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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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”.
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.
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