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Stolen wages, slavery and talking truth

22 March 2007 - The issue of stolen wages and slavery hasn't captured the imagination of Australians or the media. DOUG HYND explores why.

The National Indigenous Times story 'Our Slave Past" (February 8, Issue 122) on the Senate Committee report on stolen wages was provocative. Yet the silence from the mainstream media was deafening. Australian political blogs remained oblivious to the story.

This is too important a story to remain buried in newspaper archives. But to get this issue out into public debate the following attitudes and arguments need to be confronted:

1.Stolen wages are history, and, incidentally, why don't 'they' get over it?

2. Stolen wages are not slavery and, in any case, we didn't have slavery in Australia (unlike those hypocritical Americans, carrying on about freedom and democracy).

3. Even if you can make some smartarse intellectual argument that we had slavery in Australia, we all really know that slavery couldn't have happened here, because that would have been "un-Australian'.

Let me make a few suggestions.

1. Stolen wages are not just a matter of history and injustice is something to be challenged, not something that you just 'get over'. The results of the theft of wages are still being felt in the Indigenous community today. One quote from the Senate committee report makes the point clearly:

"A number of witnesses directly attributed the current poverty of some Indigenous Australians to the discriminatory treatment and control of wages that Indigenous workers were subjected to through the 19th and 20th century. Mr Robert Haebich has coined the term 'consequential poverty' to describe this dynamic. Professor Anna Haebich stated that in Western Australia: ...Aboriginal people played a major role in building the state economy in the pastoral and rural industries in the north and south of the state. It was the state government's discriminatory employment system that prevented Aboriginal workers from benefiting from the Australian labour system, which was hailed around the world as an exemplary model for protecting workers' wages and rights. Instead, Aboriginal people were subject to a disabling system which denied them proper wages, protection from exploitation and abuse, proper living conditions, and adequate education and training. So while other Australians were able to build up financial security and an economic future for their families, Aboriginal workers were hindered by these controls. Aboriginal poverty in Western Australia today is a direct consequence of this discriminatory treatment."

2. One of the reasons for public denial that slavery could have happened in Australia is that we have, in the back of our head, memories of history lessons that tell us that slavery was abolished early in the nineteenth century.

Our historical memory is at least partly right. In 1807 legislation was passed by the British Parliament to outlaw the trade in slaves. We are just coming up to the 200-year celebration of that significant achievement. But that was only the start of the struggle. It took another 26 years, till 1833, before the Slavery Abolition Act was passed giving freedom to all slaves held captive in the British Empire.

That was not the end of the matter either. In the United States a horrendous Civil War was to be fought from 1861-1865 before the issue of slavery was settled there, in principle anyway. But slavery persisted in many regions for a long period after that. Indeed a thriving underground market in human beings has emerged in the 21st century with estimates of over 800,000 people trafficked across international borders annually.

We are mesmerized by that early nineteenth century event into believing that slavery was out of the way before this nation really got underway. Our image of slavery is shaped by the African slave trade and that also encourages the view that we didn't have slavery in Australia because there was not a direct trade in and sale of human beings. The point needs to be made that while that specific element may have been missing, most of the other elements that make up slavery were present.

Evidence presented to the Senate inquiry on the practices that underpinned the economic exploitation and conditions of labour of many Indigenous people through the nineteenth and into the second half of the twentieth century make clear that the absence of slave traders does not mean the absence of slavery.

Let me quote again from evidence in the original article that make the point clearly.

The historian Dr Ros Kidd for example: "Recommendations for a minimum five shilling monthly wage (in Western Australian in the early 1900s) were successfully opposed by pastoralists, leading one parliamentarian to describe the current system as 'another name for slavery'."

In the absence of employment protection in South Australia the Northern Territory Chief Protector Herbert Basedow said in 1927 that pastoral workers "are kept in a servitude that is nothing short of slavery".

"Slavery was outlawed in the British Empire, including Australia, by 1833. From the 1860s, religious and humanitarian bodies began to invoke "charges of chattel bondage and slavery" to describe aspects of north Australian conditions for Aboriginal labour."

