Human rights in Australia’s early international relations: unity, prosperity, and the abolition of slavery

ABSTRACT

For the most part, histories of Australia’s international relations locate the origins of its engagement with the international human rights regime in the 1940s. By then, however, debates about human rights had been appearing in the Australian newspapers for more than a century, focused, among other things, on the application of universal rights to the foreign peoples with which the colonies were engaged in their international affairs. Drawing on archival materials and newspaper articles from 1803 to 1901, this article examines the place of human rights in the international relations of nineteenth century colonial Australia. Focusing on debates over the use of Indian and South Sea Islander indentured labour, it demonstrates how ideas developed in the context of the anti-slavery movement of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries shaped debates about the universal applicability of human rights in the Australian colonies’ engagements with others. In doing so, it provides an account of the early development of human rights ideas in the Australian colonies and demonstrates how they sought to resist human rights claims in their international affairs, choosing instead to prioritise the pursuit of national (racial) unity and prosperity over the rights of others.

KEYWORDS:

• Australian foreign policy
• human rights
• slavery
• indentured labour
• South Sea Islanders

With few exceptions, accounts of human rights in Australian politics and international relations follow a now standard trajectory. Starting with the ‘supposed invention’ of human rights in the 1940s (Piccini 2019, 8), they typically attribute Australia’s initial engagement with the international human rights regime to the ‘vision and commitment’ of Herbert Evatt, Australia’s representative at the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) (Evans and Grant 1995, 153; Firth 2011, 308; Kent 1997, 163; Milner 2012, 344).¹ This framing accords with conventional histories of human rights that tend to locate its modern origins in the Charter of the United Nations, the UDHR, and the later International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (1966), and International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966). Although most such accounts acknowledge the existence of constituent ideas in earlier writings, their central claim, implicit or otherwise, is that human rights proper did not emerge until the aftermath of World War II. They also accord with the idea that it was not until 1942, when Australia adopted the Statute of Westminster, that it could be said to have an independent foreign policy capable of pursuing an international agenda on a range of matters, including human rights.

Despite the popularity of this set of overlapping genesis stories, however, human rights were not unheard of, internationally or in Australia, prior to the 1940s. As early as the 1830s, the term ‘human rights’ was appearing in the Australian newspapers, to cast the practice of slavery as ‘a violation of the most sacred and indefeasible human rights’ (The Tasmanian 23 November 1838, 6). By 1859, the Sydney Morning Herald had published an article declaring that the ‘recognition of human rights’ is a ‘grand event for mankind’ (11 July 1859, 4), and by the early decades of the twentieth century the term ‘human rights’ was routinely used to refer to women’s suffrage, freedom of expression, religion and movement, to criticise atrocities committed in the Congo, Angola, and Armenia, to highlight the ill-treatment of Papuans and New Guineans living under Australian administration, and to frame the rights of workers.

By then, the Australian colonies, first as independent entities and then as members of a federal commonwealth, had been engaged with the peoples and nations of Asia and the Pacific for more than a century. Within a few short years of colonisation, New South Wales had established trading relationships with India, China, and much of the Pacific (Kemish 2023), and by the early nineteenth century its representatives and residents had become part of a wider imperial network, engaging and corresponding with merchants, traders, business owners, and administrators in other British colonies stretching from Southern Africa to Mauritius and the Caribbean (Duyker 2008). Imperial competition in the Pacific also saw the Australian colonies engage with French and German colonial administrations, both mediated by the British government and independently (Bongiorno 2016; Stoll 2017; Thompson 1971). These relationships and, in particular, efforts to ensure Australia’s role in the Pacific, necessitated not only the development of external engagement policies independent of Britain, but distinctive positions on issues of strategic concern such as the nature of empire and security in the region, as well as those of race, the development of social and economic rights, trade, and labour mobility, issues that all helped to shape Australia’s engagement with the global human rights regime.

