Historical Information Sheet No 1: Defining Slavery, Indenture, and Blackbirding.

The Queensland Government has records of 62,475 indenture contacts between Pacific Islanders and employers between 1863 and 1904. There were also some Pacific Islanders recruited via Sydney and into the Torres Strait onwards from 1860. Given the number of re-enlistments, the total number of individuals is likely to be around 50,000. Most were adolescent and young adult males; only about 5% were women. Throughout the ‘labour trade’ there were allegations of kidnapping and slavery, which have some foundation. The culture of today’s Australian South Sea Islander (ASSI) community is shaped by their treatment during the indentured labour period and the harsh years early in the 20th century. Their sense of their united history begins in 1863 with the first Queensland mainland labour recruits. ASSI refer to themselves as the descendants of slaves and it is clear that the community harbours a deep sense of injustice. This cannot be answered merely by denying that they were slaves.

If the word slave is used metaphorically—for example to indicate that someone was treated as badly as a slave—then this is a question of historical fact to be determined like any other, by a dispassionate weighing of the evidence. In a significant proportion of cases Pacific Islanders were kidnapped to come to Queensland to work under indenture in conditions which were slave-like. Even so, use of the term slavery in describing indentured labour merely confuses the issue by introducing an inaccurate and emotionally charged expression.

Slavery?

Slavery was a legal status that lasted for life and was inherited by slaves’ children. Slaves were the property of their owners, and could be sold, bequeathed, gifted, mortgaged or hired out like any other chattel. Slaves could not enter into any contract, own property or give evidence in court.

Legally, slavery was abolished in the British Empire in the 1800s but continued to exist in the West Indies, South Africa and Mauritius until 1833, in fifteen southern states of the United States of America until the Civil War of 1861–1865. In 1865, after the Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery throughout the United States of America. Up until 1833 individual Australian colonists could have owned slaves. The Queensland indentured labour trade began just thirty years later. A number of leading Queensland plantation owners came from families which had connections to slavery in the Caribbean.

Indenture

In contrast, indenture contracts were legally enforceable by both parties (although employers always had the upper hand) and legally void if the law was satisfied that they were not voluntarily entered into. Indenture is not the same as slavery, but it has also been called a ‘new form of slavery’, used to keep non-European labourers in servitude.

At the same time as slavery declined as a labour system, and transportation of convicts came to an end, there was a transition to the use of indenture to create masters’ and servants’ contracts. For centuries, indenture contracts had been used to bind European workers to their employers. The system was used widely in European colonies to ensure a supply of labour, and most European migrants to the USA onwards from the 17th century arrived as indentured servants. This same legal mechanism used in Queensland to bind over 50,000 Pacific Islander labourers on 62,0000 indenture contracts to their employers between 1863 and 1904. European, Asian and Pacific Islander indentured servants were imported into Britain’s Australian colonies. Indenture remained in use in Queensland until 1906 and in the USA until 1917, with a similar labour system still in use in the Pacific until the 1940s. While it has been called ‘a new form of slavery’, strictly speaking, by the standard definition of slavery given above, indenture was not slavery. Like assignment of convicts, indenture legally bound a servant to his or her master in servitude for a specific period of time under specific conditions and was a highly authoritarian legal structure which favoured the employer.

When Queensland was established as a free colony in in 1843 convictism ended and slavery had been abolished. Indenture took their place as a means of controlling labour. In some places, such as Mauritius and the West Indies, where indenture was directly substituted for slavery, the conditions remained extremely similar. When Queensland, adopted indenture as the legal mechanism to bind imported Pacific Island labour, the colony was working within the current legal system of the British Empire, although the legal relationship with Melanesia was of dubious legality and predatory.

Blackbirding and Kidnapping?

ASSI and other Australians often use ‘Blackbirding’ to describe the entire indentured labour process: the word as connotations of total illegality. However, historians and some ASSI and their families in Vanuatu and Solomon Islands differentiate between labourers who were forced to recruit, those who chose to enlist, and those who enlisted for different colonies: Queensland, Fiji, Samoa and New Caledonia. The labour trade was a ‘moving frontier’ through the islands. Everyone agrees that that in the first ten or so years in any area illegality predominated, but historians and some ASSI say that the labour trade developed into a circular migration and that overall probably only 10 to 15% would have been kidnapped as legally defined, and that occasional kidnapping occurred up until the 1890s.

The circumstances of ‘recruiting’ Pacific Islanders were dubious and sometimes totally illegal: around 10% of the labour recruiting, mainly in the 1860s and 1870s, was probably illegal; and there was no specific legislation between 1863 and 1868. The indentured labour trade took advantage of Pacific Islanders, by physical force, coercion, guile and entrapment, but as the process continued inter-colonially over fifty years it became more regulated. For a variety of reasons young males participated freely, sometimes on more than one occasion, sometimes lured by cheap trade goods but often for legitimate reasons relating to their own societies. It also needs to be said that as the indentured labour trade continued over several decades there was undoubtedly a large degree of voluntarism involved and ‘indigenous ‘bigmen’, ‘chiefs’ and ‘passage masters’ in the islands were complicit in organising the movement of labour. As well, there was virtually no difference between the indentured labour trade to Queensland and Fiji in the 1880s, 1890sand 1900s and that internally in Vanuatu and Solomon Islands in the 1910s to the 1930s. In Queensland it is often called ‘Blackbirding’, with strong connotations of illegality, while in Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands the internal indentured labour trade, while just as exploitative, is regarded as a legal labour system.

Cultural Kidnapping?

The degree to which Islanders chose to enlist does not undermine the reality of European exploitation. Dividing the labour trade into kidnapping and voluntary enlistment is too simple. Every one of the indentured Islanders was culturally kidnapped. Europeans were taking cultural advantage of Pacific Islanders in taking them from their small-scale societies, paying them with cheap goods, and binding them with legal contracts they did not understand. Even the most willing were disoriented by the experience.

The racism, exploitation and contempt from which ASSI suffered was close to the way that Australians treated Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, which also bordered on slavery. This has now been recognised by all governments and apologies issued. This is the lived experience of First Nation Australian and the ASSI community.