"In 1891 when a 'Slave Map of Modern Australia' was printed in the September-October edition of the British Anti-Slavery Reporter. This map, showed most of central and north Queensland, the Northern Territory and coastal Western Australia as areas where "the traffic in Aboriginal labour, both children and adults, had descended into slavery conditions".The map represented colonial race relations as rampant cruelty, slavery and extermination."

A 1929 Commonwealth report probing conditions in Northern Australia found the pastoral industry was "absolutely dependent on the blacks for the labour" and "most of the [farms]... would have to be abandoned" without them.

3. An implicit belief that slavery in Australia couldn't have happened reflects at a deep level the national mythology of everyone being entitled to 'a fair go', and 'mateship'. A nation with those 'values' wouldn't have been involved in anything as nasty and as "un-Australian" as slavery. We wouldn't do anything as evil as that would we?

In suggesting that we might have engaged in slavery and benefited economically from the practices under which Indigenous people were employed, the National Indigenous Times directly challenged some of the religious myths that sustain Australian society, our public discourse and self-perception, committing a form of secular blasphemy, no less.

If we are going to get into this debate and call the stolen wages issue for what it was - a form of slavery - we are going to run against the grain of a political culture in which putting a spin on things, rather than speaking the truth, has become the norm.

For recent examples I need only refer to the Australian government's refusal to apologise to Indigenous Australians on the grounds that it is pursuing "practical reconciliation", the description of asylum-seekers as 'illegals', and a continual redescription at frequent intervals of the reasons why Australia participated in the illegal war in Iraq.

Publicly acknowledging that the slavery of the Indigenous community provided the basis for the economic livelihood of many Australians would be a start in telling the truth about the history of this country.

The deprival of Indigenous communities of a fair wage over generations provides at least part of the explanation for the ongoing poverty, ill health and marginalisation. Saying this publicly and repeatedly will not necessarily win us lots of friends. Still we have to keep making the effort and look for opportunities that events may present us.

What can we do to help our political leaders focus on the issue if the media won't pick up the issue of stolen wages and run with it?

If for example, our politicians want to play the religious card, as they have been doing recently, and reach for the high moral ground, then we get a chance to engage with them.

In raising the stolen wages issues, we can remind them that Jesus summoned those who follow him to work towards building communities characterised by truth-telling, peacemaking and respect for the dignity of all.

Jesus warned against judging others and failing to recognise our own faults. No person or institution, whether church or nation, is immune from moral failure.

Individually and collectively, we should be strong enough to be truthful about our failures, compromises and deceptions, including the question of slavery.

We are approaching a Federal election towards the end of the year. We should be directly asking our politicians at a federal level, in uncompromising terms, what they are going to do with the recommendations of the Senate report. We need to turn up the volume and make a nuisance of ourselves on this issue.

Two hundred years after the first legislative attack on slavery, it's a good year to be dealing with this unfinished business.

Remembering the struggles of others can encourage us. It took William Wilberforce 18 years from the introduction of his first bill to ban the slave trade before he achieved success in 1807. Celebration of that event in the United Kingdom is providing the impetus for the next round of struggle against slavery.

In the United Kingdom campaigners bound in chains have set off on a 250-mile march from Hull to London to commemorate of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.

The march also hopes to encourage dialogue and 'foster healing and reconciliation'.

The event is one of the first marking the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.

It has been organised as an act of apology for the Atlantic slave trade - something that the Church of England has now done, but that the British Government refuses to do for fear of claims that there will be reparations.

Sounds familiar.

Doug Hynd is a public servant based in Canberra, who has also worked in the community sector and for Senate Committees. He is a sessional lecturer in the CSU School of Theology who teaches courses on Christianity and Australian Society and Theology and Social Policy. Anyone interested in pursuing Federal Members of Parliament on the Senate Committee recommendations can contact him at doug.hynd@netspeed.com.au

Source: National Indigenous Times

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