About Keeping People is Wrong

This book examines the nature of forced or compulsory service, and the name stems from an 1852 newspaper description of an Aboriginal man as “belonging to Mr Andrews”. The language of slavery and being a boss tend to merge into each other, all too easily. Among family and friends, I call this work Bog-snorkelling in a cesspool, due to the loathsome creatures encountered.

Starting with a quick look at classical and plantation (sugar/cotton) slavery, we look at slavery’s poor cousin, indentured servitude in North America, and how indentured worked for apprentices. Then we move onto compulsory labour in Australia (the convict era), and how ‘servants’ were managed, usually badly. This was not slavery, but close, and the trained eye will discern the seeds of slavery.

As an example, apprenticeship and indentures were often a sham.

Australia’s first slaves were sent home in 1819, by Governor Macquarie, who by an odd quirk, had owned slaves, briefly, and freed the lot. Repression came from various Masters and Servants laws. By the 1830s, Australia was importing trainee servants and serfs: indentured Irish, German and Indian workers. The exploitation of youngsters is followed down to Fairbridge and stolen generations, all trained as domestic servants.

More on importing Chinese and Indians, Ben Boyd’s first South Sea Islanders. Using M&S laws to stop people rushing to the goldfields. The rise of the unions, railways and shearer’s strikes, and how ‘Afghans’ came in, far better protected, to work camels.

Some vignettes on blackbirding, some of the more violent blackbirders: this was definitely close to slavery at times. (One case of an islander with a ‘brand’, later cleared.) Real slaves came in from the Sulu sultanate (Philippines) to fish for pearls, and some of the Aborigines involved may have been enslaved.

Some of the workers that you see above were probably slaves, but as pearl divers, they were paid, and some of them earned enough to buy their freedom.

On the cattle stations: how Aborigines were treated as property, cases of violence and murder, remarkably slaver-like behaviour, stockmen in the 1960s, Vincent Lingiari has a win. Finally, a 2020 conviction for slavery in New Zealand. Slavery still happens!

This looks at all of the potentially enslavable groups in Australia, either prisoners or under indentures: convicts; Irish and other orphans or teenagers; Indians; Germans; Chinese; apprentices and unionists; south sea islanders and Indigenous workers. There are common themes in the methods used to oppress and control, and that brings us to the Fairbridge kids and the Stolen Generations.

Most of the studies I can identify look only at one group, and that means we miss the common themes. Three groups provided undeniable slaves: Indians in Sydney in 1816; Sulu pearl fishers in the 1880s; and Aborigines in the pearl fisheries and cattle stations of WA, some of whom were bashed and murdered.

A few books have looked at the plight of the south sea islanders in the hands of the blackbirders, but this work provides a synoptic view of how the people traffickers worked, and the facile lies they told. The alternative title (Involuntary Belonging) comes from that1852 SMH news report of a Wiradjuri hero as “belonging to Mr. Andrews”!

This book reveals where the bodies are buried, and who buried them, right across Australia’s history. Nobody else has done that, and this is a hot topic, right now.

Chapter breakdown:

1. Defining slavery: Valuing freedom, slavery in ancient times, Egypt, Greece and Rome, sugar slavery, the Somerset and Knight cases outlaw slavery in Britain, the emancipation movements in Britain.

2. Apprentices and indentures, apprentice teachers, indentured servants in America (some of them undoubtedly kidnapped, and it was coerced labour), then a surprise that I may how slavery may have made us human.

3. Convicts to Australia as a way of cleansing Britain on the model of indentured servants: some case studies, how they were shipped, compulsory labour, management and works done, road gangs, the challenge of keeping wages as low as possible.

4. Justice and convict management: tickets of leave, pardons, some of the bad and bent judges, because unsympathetic judges helped keep manual labourers (and wages) under control.

5. Punishment of convicts and others, the life in the Female Factory, Sudds and Thompson, a wicked Archdeacon, the Bushranging Act, some of the system’s victims. This was nothing to what happened in the late 19^th century, but the seeds were sown here.

6. Masters and servants: how the underclass, even when ‘free’ were constrained, how people were blocked from gold hunting, how the gold rush really started, how young people were tamed, indentable colleens who frightened off pirates, Stolen Generations, the Fairbridge failure, runaway servants. How the Masters and Servants laws operated.

7. The end of transportation and changes in the labour supply meant we needed to cast around for other supplies of menial labour, and lots of it, to keep wages low. Giving Australia its name, an innocent convict, colonial rivalry, the Catalpa rescue, the side issues of the convict era.