Drawing on archival material and systematic analysis of newspaper articles published in the Australian colonies, this article examines the place of human rights in Australia’s nineteenth century international relations. It focuses, in particular, on debates surrounding the use of indentured labour in New South Wales and Queensland and their implications, both for how human rights were conceived in the colonies’ foreign policies and how their international relations were practiced. While notions of human rights found form in a range of contexts in nineteenth century Australia—from debates over representative democracy and universal suffrage (The Sydney Free Press 3 March 1842) to those concerned with the rights and treatment of Chinese immigrants (The Sydney Morning Herald 9 october 1860, 4), workers (The Brisbane Courier 22 May 1894, 4), and First Nations (The Colonist 17 November 1838, 2)—those forged in response to the Australian colonies’ efforts to meet their growing labour needs through the recruitment of foreign workers were especially significant in shaping their early international relations.

The article begins by providing a brief overview of how human rights histories, including that of Australia, have typically been framed. It identifies the anti-slavery movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as providing both the origins of the modern idea of human rights and the context in which the Australian colonies first came to use and understand the term. Although Australia’s engagement with the international anti-slavery movement has attracted significant attention in recent years, particularly among historians (see Lydon 2021; Paisley 2017), less attention has been paid to how notions of human rights, forged and transmitted by that movement, helped shape debates about the colonies’ early international relations. Using an interpretive approach, this article thus provides a narrative account of how accusations of slavery and references to human rights shaped debates over the recruitment of Indian indentured labourers and the practice of coercing, tricking, of kidnapping South Sea Islanders known as blackbirding in the nineteenth century. It also shows how appeals to those rights were routinely rejected, overlooked, and disregarded in Australia’s international relations, earning it a reputation for being willing to subordinate the rights of others in pursuit of its own national (racial) unity and prosperity and becoming a source of tension in its early international relations with India and the nations of the Pacific. The article concludes by noting that, more than a century later, those tensions remain a source of antagonism that continue to mar Australia’s relations with its neighbours in the Pacific.

Human rights histories

In recent years, the origins and historical development of human rights have become the focus of unresolved debate. Its key antagonists tend to approach the subject in one of three ways. Proponent of ‘linear progress narratives’ conceive the historical development of human rights as one long and gradual evolutionary process beginning in the ancient world and culminating in contemporary ideas (Alston 2013, 2063). Despite acknowledging that ‘a perfect continuum from ancient to modern thinking about human rights’ cannot be said to exist, writers like Micheline Ishay understand human rights ‘as the result of a cumulative historical process’ that has, in some senses, take ‘on a life of its own’ (2004, 5 & 2). In doing so, she and others tend to impose, if not a sense of perfect continuity on the history of human rights, then one of overarching coherence within a grand narrative arc. The second dominant approach seeks to identify the origins of human rights at a precise moment in history and to craft a narrative from that point on (Alston 2013, 2064). Among their most common starting points, these ‘precise timeframe’ histories tend to locate the origins of human rights in the Renaissance, Reformation, or Enlightenment, occasionally in the Magna Carta or, more commonly, in two documents signed in the aftermath of World War II, the United Nations Charter (1945), and the UDHR (1948). More recently, proponents of the third, ‘new revisionist’ approach, have argued that the international human rights movement did not emerge until much more recently. To do so, they impose two threshold criteria on the concept of human rights—transnational reach and transcendence of the state—to dismiss earlier iterations of human rights and locate their emergence as a truly ‘transnational social movement’ capable of transcending the state in the 1970s (Alston 2013, 2069; Moyn 2010, 2 & 13). Critics of this approach question both its assessment of earlier social movements, such as that which fought for women’s suffrage, as being an insufficiently ‘global forum’ for ‘invention or reform’ to be considered contributions to human rights, and the claim that human rights entail the ‘severing of rights from the nation-state’ (Martinez 2013). In short, they reject the validity of the additional criteria Moyn adds to his concept of human rights to enable him to argue they are an invention of the 1970s.

For the most part, accounts of human rights in Australian politics and international relations have adopted the precise timeframe approach, identifying the 1940s as the period during which Australia first began to engage with the idea of human rights. More recently, and coming closest to adopting the new revisionist approach, Piccini’s history of human rights in twentieth century Australia acknowledges that we cannot ignore the idea of human rights as it appeared in ‘movements throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,’ but casts those early rights as limited demands for the extension of British rights rather than as appeals to the ‘universal nature of man’ (2019, 15). He argues that although these ‘national-based rights’ were ‘the “essential crucible” of the rights paradigm,’ they differed from ‘human rights’ that, according to the new revisionists, transcend the state (Piccini 2019, 15). As a result, discussions of human rights prior to the 1940s are almost entirely absent from the literature on human rights in Australian politics and international relations.

