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.