8. Finding foreigners who might be biddable, including the Irish and the Germans: enough hungry paupers would force wages down. Squatters and how to spot them. The first Australian owner of slaves (Macquarie briefly owned 300!) and the first Australian slaves (chapter 10, sent home by Macquarie!).

9. The wool trade and managing the shepherds and the sheep, on to the shearers’ strikes, and the rise of the unions. Workers standing up for their own rights would become important when they looked at the welfare of their darker-skinned siblings.

10. Indian imports, starting with some slaves in 1816, then Indian labourers for a short while, largely unsuccessful, and replaced by Chinese, then Afghans to work camels after Harry the Camel shot his owner.

11. Chinese servants before the ‘coolies’, their travails, a court case in Goulburn, Chinese reaching Australia to hunt for gold, anti-Chinese riots, free Chinese in Australia.

Kanakas on a pineapple plantation.

12. South Sea Islanders, how Ben Boyd started the trade, and was stopped, the villainous blackbirders. There were other less villainous ones, but there was definitely something close to slavery going on here, with slaughter, kidnapping, beating and more. The mindset of the farmers was close to slavery.

Quelling an attempted break-out by kidnapped 'blackbirds' on the brig Carl. This was murder.

13. The pearl fishers, how the trade began and was managed, slaves from the Philippines, the likelihood of exploited or enslaved Aborigines, the treatment of convicted Aborigines, Tjandamurra fights back.

14. Two Wiradjuri heroes. On the cattle stations: how Aborigines were treated: some cases of violence and murder, remarkably slaver-like behaviour, on to stockmen in the 1960s, Vincent Lingiari has a win. Finally, a 2020 conviction for slavery in New Zealand. Slavery is still out there.

Nobody else has done this, according to an Australian emeritus professor of Southeast Asian Modern History (name available if you are a publisher). He wrote:

The subject matter of your manuscript numbering 95,000 words is both timely and important Slavery or servitude in all its manifest form and variation in Australia has not been tackled yet in a single volume. 

It actually grew to 106,000 words after that. If you believe in this book, badger a publisher to pick it up. You, or the publisher, can get a sense of my work here.

For a sample from this work, read about the earliest Australian slaves here.

Keeping People is Wrong

The title is the title of a serious history that I am pitching. Here's a taste: it is about coerced labour: did you know that Australia once had slaves?

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Before 1786, courts in Britain had ruled that there could be no slaves on English or Scottish soil, and in that year Arthur Phillip—the future first governor at Botany Bay—had written to Lord Sydney about his plans:

The laws of this country [Britain] will, of course, be introduced in [New] South Wales, and there is one that I would wish to take place from the moment His Majesty’s forces take possession of the country: That there can be no slavery in a free land, and consequently no slaves.

With the British penetrating India in the 1800s, some settlers moved on from India to Australia, and they sometimes brought Indian servants with them. The earliest case seems to be that of Governor Macquarie’s one-time slave, George Jarvis, though by the time he reached Australia, Jarvis was already a free man and the Governor’s loyal manservant. Purchased at the Cochin slave market, along with another boy for a total of 170 rupees, Macquarie gave them Anglo names, but while Macquarie later referred to him as his ‘smart Portuguese boy’, George was probably at least part-Indian. I have to conclude that Macquarie’s purchase was a “rescue”.

The family of Macquarie’s first wife, Jane Jarvis, owned 300 slaves in Antigua. When she died of tuberculosis in 1796, they had already bought the two boys, and she left her fortune (£6000) to him, along with all the slaves. Macquarie promptly freed the slaves in Antigua, but he sent the two boys to school. The other boy, Hector, disappeared in Kolkata (then Calcutta), and Macquarie later (in 1802) sent George to school in Scotland.

Anybody knowing of Somerset’s case and Knight’s case (as Macquarie must have done) will realise that sending George to school in Scotland made him no longer a slave. He might have gone his own way, but he later became Macquarie’s valet, and served the governor throughout his time in New South Wales, and then back in Scotland. That aside, there are hints of other Indian servants in New South Wales, such as those of Mr O’Connor, who was leaving the colony in March 1818, with three “native Bengal servants”, Boxoo, Callachund, and Jument.