Yet, as noted above, Australia’s earliest engagement with human rights came, not in the context of the post-World War II settlement, but in the much earlier context of a movement explicitly founded on appeals to the universal nature of humankind: the most successful human rights movement of all time, that which sought the abolition of slavery. With this in mind, this article demonstrates how appeals to human rights that emerged in the context of the anti-slavery movement went on to shape debates about and the implementation of Australia’s early international relations. In doing so, it comes closest to adopting a linear narrative approach underpinned by the notion that ideas about human rights did not simply fall from the sky at pivotal moments in human history but were built on older ideas that, in new contexts, were reconsidered, reformulated, and developed. However, it also recognises that accounts such as this run the risk of wrapping human history into a single story of inexorable progress that ignores disagreement, dissent, and decline (Alston 2013, 2063). Heeding this warning, the story it tells is thus as much one of mis-steps and failures as it is of the development of human rights in Australia’s international affairs.

Human rights and the abolition of slavery

The rise of the anti-slavery movement in the eighteenth century, which culminated in the popular acceptance of abolition in the century that followed, marks the most radical turning point in the history of human rights practice. In the space of a few short decades, the efforts of anti-slavery campaigners brought about a dramatic shift in the perceived morality of treating some human beings as property, to be bought, sold, and forced to engage in unrecompensed labour. By the time it reached its height in the eighteenth century, the trans-Atlantic slave trade had seen almost nine million individuals trafficked from Africa to Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, it had been outlawed, first by Britain and then by Denmark, France, and the Netherlands. While this shift did not bring about the absolute abolition of slavery, it signalled a new era in thinking about the rights of individuals. Grounded in principles of natural rights, the anti-slavery movement extended the idea that all human life is equally deserving of respect to the enslaved and, in doing so, became ‘the parent of all subsequent efforts to defend rights’ on the basis of ‘respect for individual human dignity and autonomy’ (Neier 2020, 34). What is more, and contrary to the new revisionists’ claims, the adoption of treaties against the slave trade established the idea that ‘violations of human rights were … not just matters between a people and their sovereign’ but where ‘offenses of a concern to humankind generally’ (Martinez 2011, 149).

Among the most serious objections to locating the origins of international human rights practice in the anti-slavery movement is the charge that abolition was a humanitarian movement and not a human rights movement. At its heart, humanitarianism was concerned with ameliorating the suffering of others in distant lands and, in its early years, was indeed focused on the campaign to end slavery (Barnett 2011, 10; Lydon 2020, 10). Yet, abolition was also a human rights movement. This is not to imply that humanitarianism and human rights are one and the same, but rather to suggest that they share several key foundational principles, have at times addressed similar issues, and have converged in some specific contexts (Tusan 2014, 50). Tusan thus argues that ‘[h]umanitarianism and human rights should not be considered separate, unrelated subjects of study’ (2014, 50). Their differences are rather matters of focus and emphasis and not so much of underlying sentiment. Both are founded on a commitment to the concept of ‘humanity’ but operationalise it in different ways, and both are concerned with the problem of suffering, but focus their efforts of different manifestations of harm. As Barnett explains, while

[h]umanitarianism largely concerns the attempt to assist distant strangers whose lives are in immediate danger … human rights practice concerns the articulation, codification, and enforcement of those rights that individuals possess because of their humanity, with the goal of helping individuals live a life that is full and flourishing. (2011, 294)

Moreover, both are ideas that have evolved over time, taking on multiple meanings, applications, and emphases in different times, places, and contexts (Cmiel 2004).

