Workers in Bondage: The Origins and Bases of Unfree Labour in Queensland 1824-1916
213
Workers in Bondage: The Origins and Bases of Unfree Labour in Queensland 1824-1916
213eBookSecond Edition, Second edition (Second Edition, Second edition)
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| ISBN-13: | 9781921902109 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Queensland Press |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2013 |
| Series: | Pacific Studies Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 213 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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Workers in Bondage
The Origins and Bases of Unfree Labour in Queensland 1824-1916
By Kay Saunders
University of Queensland Press
Copyright © 1982 Kay SaundersAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-921902-11-6
CHAPTER 1
"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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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". 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 decades before, its ramifications still affected the Moreton Bay and Darling Downs districts. The first squatters such as the Leslie brothers, Arthur Hodgson and Gilbert Elliott, entering illegally before the official 1842 proclamation, were accompanied by both assigned and "ticket-of-leave" convicts. With the unprecedented demand for labour and the subsequently high wages, an unskilled pastoral worker could command £2610s annually with "found" by 1838. As Hugh Gordon confided to Ann Leslie Davidson in April 1837:
Servants are quite the pest of your life, endeavouring to do the very contrary of what you order ... Both for my own and their interest, it would be to me the greatest pleasure to award them for their good services, instead nothing will do but the lash, horrid indeed!
Davidson's brother, George, expressed similar sentiments:
Whenever I 'find them out' at ... [stealing], I have only to send them [to a magistrate] ... to get 60 or 100 lashes or send them to an ironed gang for a year or so where some hundreds of men are made to work in chains.
It was never simply that these assigned felons were attractive because they were a cheap form of labour. Their servile status gave the private master far greater rights and authority than he could ever enjoy with indentured servants who themselves did not experience the doubtful freedoms of the wage-labourer.
In the years just preceding the occupation of the Darling Downs nearly 70 per cent of the nearly thirty-eight thousand transportees in New South Wales were assigned to rural masters. If the primary object of transportation was severe and unmitigated punishment, it was to be accomplished by these free settlers to whom these felons were summarily assigned. Since legally only magistrates could order actual physical chastisement to insubordinate or unruly convicts, it logically follows that this whole process of compulsory and enforced labour to masters must necessarily have constituted the intended punishment. As E. Lilburne in his passionate indictment of penal servitude argued:
[Felons] are assigned to the masters for reformation, but the master's object is profit. His contention is to produce as much labour out of his slaves as possible; when one is worked out, there is another ready. The incentive to good conduct and industry is the lash.
George Arthur, a gentleman who found no incompatibility between his role as governor of Van Diemen's Land and director of the well-endowed Van Diemen's Land Company, felt that masters should not feel guilty. Without any trace of irony, he wrote.
Supposing the object of the proprietors in the West Indies and the settlers in Van Diemen's Land to be the same – the obtaining of as much labour as possible from their slaves ... why should [they] endeavour to reach the same port by steering in opposite directions?
Clearly if unintentionally Arthur delineated the essential status of the convict system as a variant of the slave mode of production.
As the Report of the Select Committee into the Renewal of Transportation in 1846 contended:
The result of this [assignment] system then was that the ... [master] was in fact an unpaid superintendent interested in the labours of the convict, but restrained, at the same time, from acting towards him with hardness or injustice ... During the first stage of the convict's probationary career he received no wages. He was thus at every turn made sensible of the painful contrast between his position and that of free labourers, and that he was, during the whole course of his assignment, a slave of the law.
Whether a painful contrast was perceived by the assigned convict or by the "free" labourer is disputable. Perhaps it can be assumed that it was in fact the latter who regarded his own position as too close to that of the felon who was punished by enforced labour.
Assignment never became as dominant a factor in the Moreton Bay and the Darling Downs districts as it was in the South. Since assignment was to be abolished after July 1841 and squatters only began settling the Downs in 1840, this effectively precluded the extensive utilization of this labour category. An examination of the first census conducted into these districts in March 1846 confirms this pattern (see Table 1).