Even earlier, William Browne had Indian servants in Sydney. Browne’s mother was Persian, while his father was apparently English; as a rich Calcutta merchant in Sydney, he was probably socially acceptable. He is sometimes said to have settled in Sydney in 1809, but the earliest trace I can find of him is in 1816:

MR. WILLIAM BROWNE (of the Firm of BROWNE & TURNER, Calcutta), intending to reside henceforward in this Colony, proposes to receive Orders for BENGAL and other GOODS, to be imported with all practicable Despatch on the ship Mary, Captain ORMAN, now in this Port, and nearly ready for sea.
—The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 4 May 1816, 2.

When he reached Sydney in 1816 Browne had at least four Indian workers with him. When his wife joined him in 1818, she brought more servants, and he gathered others on contracts for service of between three and ten years. He referred to them as “dungurs”, while others referred to them as Dhangars. The Governor was impressed by Browne and granted him a large area of land. This was worked by the “dungurs”, who are largely missing from the records, but in April 1818 two of them were robbed. Another four, described as “Indian servants of Mr William Brown (sic)”, named as Subball, Hanniff, Rimdiall, and Pearbux, left the colony in 1820. By 1819 most of Browne’s other thirty-nine Indians had already been sent back to India at government expense, and there is a story behind their departure.

In July 1819 William Browne was ordered to appear before the colony’s bench of magistrates to defend himself against allegations of mistreatment and serious abuse of his Indian workers. In all, twenty-two employees complained of gross abuse, and asked to be released from their contracts.

The magistrates found that the workers had indeed been “insufficiently and ill fed, unduly worked, greatly aggrieved and unjustly treated,” ordering that all his Indian workers (forty people) be released at once from his service and returned to Calcutta, with the government footing the bill. The governor then tried to recover this cost from Browne, but the judge (Barron Field, whose curious name will be explained later) found with some regret for Browne on a technicality:

…the Bench might have done more; and might have compelled the defendant adequately to victual and clothe his servants till they should be entitled by their agreements to passage home; and that the finding of such passage too might have been compelled by the Governor, at the peril of the defendant’s being sent out of the Colony himself. But the Governor could not recover this maintenance and passage-money by paying it for the defendant, and then seeking to recover it back from him in a Civil Court … the verdict must be for the defendant.
—The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 18 September 1819, 4.

It must be said that the greatest villain in the piece appears to have been Mrs Browne. A person of mixed race, her animus towards the Indian servants may have related to race, but she may simply have been mean. Certainly, two years after the rest had escaped, Pearbux, who was still working for the Brownes, wrote to one of her former employers in Calcutta, complaining that she was treated “no better than a slave”. She asked him to intercede with the Governor on her behalf to “free her from bondage”.

In evidence in 1819, a servant called Thomassie said “I was beat by Mrs. Browne at the farm at the Devil’s Back; I have been so long with Mr. Browne without wages; and I want some; I have been with him from my infancy…” On that evidence, Thomassie was undoubtedly a slave in Australia.

Later, “Indian servant” was used as a code for “coolies”, and the only way of telling the difference between personal servants and labourers is by the numbers: if there were more than half a dozen “servants”, they were coolies. Being a coolie meant signing a contract by which the servant’s fare was paid by the master, in exchange for the servant agreeing to work for a (usually long) time at a specified (usually very low) rate of pay. Being a coolie in a foreign country also meant being hampered by not being able to communicate with Australians, not even friendly ones. It was the thin end of the slavery wedge, but not itself slavery.

At the very end of the 1800s, there were other bought-and-sold slaves in Australia, but to find out about them, you will need to read the book.

 

Tectonics

I have recently been polishing off a HUGE Australian history, and you cannot explain Australia, its places, biota and people without the geology, and that needs plate tectonics.

In the early 1960s, we gathered the evidence of sea floor spreading, which showed that the Earth’s surface is made up of plates that were moving, and all of a sudden, the planet’s history made a lot more sense.

First, there was the idea of continental drift, a vague notion that somehow the planet had a changing surface. You only had to look at a map of the Atlantic Ocean to see how Africa would fit in neatly against South America, people said. In 1596, a Dutch map maker called Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598) suggested that the two sides of the Atlantic had been torn apart, but he did not explain what might have done it.

Once people started collecting plants and animals, some interesting parallels showed up, like the presence of monkeys on both sides. You could explain Asian monkeys by assuming they had wandered across from Africa (or vice versa), but the South American monkeys were a puzzle. A close inspection showed that the New World monkeys were quite different, suggesting that a great deal of change had happened since the groups separated. Other plant and animal distributions would also make more sense if continents had originally been joined together.