Conceiving human rights

In contemporary thought, disputes over what human rights entail have been partially reconciled by the development of abstract definitions that are broad enough both to garner general acceptance and to accommodate diverse understandings of their application. Among them is the often-cited definition of human rights as the equal, inalienable, and universal rights ‘that one has simply because one is a human being’ (Donnelly 2003, 10). Of course, this definition does not tell us anything about the content of human rights, that is, the ‘normative implications of human rights’ or their practical implementation (Lamb 2019, 111). Alongside allowing for disagreement within a broad umbrella of agreement, this type of abstract definition has several advantages. Among the key challenges associated with attempts to trace the history of human rights are matters of language and semantics. Prior to the twentieth century, the term ‘human rights’ was not frequently used. It was certainly not absent from the nineteenth century English lexicon, wielding rhetorical clout in both anti-slavery and women’s rights campaigns, but the phrase itself was relatively uncommon. Yet, this does not mean that ideas of human rights were similarly anomalous. On the contrary, the concept of human rights was rather more widely discussed and debated than the specific term was used. At stake here is thus less the term ‘human rights’ than the meaning afforded the concept of human rights articulated in a variety of ways. In this sense, Donnelly’s (2003) abstract definition of human rights is instructive, for it points us toward the beliefs and values that give the concept of human rights its meaning: namely, humanity, equality, universality, and inalienability. These same ideas formed the basis on which the campaign to end slavery was fought.

Indentured labour

Among the key challenges faced by the Australian colonies in the early decades of the nineteenth century was the need to secure an adequate supply of labour. With the appropriation of huge tracts of land from their traditional owners and the transformation of those lands into large scale pastoral and agricultural operations came a growing demand for labour in the form of farm hands and shepherds (Banivanua Mar 2016, 32). Even at the height of transportation in the 1830s and with increasing numbers of free settlers arriving each year, the colony’s labour needs were not being met (Cullen 2012, 85). After early plans to redistribute Britain’s surplus population failed to gain traction, a number of prominent businessmen began making the case for importing indentured labourers to the colony from a range of source countries, the most prominent of which was India.

Among New South Wales’ earliest international relations were those it forged with India. In 1792, after the colony’s supply ship, the Guardian sank, leaving the settler population without adequate food or supplies, Governor Arthur Phillip sent the Atlantic to Calcutta to source provisions, thus beginning one of Australia’s longest standing international relationships. Indeed, although London may have been ‘the most important city’ to the Australian colonies, their closest and most direct links were with India, which served as a colonial ‘hub’ ‘projecting power, goods and people’ around the British empire (Davis 2013, 82 & 81). As Broadbent, Rickard, and Steven (2003) note, such was the extent of the relationship developed between New South Wales and India, that by 1840 a ship was departing Sydney for the Indian ports almost twice a week. Those ships did not just transport food and other goods but facilitated the movement of colonial administrators, traders, business owners and other settlers between India and Australia, in both directions. Among them was John Mackay, who arrived in Sydney with his family and five Bengali servants in August 1836.

Mackay’s proposed solution to addressing the colony’s labour shortages was the importation of indentured labourers from India. For the previous twenty-eight years, Mackay had operated as a merchant and indigo planter in Bengal, employing ‘considerable numbers’ of Indian workers (Cullen 2012, 84). The particular labourers he thought suitable for the conditions in the colony were variously known as Dhangars, Boonahs or, most commonly ‘Hill Coolies,’ a name that became a ‘catch-all term for those on the margins of Hindu society, whose supposed poverty, backwardness, and ignorance made them particularly vulnerable’ (Major 2017, 27–8). According to Mackay, they were ‘quiet, docile, and industrious,’ and could be maintained at a very low cost (1837, 3). The model that Mackay proposed for the introduction of Indian workers to the colony was that which had already been established in Mauritius.

Australia also had a pre-existing relationship with Mauritius, forged independently and through their joint membership of the British empire. As early as 1802, New South Wales entered a trade relationship with Mauritius, relying on its Indian Ocean neighbour for its sugar supply. Although their interactions were tentative in the early years, owing to Mauritius being a French colony, its transferral to Britain as part of the Treaty of Paris (1814) saw their relationship develop into one in which merchants, businessowners, and colonial administrators became part of the same imperial network, corresponding with and on occasions visiting one another (Cullen 2012, 92). Given this existing relationship, Mackay’s suggestion that New South Wales adopt the model of indentured labour instituted in Mauritius was unremarkable. After the emancipation of its slave population in 1834, at the time one of the largest in the British Empire (Barker 1993, 185), Mauritius was chosen as the location for what was known as the ‘great experiment,’ in which Britain aimed to demonstrate that free labour was preferable to slavery. That year, the first shipment of more than 41 000 Indian labourers looking to escape the effects of an economic depression in India were sent from Bengal to work on the sugar plantations of Mauritius (The National Archives 2023). It was to be model for other colonies throughout the empire to follow: in total, 1.3 million Indians emigrated to Mauritius (500 000), the British West Indies (400 000), Natal (150 000), and Fiji (60 000) to work as indentured labourers.

