Slavery in Australia
Slavery in Australia has existed in various forms from colonisation in 1788 to the present day. British settlement relied heavily on convicts, sent to Australia as punishment for crimes and forced into labour and often leased to private individuals. Many Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders were also forced into various forms of slavery and unfree labour from colonisation. Some Indigenous Australians were unfree labourers until the 1970s.
Pacific Islanders were kidnapped or coerced to come to Australia and work, in a practice known as blackbirding. Labourers were also imported from India and China, and employed in various degrees of unfree labour. Legal protections varied and were sometimes not enforced, particularly with workers who were effectively forced to work for their employers and would often go unpaid.
Australia was held to the Slave Trade Act 1807 as well as the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, which abolished slavery in the British Empire.
Types of slavery
Convicts
Many of the convicts transported to the Australian penal colonies were treated similarly to slave labour. William Hill, an officer aboard the Second Fleet, wrote that "the slave traffic is merciful compared with what I have seen in this fleet the more they can withhold from the unhappy wretches, the more provisions they have to dispose of at a foreign market, and the earlier in the voyage they die, the longer they can draw the deceased's allowance to themselves". Once the convicts arrived in Australia they were subjected to the system of "assigned service", whereby they were leased out to private citizens and placed entirely under their control, often forced to work in chain gangs. The unwillingness of wealthy landowners to give up this cheap source of labour was a key factor in why penal transportation persisted for so long, especially in Van Diemen's Land where "assigned service" continued to be widespread until the 1850s.Coolies
With the ceasing of convict transportation to New South Wales becoming imminent by the late 1830s, colonists required a substitute cheap form of labour. In 1837 a Committee on Immigration identified the possibility of importing coolie labourers from India and China as a solution. John Mackay, an owner of indigo plantations in Bengal and a distillery in Sydney, organised the import of 42 coolies from India who arrived on 24 December 1837 on board Peter Proctor. This was the first sizeable transport of coolie labour into Australia and Mackay leased most of them out as shepherds to work at John Lord's Underbank land-holding just north of Dungog. The contracts included a 5 or 6 year term of indenture with food, clothing, pay and shelter to be provided, but many absconded, due to reasons of these conditions not being met. The coolies were also subject to assault, slavery, and kidnap.Government enquiries delayed further coolie importation, but in 1842 a number of colonists, including William Wentworth and Gordon Sandeman, formed an association to pressure the colonial government into allowing further intakes. The association declared that should this be permitted, they would be prepared to adopt principles which Secretary of State for War and the Colonies Edward Stanley had put forth "framed with a view to secure the protection" of the labourers. They wrote that coolies had "exhibited a remarkable standard of honesty, sobriety, and thrift – the latter being strongly exemplified in the sums which many of them have deposited in the Savings Bank, during a few years service." They argued that the practice would be mutually beneficial, positing that wages in New South Wales were "so much superior" to those in India.
The following year, Major G. F. Davidson imported 30 Indian coolies into Melbourne, and in 1844 Sandeman and Phillip Freil organised a shipment of 30 Indian coolies, most of whom were sent to work on their properties in the Lockyer Valley. Wentworth and Robert Towns arranged a shipment of 56 Indian coolies who arrived in a state of starvation in 1846. These coolies went either to labour on Wentworth's pastoral properties such as Burburgate on the Namoi River or worked as servants at his Vaucluse House mansion. Several were imprisoned with sentences of hard labour for absconding. Some were leased out to Helenus Scott's Glendon property in the Hunter Valley – it was alleged that four or five of these died of "a terrible disorder," to which Scott countered that two died of lung inflammation; five were imprisoned after refusing to work on account of not having received summer clothing, cavalierly rejoicing "Gaol–very goot––no work gaol."
