the hiring out of their labourers for short periods to others,64 but these in no way changed the fundamental nature of the relationship. While the system of indenture meant that the individual labourer was released from their bondage after three years, new recruits meant that, for employers and the Island communities, the system was ongoing.65
In the absence of strong economic incentives, or any culture of wage labour amongst the indentured labourers, planters turned to violence to extract labour.
In the absence of strong economic incentives, or any culture of wage labour amongst the indentured labourers, planters turned to violence to extract labour.