In 1912, a German meteorologist named Alfred Lothar Wegener (1880–1930) published an account of how continental drift might have happened. He suggested that the supercontinent Pangaea began to split, about 200 million years ago. Alexander Du Toit in Johannesburg supported him and proposed that Pangaea first broke into two large pieces, Laurasia in the northern hemisphere and Gondwanaland in the southern hemisphere. Laurasia and Gondwanaland later broke apart to make today’s continents.

The key find was the distribution of a fossil fern named Glossopteris, found in South America, southern Africa, Australia—and Antarctica. The snag was explaining the huge force needed to move a continent around. While we use the same slab-names today, much of the background is different, and we regard some of today’s land masses as being assembled from several different scraps.

How the mysterious ‘drift’ of the continents was explained, and went from science fiction to science.

Continental drift tried to account for the shapes of the world’s large land pieces and the distributions of animals and plants. Plate tectonics works on the idea that the crust ‘floats’ on the more dense mantle, and that parts are slowly moved around by convection effects. It explains the continent shapes and plant and animal distributions, but it also explains the main mountain regions like the Himalayas and the Alps, the distribution of volcanoes and earthquakes, the location of island groups like Hawaii and the Aleutian islands—and the forces that drive the process.

It all began with the idea of sea floor spreading, and that came from mapping of the sea floor, at first carried out with long weighted lines, lowered to the floor, and later with sonar: sending ultrasonic ‘pings’ at the sea floor and timing their return. This revealed the shape of the seabed. The first chart showing parts of the mid-Atlantic ridge appeared in 1855. Ships laying telegraph cables across the Atlantic also detected parts of it, then in 1947, cores of the seabed showed that the sediment on the floor of the Atlantic was much thinner than it should have been under an ocean that had existed for 4 billion years. Clearly, a rethink was needed.

Before long, other ships were mapping sea floors and tracing the whole of the global mid-ocean ridge, more than 50,000 kilometres long and, sometimes more than 800 km across. This was no mere range of hills, either, because the mountains averaged 4500 metres above the sea floor.

Then there was an oddity that can be found in basalt: the magnetic fields sometimes go the ‘wrong’ way, the reverse of today’s magnetic field. We know now that every so often, there is a polar reversal, where the Earth’s magnetic field ‘flips’, reversing the magnetic north and south poles. As liquid basalt escapes from the Earth, the magnetic field of the moment is printed into the rocks.

If you map the zones of normal and reversed magnetic fields around the mid-Atlantic ridge, you see a pattern of stripes going across the sea floor. The way this is shown in school texts, most people think the sea floor is striped like a zebra. It isn’t like that, at all: the black and white are there to show the two polarities, and all the basalt is black. The ‘stripes’ were of different sizes, reflecting longer and shorter periods between reversals, but the amazing thing was that the two sides of the ridge showed a mirror pattern.

By 1961, people were beginning to hint, rather nervously, that maybe the basalt was oozing from the floor and spreading out to either side. During the 1960s, deep-sea drilling rigs began to bring up cores from the sea floor, and by 1968, fossil and isotope tests on the cores established a proof for the sea floor spreading hypothesis, young rocks near the ridge, old rocks further out.

Now we can explain the more peculiar earthquake areas. Spreading in one place means rocks being buried somewhere else. The subduction zones where one plate slides under another, the deep sea trenches, the position of Wallace’s Line, and even the origins of Africa’s Rift Valley, where many of the earliest human and pre-human fossils are found today, were all explained.

Wallace’s Line divided Asian plants and animals from Australian plants and animals. It is a subduction trench between Australia and Asia.

The Himalayas, the Swiss Alps, and the Andes are all formed as the crust piles up where plates are colliding. The volcano-free earthquakes of Turkey and Greece are explained: the movement between the plates there is not the sort that generates volcanoes. Around the Pacific, the Ring of Fire, the long chain of active volcanoes is explained, while the Hawaiian islands are the result of a plate slipping over a ‘hot spot’ that keeps generating volcanoes.

And that is probably enough for any single theory to have to explain.

The art of making records

There was a quiet patch there, because I was too busy working on several almost-complete books that I have started to pitch. Here's a bit from one of them, working title Founding Principles.

