No Slavery in Australia?

Slavery had no place in the founding vision
PAUL KELLY

Australian nationhood in 1901 was driven by powerful ideas in the public’s mind — that of an egalitarian, racist, democratic polity that had learnt from the mistakes of our two great exemplars, Britain and America.
Integral to this vision was a complete repudiation of slavery. This was a deliberate and calculated decision. It had overwhelming support from the Australian public at Federation. Australia’s founders were deeply aware of the catastrophic history of slavery in the US and were determined that Australia would not follow this disastrous path.
One of the key figures in Federation and the most influential of our early prime ministers, Alfred Deakin, enunciated the position of virtually the entire political class: “No slave is to be allowed to tread Australian soil at all. The mere suspicion of the taint of slavery is leading to the prohibition of the Pacific Island labourer.”
The Federation generation took ruthless steps to outlaw slavery in the cause of racial white egalitarianism, the essence of Australian nationalism. Their conviction was absolute: our nationalism would not tolerate slave or cheap coloured labour.
But this sentiment long predated Federation. It was critical to the vision of Governor Arthur Phillip in his conception of the colony of NSW. Phillip wrote: “The laws of this country will of course be introduced in NSW and there is one I would wish to take place from the moment His Majesty’s forces take possession of the country: that there can no slavery in a free land and consequently no slaves.”
This was the founding governor’s core vision of Australia. It was a path-breaking vision, far in advance of Britain and America. For Phillip, the settlement he was founding would be free; it would have convicts but no slaves. And this was written many years before slavery was abolished in Britain. Phillip’s vision revealed his intentions far transcended a mere convict colony.
It was also a sharp departure from the American narrative.
The American paradigm was a nation half built on slaves carried from Africa; the Australian paradigm became something different — a nation built on Aboriginal dispossession. Exploitation of Aboriginal people was ruthless and brutal.
Like many visions, Phillip’s was impaired in delivery. But when in history’s name has this not occurred? It is true there were many departures from Phillip’s vision. It is misleading, therefore, to think there was never any slavery or trace of slavery in Australia.
Indentured Aboriginals worked for farmers and squatters, some were forced to work in the west’s pearl industry, others in agricultural labour, yet others were victims of forced labour or prison gangs. The pictures are horrific. The moral vacuum at Federation was the plight of the indigenous peoples assumed to be a dying race and left with no role in the formal political, economic and constitutional structure.
In 1901 there were nearly 9000 Pacific Islanders working the Queensland cane fields, the legacy of about 50,000 who had been brought to the north or kidnapped in the last 40 years of the 19th century.
But Queensland sugar interests were subjugated post-Federation under the legislative power of the new Australian nation. Despite their heartfelt pleas to stay, the government was resolute. Many of the Islanders were Christians with established families and desperate to stay but more than 7000 of them were repatriated between 1904 and 1908.
These workers, many of whom were not paid, were sent home and the government and unions enforced a policy of exclusive white wage justice in the industry. Deakin, in effect, was delivering Phillip’s vision.
These facts suggest Scott Morrison was misleading in his remarks this week that “there was no slavery in Australia”. But Morrison was more right than wrong. His remarks were correct in reflecting Phillip’s vision at the founding of NSW. There is no disputing the point Morrison was making: the conception of the Australian nation had no place for slavery.
The entire impulse from the federated nation was to remove the remnants of slavery that had existed. Those critics of Morrison who ignore Phillip’s conception and the deliberate campaign from Federation to create a new nation devoid of slavery have violated and distorted the history far more than Morrison.
Both sides need to get the story right. Telling the truth to history is no one-way street, yet this is how it is presented and that project will assist nobody.
In truth, many of the critics fail to comprehend the forces that created the Australian nation. These were also embodied in the first laws passed by the new parliament, the Immigration Restriction Act, giving effect to the White Australia policy, followed by the Pacific Islands Labourers Act to remove the Islanders.
The idea, in the language of the day, was that Australia was to have no coloured labour, no paupers and no poor houses. This position was held most tenaciously by the Australian Labor Party. Deakin, as acting prime minister, said of the removal of the Islanders, known as Kanakas: “It has been universally admitted that the introduction of the Kanaka reflects no credit on Australia.”
The two remarkable features of the White Australia policy were its near universal support and its longevity. It prevailed until the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was supported by every prime minister until Harold Holt.
Judged by today’s standards the policy was deeply offensive but if you choose to act upon that offence you will need to pull down every statue to every politician for our first 66 years as a nation, from Deakin to Billy Hughes to John Curtin to Ben Chifley to Bob Menzies, as well as burn the paintings and torch the archives and Hansard for twothirds of the past century.
The founding fathers were also desperate to avoid the southern African as well as the American experience. The first prime minister, Edmund Barton, repudiated any notion of slave or cheap labour in the mines and plantations, saying, if that happened, “the whole civilised world will be the losers”.
You can deplore the racism at its heart but the companion to that racism was Australian equalitarianism, and that egalitarianism has evolved and survives today devoid of its racial dimension.
For too long that egalitarianism excluded indigenous peoples, an omission the nation still struggles to put right.
It is surely ironic — perhaps beyond belief — that Black Lives Matter activists in Australia this week are appropriating or linking to this country the American experience of slavery that ran for centuries, that was based upon the transportation of Africans to America, that became pivotal to the Southern economy, provoked a civil war and represents today a legacy far different from the challenges faced by indigenous Australians.
The most comfortable response to historical sins is to purge them from sight and memory. But such policies merely reflected the values of the time. Racial equality did not exist in the 19th and early 20th centuries when much of Africa, Asia and the Middle East was under colonial rule.
Trying to destroy the past is an excuse for not coming to grips with it — in its flaws and achievements. True history is complex, not simple. But conclusions are needed — and any notion of Australia as a nation built or dependent or organised on slavery distorts, not illuminates, our history.
The companion to (historical) racism was Australian equalitarianism, and that egalitarianism has evolved and survives today devoid of its racial dimension