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- Convenor:
-
Anthony Redmond
(University of Queensland)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Friday 26 November, -
Time zone: Australia/Sydney
Short Abstract:
This panel will explore the contexts in which the term "slavery" recurs so poignantly and so regularly in Indigenous Australians' discourse. Papers are invited which address this issue in a historical and/or contemporary context.
Long Abstract:
Patrick Wolfe (2001:2016) has made the cogent historical argument that a logic of elimination of the Indigenous population and their replacement with colonial settlers was the central guiding principle of the American and Australian British colonies. This differed from what he calls "the logic of franchise-colonial relationships (such as the British Raj, the Netherlands East Indies)", which involved the extraction "of surplus value by mixing their labor with a colony's natural resources".
When speaking with Indigenous Australians who endured the so-called Protection Era (c. 1870-1972) or reading their accounts of this time, references to being "slaves" recur repeatedly. Indigenous Australians were never legislatively defined as slaves and were in many cases technically entitled to (if not actually paid) wages, albeit in meagre and often inaccessible amounts. However, under Australian Law a person may be considered to have been enslaved even if the victim is not subject to the exercise of the more extreme rights of ownership associated with 'chattel slavery', but in all cases, as a result of the exercise of any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership, there is some destruction of the juridical personality. The extent of the "destruction of the juridical personality" determines whether or not it meets the stricter definition of "chattel slavery" (Allain 2009).
This panel will explore the contexts in which the term "slavery" recurs so poignantly and so regularly in Indigenous Australians' discourse.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 26 November, 2021, -Patrick Horton (University of Sydney)
Paper short abstract:
Aboriginal people of the NT’s Victoria River region evoke the metaphor of ‘bullocky’ (cattle) to describe people subjected to dehumanising conditions. In this paper I apprehend the metaphor to discuss relations between historical and contemporary circumstances, namely slavery and hyperincarceration.
Paper long abstract:
This paper considers the trajectory of settler-colonial occupation of the Northern Territory’s Victoria River region through the idiom of cattle, or ‘bullocky’. The pastoral industry was and remains the most extensive form of occupation in the top end of the Australian continent and was central to the development of state, territory and regional economies at the expense, dispossession and forced labour of pastoral land’s Aboriginal owners. Decades on from the categorial expulsion of Aboriginal workers from the industry, cattle and cattle work continue to play a significant part in everyday Aboriginal life, imagination, aspiration and metaphor in the region. As part of a broader body of work considering the impact of hyperincarceration in the lives of Victoria River people, families and communities, I approach the concepts of slavery, commodity, control and imprisonment through the local metaphor of ‘bullocky’. This notion links past histories with present material conditions which (continue to) render Aboriginal people as expendable, inhuman and destined for elimination via containment.
Kevin Keeffe (The Australian National University)
Paper short abstract:
A Makarrata and truth telling process will need to consider and respond to the historical conditions of slavery, servitude and enforced labour established by the Queensland settler-colonial state, and account for the impacts of those practices in the present day.
Paper long abstract:
The Uluru Statement from the Heart in 2017 called for a ‘Makarrata Commission’ to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth telling about our history, as well as a constitutionally enshrined Voice to the Australian Parliament. These calls have been rejected by three Australian Prime Ministers, including the current Prime Minister, who also declared that ‘there was no slavery in Australia’.
A Makarrata Commission will need to design and deliver processes for truth-telling about the troubled history of labour exploitation and control in Australia. It is known, if not yet widely accepted, that the settler-colonial state established race-based legislation, policies and practices that entrenched the loss of land, liberty and livelihood for generations of Indigenous Australians. Across Australia, many Indigenous peoples view this history of forced labour as race-based slavery.
This paper will explore some of the experiences of people in Cape York, the Torres Strait and Central Queensland. It will examine the role of the state in enforcing racially discriminatory forced labour systems. In Queensland, various forms of such discrimination continued into the 1970s and their impacts continue to be felt today.
A successful Makarrata process would design and resource modes of truth-telling to formally document the role of indigenous labour in the Queensland economy and consider the impact of such enforced labour across generations. Acknowledgement, commemoration, apology and compensation, including in the domain of native title, would be a transformative challenge for the nation.
Anthony Redmond (University of Queensland)
Paper short abstract:
Using a longitudinal perspective, the paper moves between a broader analysis of the forced extraction of Indigenous labour by the state and the police violence against Indigenous people which accompanies it. Keywords: military policing; prison industrial complex; Indigenous labour.
Paper long abstract:
Patrick Wolfe (2001; 2016) has made the cogent argument that a logic of elimination of the Indigenous populations and their replacement with colonial settlers was the central objective of Britain’s American and Australian colonies. This differed from what he calls “the logic of franchise-colonial relationships (such as the British Raj, the Netherlands East Indies)”, which involved the extraction “of surplus value by mixing their labor with a colony's natural resources”. Settler-colonial elimination and replacement was achieved through a staged series involving “conquest, removal, reservation, allotment, assimilation, co-optation, termination, self-determination” (2001:870).
Nevertheless, in the Australian colonies, displacement and captive labour went hand in hand, particularly once convict labor transportation ceased (Western Australia being the last colony to do so in 1868). Enforced Aboriginal labour quickly emerged as a crucial component of the emerging pastoral, pearling, sealing, whaling, agricultural and sexual economies across the Australian colonies. The original displacement of Indigenous people and subsequent forced servitude on colonial enterprises within their country resulted in extremely high rates of imprisonment for Indigenous Australians throughout the entire colonial era.