Masters in pre-separation Queensland regretted the demise of this system, for as one angrily claimed in the Moreton Bay Courier of 26 May 1847:
It was all very well when the assignment system was in force to employ the convict population as shepherds when the choice was not with the labourer but with his master, and when any neglect of duty was punishable immediately on conviction by that precious system of summary jurisdiction then in force; now the case is different, when the labourer has choice; they prefer the town at low wages to the country at high.
One case aptly illustrates the operation of this summary justice. Thomas Deadman, a freeman, and W. Turner, an assigned convict, in the lawful service of the Hon. Arthur Hodgson and Gilbert Elliott of Eton Vale on the Darling Downs were charged in September 1844 with "disobedience" and "neglect of duty". On being convicted Deadman was fined £2 but his convict confrere was given fifty lashes and returned to government service, presumably to work in irons on the public roads.
The statistics in Table 2 clearly show that felons holding "tickets-of-leave" almost totally comprised this enforced-labour category. Unlike assigned convicts, "ticket-of-leave" holders could earn wages though they were legally-bound to perform labour services for their designated master. In these regards, their position differed little from that of the non-convict indentured servant. They were, however, required to "muster" or report to a magistrate or some other nominated official and failure to do so would result in the forfeiture of the "ticket".
The "ticket-holders" in Moreton Bay and the Darling Downs were not part of the former penal establishment, but had arrived there with the masters from the southern districts after 1840. Though nominally they could choose or change their masters, they were however effectively tied to the employer in a curious form of paternalism. The master intent upon subduing the hostile unfamiliar environment, conquering the indigenes and creating a profitable livelihood for himself, deployed all his servants ruthlessly and unremittingly, whether they be bond, indentured or free (so rare as to be insiginificant). On some occasions master and servants were temporarily joined together by the bonds of ethnicity which could set aside their irreconcilable class differences. It is probable though not conclusive that all categories of servants worked in concert with the proprietors to exterminate the Aborigines. As George Leslie wrote to his brother William in January 1844:
The blacks have been annoying us greatly within the last 10 months. We have lost through them about 100 head of cattle Ernest Dalrymple and a party are out hunting the niggers ... [who] have killed a great many white men in this part of the country.
Undoubtedly too it was these servants, acting as shepherds and hutkeepers, who would be most vulnerable during reprisal raids by the Aborigines. Writing to his parents in November 1844 George Leslie complained that:
The blacks on the Downs have been a little troublesome lately, having killed 2 shepherds and a good many sheep. They did not injure any of our men but a few days [ago] ... they killed and carried off about 60 maiden ewes but, for that, we gave them what they will not forget in a hurry.
This summary retribution was effortlessly rationalized. The blacks were savages who murdered their servants, despoiled and often wantonly killed their livestock and prevented them from "developing" the bountiful resources of the land.
Though "ticket-of-leave" convicts could not reside in metropolitan areas, this did not necessarily mean that they had to be relegated to violent frontier districts like the Darling Downs of the 1840s. It may be wondered why they located themselves there. They formed an indispensable, consistent labour force during these initial years when the pastoral mode of production was being established. But more than this, it was they who endured far more hardship, deprivation, and isolation than their masters. Ultimately it was their lives which were taken by the blacks and not those of their worthy masters. A.C. Grant in his reminiscences of this period, remarked:
A large number of the white men employed in those days, were men who had been convicts and 'Pentonville exiles' ... Having arrived in the district with the first white settlers [they] seemed to attach themselves, in many cases, to the fortunes of their employers, apparently coming to the conclusion that they formed part and parcel of the station plant I ... found them faithful, efficient and often companionable and many times in latter days, I sighed for the true and honest services of the despised and desperate Van Demonian [sic] when suffering from the insolent and undeserved ingratitude of his free immigrant brother.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Workers in Bondage by Kay Saunders. Copyright © 1982 Kay Saunders. Excerpted by permission of University of Queensland Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Tables,List of Figures,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
Chapter I: "Inescapable Exile",
Chapter II: A Decent Cargo,
Chapter III: A Gentleman's Domain?,
Chapter IV: Life in the Barracks,
Chapter V: Adjustments to Servitude,
Chapter VI: "Troublesome Servants",
Chapter VII: The Realities of White Australia,
Abbreviations,
Bibliography,
Index,