Indian coolie transportation was largely discontinued after this but the first shipment of 150 Chinese coolies arrived in Melbourne in 1847 aboard the brig Adelaide and another 31 arrived in Perth a year later. Toward the end of 1848, Nimrod and Phillip Laing brought a further 420 mostly Chinese coolies into the Port Phillip District. Many of these coolies were abandoned, perished in the bush, were jailed, or were found wandering the streets of Melbourne with no food or shelter. Around another 1500 Chinese coolies were shipped into Australia up to the year 1854 with Robert Towns and Gordon Sandeman again being the principal organisers of the trade. A number of scandals occurred that caused a government select committee to be formed to investigate the importation of Asiatic labour. The inquiry found that 70 coolies had died aboard General Palmer during the voyage from Amoy to Sydney and that others had died from sickness once in Australia. There were no berths, bedding, medical, or toilet facilities available on the vessel and a great deal of kidnapping was involved in the recruitment process. The poor conditions on board the vessel Spartan, chartered by Robert Towns, sparked a rebellion of coolies against the crew of the ship. The second-mate and ten of the Chinese were killed before the captain was able to regain control. Out of nearly 250 coolies who had embarked on Spartan, only 180 arrived in Australia. These events together with concurrent disasters in the Chinese coolie trade to Cuba and Peru, ended Asian coolie transportation to Australia by 1855. From 1858, Chinese migration to Australia again spiked due to the gold rushes, but this was mostly voluntary travel.
Forced Indigenous labour and stolen wages
From the early stages of the British colonisation of Australia right up until the 1960s, Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders were used as unpaid labour in many sectors such as the pastoralist industry, beche-de-mer harvesting, pearling, the boiling down industry, marsupial eradication, and prostitution, they were also used as household servants. In return for this labour, the Indigenous people were given portions of inexpensive commodities such as tobacco, rum, slop-clothing, flour and offal. Trade in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and adolescents was often sought after. Children were often taken from Aboriginal camp-sites after punitive expeditions and they were used as either personal servants or as labour by the colonists who took them. Sometimes these children were taken very far away from their lands and traded to other colonists. For instance, Mary Durack described how one of her relatives in the Kimberley region bought an Aboriginal boy from Queensland for a tin of jam.In Australia's early years, colonists debated whether the conditions under which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people worked breached laws against slavery in the British Empire. In the pastoralist sector, unpaid labour also allowed Aboriginal people to stay on their land instead of being forced off or massacred.
Anti-slavery campaigners described the conditions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander labour in northern Australia as slavery as far back as the 1860s. In 1891 the British journal Anti-Slavery Reporter published a "Slave Map of Modern Australia".
In Queensland, the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 and successive legislation allowed the Protector of Aborigines to keep wages in funds which were never paid out. From 1897, no person could employ Indigenous labour in that state without the permission of a Protector. The Protector, usually a policeman or government official, had full control of the contract with the employer. Fraud was common, whereby the Protectors would collude with the employers, mostly pastoralists, to underpay or not pay the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers. Those who refused to work were jailed, threatened with removal or denied access to food. Aboriginal settlements were run as depots for cheap labour where a 20% levy was placed on the inmates' already meagre wages, with the remainder held in a departmental trust account. The money in this account was subject to additional levies, bureaucratic corruption and also appropriated for government spending. The interest earned also went to the government not the wage earner. Aboriginal workers had to get permission from the Protector to make withdrawals and asking questions about their money were often met with the workers being jailed or otherwise punished. This system has been described as "economic slavery" and existed in largely the same format in the state until the mid 1970s.
After Federation in 1901, where Aboriginal labour was legislated as requiring payment in money, these wages were often kept in bank accounts that could not be accessed by them, with the money being redirected elsewhere by government bureaucracies.
Through the 20th century, the British Commonwealth League, the North Australian Workers' Union, anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt, artist Albert Namatjira and others raised concerns about the slave-like conditions under which many Aboriginal people worked.
The Aborigines Act 1911 gave South Australian police powers to “inspect workers and their conditions” but not to enforce change.
On cattle stations in the Northern Territory, Aboriginal workers not only lived in very poor conditions, but they were given no money, only food. Clothing was lent but had to be returned. The Aboriginals Ordinance 1918 allowed the non-payment of wages and forced recruitment of labour in the NT. NT Protector Cecil Cook noted that Australia was in breach of its obligations under the League of Nations Slavery Convention in the 1930s.
When wages started being paid with cash in the 1950s and 1960s, they were still much less of white people doing similar work. In 1966 the NT's Wave Hill walk-off, a strike by Gurindji workers led by Vincent Lingiari brought international attention to the injustice of the system, and eventually led to the government mandating equal pay from December 1968. However, at the same time, mechanisation of the stations led to most workers being laid off, and the policy of assimilation meant that the government was placing Aboriginal people on reserves with minimal facilities instead.
Legislation governing and regulating the forced employment of Indigenous Australians continued until the 1970s in some states.