Rather than simply being a function of the international relations established between the governments and administrations of the British empire, however, Mackay’s proposal was underpinned by the experiences and international interactions of several individuals. Foremost among them was J.T. Mayo, who arrived in Sydney directly from Mauritius in 1837, bringing with him with firsthand experience of the indenture system and plans to grow cotton in New South Wales (Woollacott 2015, 88). Also giving support to Mackay’s plan was the Colonial Secretary in Mauritius, as well as businessmen and merchants who provided insights into their experiences and referred Mackay to agents in Calcutta who could undertake recruitment operations (Cullen 2012, 93).

Despite local and international support for Mackay’s plan, critics of the proposal, including the prominent minister, politician and activist, John Dunmore Lang, opposed the importation of Indian labourers on racial grounds, raising concerns about the ‘absolutely intolerable’ prospect of ‘fraternization with a race so essentially different from ourselves’ leading to the inevitable propagation of ‘mongrel and degenerate progeny’ (The Colonist 21 September 1837, 1). Others turned to anti-slavery rhetoric to oppose the idea, drawing on arguments popularised by the campaign to end transportation that was being simultaneously waged in the colony. Among anti-transportation campaigners, the treatment and management of convicts was routinely referred to as the ‘slave system’ (The Australian 24 November 1837) and condemned as ‘an outrageous violation of human rights’ (The Austral-Asiatic Review 28 May 1839, 6). So too among its opponents at home and abroad, indentured labour was posed as a form of slavery (The Sydney Herald 19 January 1837, 2).

As the debate wore on, critics of indenture not only pointed to the fact that the Indian government had banned labour migration to Mauritius in 1838, on account of abuses perpetrated against its emigrants, but noted that the trafficking of Indian workers to the sugar colonies was being referred to as the ‘East Indian slave trade’ (The Australian 23 April 1839, 2). Indeed, Mackay’s proposal saw New South Wales dragged into international debate about whether the Transatlantic slave trade had simply been replaced by a new form of slavery. In the British House of Commons, the radical politician William Molesworth argued to this end that indentured labour was ‘a new kind of slavery, and a new kind of slave trade,’ designed by planters to ensure a ready ‘supply of labouring hands’ and fully sanctioned by government, adding that his particular concern was for the Hill Coolies that Mackay and Mayo proposed importing into New South Wales (1838, 476–571).

Although the New South Wales Legislative Council ultimately determined not to support Mackay’s plan, by the time it reached its decision he had already brought thirteen Indian labourers to the colony to work as shepherds and labourers. His scheme was an unmitigated disaster. Not only did the workers flee but once located, took Mackay to court claiming breach of contract on account of insufficient provision of food and clothing, although they eventually lost their case (Major 2017, 34). Despite these troubles and lack of government support, between December 1837 and March 1846, 150 Indian labourers were brought to New South Wales by several agents, including Mackay and Robert Towns (Doust 2004, 158 & 159).

Early pacific island labour

Although Mackay and Mayo’s proposal had provoked some opposition to the idea of importing foreign indentured labour, it was with the arrival of workers from the Pacific that comparisons to slavery and engagement with the idea of human rights began to gather pace. By then, as with their engagements with India and Mauritius, settlers from the Australian colonies had been interacting with the peoples of the Pacific for almost 50 years. Those early engagements were primarily driven by trade, commerce, and evangelism. In particular, lucrative trades in sandalwood, bêche de mer (sea cucumber) and mother of pearl, saw the establishment of relationships extending from the Marquesa Islands in the east to New Guinea in the north with Fiji, the Loyalty Islands, the New Hebrides, and the Solomon Islands in between. After 1840, coconut oil and copra became significant commodities and by the 1850s, settlers from Europe and the Australian colonies had begun establishing plantations on the Pacific Islands, first to grow coconuts, and later, in the aftermath of the American Civil War, cotton, and sugar cane. By then, however, Queensland’s cotton and sugar plantations had also been established and, with them, trade in labour from the Pacific islands had commenced.