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If science is to grow, if knowledge is to be spread, it needs to be shared. Stone engravings are all very well, but in the long run, we need paper and ink, we need writing, and we need printing, but it began on clay and stone, and I have just finished Margalit Fox's The Riddle of the Labyrinth, about how Linear B was decrypted. 

above, the Rosetta Stone which let us decipher hieroglyphics; below, Egyptian hieroglyphics from Abu Simbel

The Rosetta stone was carved in 196 BCE, and it carries three inscriptions, saying the same thing in Greek, in Egyptian demotic script, and in hieroglyphics. The content is fairly boring, a list of taxes repealed by Ptolemy V, but the use of three languages made the stone very exciting when it was found in 1799 by French forces fighting in the Napoleonic Wars in Egypt. When the French lost a major battle, the stone became a prize of war, handed over to the victors, and placed on display in the British Museum in 1802, where it remains.

A few things were needed before writing could catch on. As a rule, nomads would have no interest in making records or carrying records around, especially if they were on clay. So people probably needed something to write on, something to write with, and some useful place where the written records could be kept. Inscribed stones might be set up here and there, but unless there were other uses for writing, the whole recording thing might be a bit of a flash in the pan. As well, there needed to be an agreed alphabet or script that readers and writers could understand.

The Sumerians explained the invention of writing with a tale of a messenger who was so tired when he reached the court of a distant ruler that he could not remember his message from the king of Uruk (between Baghdad and Basrah). Hearing this, the distant ruler took a piece of clay, flattened it, and wrote a message on it for the messenger to take back.

That story has a few sizable holes in it. Just for starters, how would somebody back at Uruk know what the symbols meant? Still, what can we expect in a tale about events that happened so long ago, when it was probably never written down?

The Egyptians said the scribe and historian of the gods, the god Thoth, invented hieroglyphs; the Sumerians either credited the unnamed king, or the god Enlil. The Assyrians and Babylonians said the god Nabu was the inventor. The Maya said they owed their writing system to the supreme deity Itzamna who was a shaman, a sorcerer, and creator of the world. More believably, Chinese tradition says writing was invented by a sage called Ts’ang Chieh, a minister to the legendary Huang Ti (the Yellow Emperor).

Some forms of writing used characters for syllables (Linear B is a good example), other writing systems used a symbol just to mean a letter-sound (as in English), while still others used a symbol to mean a word or idea, as happens in Chinese.

These full-word symbols are called ideograms or logograms (which just means that each symbol writes an idea or a word), and they can mean the same in different languages, rather like the numeral 5 or the signs in airports all over the world. Just to confuse things, some of those airport signs are also called pictograms, because they are pictures of what they represent.

Then again, Egyptian hieroglyphs are a mixture of alphabetic characters and ideograms, with a few extra symbols to clarify the meaning. Few writing systems were designed from scratch: they just grew, a bit like English spelling! The Sumerians lived in what is now southern Iraq.

Ignoring the myth of the Uruk messenger, their writing probably started with marks on clay that Sumerian accountants used around 3300 or 3200 BCE to note down numbers of livestock and stores of grain, the sorts of records societies need, once they start farming. Over about 500 years, the symbols became more abstract, allowing ideas to be written down.

Egyptian hieroglyphs (literally “priestly writing”) are unlike Sumerian cuneiform. They probably developed separately, but maybe the Egyptians got the basic idea of marks to represent language from other people. The Harappan script from the Indus valley in what is now Pakistan and western India, seems to be another independent growth, though nobody has learned to read it yet. The civilization which established the script collapsed in about 1900 BCE, so their writing did not develop further.

The oldest alphabets that we understand seem to have emerged in Egypt around 1800 BCE. They were developed by people speaking a Semitic language, and only had consonants. These alphabets later gave rise to several other systems: a Proto-Canaanite alphabet at around 1400 BCE and a South Arabian alphabet, some 200 years later. There were others, but we will stay with this short list.

The Phoenicians adopted the Proto-Canaanite alphabet which later became both Aramaic and Greek, then through Greek, inspired other alphabets used in Anatolia and Italy, and so gave us the Latin alphabet, which became our modern alphabet. Aramaic may have inspired some Indian scripts, and certainly it became the Hebrew and Arabic scripts. Greek and Latin alphabets later inspired Norse runes and also the Gothic and Cyrillic alphabets.

The way was open for poetry, literature, history, philosophy, mathematics, recipes, racing form guides, technical information, comic books, tax, weather and astronomical records, religious teachings and more to be written down and passed from one generation to another.

All of a sudden, people didn’t need to remember so much, and all of the playing pieces that scientists would need were in place.