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.