Reconciliation in action | Slavery and stolen wages

For Britain, it is a word that is associated with North America — the United States.

But it is the colonisation of the Caribbean by the British that saw slavery — and the free labour it offered — become a crucial part of the rise of the British Empire.

A crucial part of the wealth of the nation.

This delving into the history of The Guardian’s past has also raised issues for us here in Australia.

Back in 2020, then Prime Minister Scott Morrison, unleashed a strong backlash when he claimed there had been “no slavery in Australia”.

Article one of the United Nations Slavery Convention states: “Slavery is the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.”

These powers might include non-payment of wages, physical or sexual abuse, controls over freedom of movement or selling a person like a piece of property.

Slavery practices emerged in Australia in the 19th century and, in some places in Australia, endured until the 1970s.

There was even a Slave Map of Australia, published in 1891 in the British Anti-Slavery Reporter, a journal that documented slavery around the world and campaigned against it.

Reprinted from English journalist Arthur Vogan’s account of frontier relations in Queensland, it showed large areas where “… the traffic in Aboriginal labour, both children and adults, had descended into slavery conditions”.

Former local federal politician and Monash University professor Sharman Stone said at the time of Mr Morrison’s comments: “Slavery of Indigenous men, women and children is well documented in a series of State government inquiries, in particular in the WA Royal Commission into the conditions of Natives, 1904, but also in 1913, 1929 in SA and Commonwealth parliamentary papers.”

The pearling, fishing, sugar and pastoral industries all benefitted from slavery as did the provision of domestic labour.

Blackbirding or “the capturing of labour from the Pacific to work in Queensland cane fields is also well documented,” Dr Stone said.

From the late 1800s until the 1970s, many Aboriginal workers had their wages unjustly withheld or not paid at all – it was slave labour.

Known as ‘stolen wages’, this non-payment of wages locked First Nations workers into a cycle of poverty.

Governments and churches have made it difficult to access records and there has been a general reluctance to pay the monies withheld.

David Olusoga, in his article Slavery and The Guardian: The Ties that Bind Us, described what he called the two “fundamental legacies of slavery”.

It is these legacies that we are still grappling with in Australia today.

The first legacy is that of Inequality.

On the one hand, there are those organisations, family dynasties and others, who benefitted from the wealth generated from slavery and who continue to benefit today.

On the other hand, there are the communities and peoples who suffered — and continue to suffer — because of crimes against their ancestors and their exclusion from the economic system built on the back of their enslavement.

Slavery — a word we Australians find uncomfortable using when talking about our own history.

But part of that history is forced labour for no money or only rations as payment.

This legacy also impacts on our national story.

The story that has focused on taming the harsh new continent, of overcoming adversity.

Of creating a ‘new nation’ based on the wealth of the wool and cattle industries.

The story that we are still trying to understand because, in reality, Australian wealth and prosperity was achieved on the backs of those who were dispossessed of their lands, culture and communities.

That this wealth was based on unrecognised — and often unpaid — slave work of First Nations peoples and ‘blackbirded’ South Sea Islanders.

And this story has been part of the ‘Great Silence’ of our past – the national forgetting of those dark parts of our history.

But as The Guardian writer Gary Younge noted: ‘This “forgetting” about the people who were massacred, enslaved, subjugated, tortured or otherwise oppressed is a privilege of the powerful. Those from the communities who were massacred, enslaved, subjugated and tortured simply don’t have that luxury.” They are living the intergenerational impacts of this treatment.

But it is the second legacy of slavery – the idea of a hierarchy of race and the stereotypes associated with certain peoples — that is more insidious.

It is the truly poisonous legacy of the system of slavery.

It came with the colonisation of this vast continent and has permeated our culture, our language and to an extent, our subconscious.

It is so subtle we are often not aware of its influence on our attitudes – but it is there.

Australia became a white society and a society that was deeply separate according to race.

Think about the treatment of Aboriginal workers – their pay rates and often appalling working conditions compared to white workers.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people were not even counted as citizens until 1967.

These ideas found their way into our systems of justice – just consider the many laws enacted to force First Nations peoples onto mission or reserves – and which limited access to education, housing and health services.

We only have to think about the findings of the Royal Commissions into the Stolen Generations and Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

These ideas are also found in the racist comments directed at an Aboriginal AFL footy player.

It is not hard to think of other examples.

Jane Lydon, Wesfarmers chair of Australian History at UWA, and Zoe Laidlaw from Melbourne University, writing in The Conversation argued that: “Colonisation was enacted by all those who came to Australian shores, rich and poor, willing or reluctant, and the inevitable effects on Indigenous people resulted from this collective and continuing process. Colonial legacies such as white privilege and Indigenous disadvantage — exemplified by the Stolen Generations and appalling Aboriginal deaths in custody statistics — are therefore a collective responsibility all Australians must shoulder.”

So why should we take this collective responsibility?

Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik sums this up perfectly:

“Because it’s morally right to make amends for stealing people’s lives and their labour. But it also matters because those who perpetrated such abuses were versions of us in different circumstances.

“Nobody actually thinks that the people of today are responsible for what happened two centuries ago – but we can be guilty of refusing to learn about it and from it.

“The people in our past were not uniquely evil, they went along with an evil system that created two classes of human beings and allowed one to enslave the other.”

To take responsibility is to consider two versions of our future.

In one version we do not want to look at the past, but are actually tied to it, and feel affronted when words like massacres, slavery and colonisation are mentioned.

In the other, we look to the future, consider the amazing story of our continent, have the confidence to acknowledge our colonial history and work towards a more just and equitable nation.

I know which version I’d prefer to be part of.

To find out more about Stolen Wages visit www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Legal_and_Constitutional_Affairs/Completed_inquiries/2004-07/stolen_wages/report/index https://humanrights.gov.au/our-work/legal/inquiry-stolen-wages