In 1847, Benjamin Boyd brought the first indentured labourers from the Pacific to New South Wales. A Scot by birth, he hailed from a well-established transatlantic slave-trading family (Christopher 2020, 239). Arriving in Australia in 1842, Boyd quickly established himself as one of the largest land holders in the colony, taking 2.5 million acres of land traditionally owned by the Wiradjuri people in the Monaro and Riverina (Walsh 1966). Like Mackay’s experiment before him, Boyd’s initial attempt to source cheap labour to work that land was not a success. Most of the 70 men and boys imported from Tanna and Aneityum in the New Hebrides and Lifu in the Loyalty Islands died, fell ill, or ran away (Banivanua Mar 2016, 32). Although the workers had ‘all put their mark on contracts that bound them to work for five years,’ it is highly unlikely they understood what they were agreeing to (National Museum of Solomon Islands 2014, 6). Undeterred, Boyd sent for more workers.

To Boyd’s surprise, however, his ‘actions were met with near-universal opposition’ (Curthoys and Mitchell 2018, 168). So reprehensible were his operations that he was not simply cast as ‘a pariah amongst urban liberals’ but deemed an embarrassment by his friends and associates (Diamond 1995, 132). In short, the practice of importing indentured labourers from the Pacific Islands was, from the very start, denounced as a form of slavery. As its detractors argued, Boyd’s labour recruitment practices contravened the basic principles of human rights, in particular, the right to liberty, as well as the exercise of free will and freedom from harm. In a speech before the New South Wales Legislative Council, Robert Lowe raised serious concerns that the ‘trade springing up in the colony … was characterized by the distinctive marks of a slave trade,’ before calling on the legislature to ‘putdown this monster … before it ripened into full bloom’ (Sydney Morning Herald 2 October 1847, 2). Lowe thought it particularly egregious that Boyd did not consider the labourers to be immigrants. On the contrary:

He spoke of it as importation. He had brought his cargo of labour as he would have brought a cargo of tea or sugar, and laid it down on the wharf. He had brought these people out as slaves, to traffic in and profit by their labour. (Sydney Morning Herald 2 October 1847, 2)

Such was the sense of unease provoked by Boyd’s scheme that when the Masters and Servants Act, which established the validity of contracts between masters and servants anywhere in the colony, was amended in August 1847, it deliberately excluded Pacific Islanders (National Museum of Solomon Islands 2014, 6).

In the meantime, an Immigration Committee established to determine the level of demand for labour in the colony and to offer suggestions about how it might be procured also concluded that Boyd’s scheme should not be supported. While it acknowledged that there was a ‘most urgent demand for labour’ in the colony, it expressed ‘feelings of the deepest regret and alarm’ that ‘immigration of this character’ was being sought as a solution (The Maitland Mercury 22 September 1847, 2). That said, its concerns were not of a humanitarian character but echoed earlier racially motivated arguments against the use of Indian indentured labour. The importation of ‘savage natives from the Polynesian Islands,’ would, it argued, ‘expose the colony to all the evils of a mixed and coloured population … lead to the preoccupation of the territory by a semi-barbarous or savage race, to the prejudice of immigrants from the United Kingdom,’ and injure ‘the purely British character’ of the colony (The Maitland Mercury 22 September 1847, 2). In short, although human rights arguments were certainly levelled against proposals to important indentured labour into New South Wales, objections to the scheme were primarily driven by race-based notions of national unity. A similar set of arguments also found form in Moreton Bay.

Labour supply in Queensland

Established as a secondary penal colony in 1824 and declared a free settlement in 1842, in 1859 the Moreton Bay colony separated from New South Wales, becoming the colony of Queensland. Its new government, which sat for the first time in May 1860, faced two immediate problems: a ‘critical lack of labour’ and a pressing need to expand the economy beyond its reliance on the pastoral industry (Moles 1957, 1345). The solution to these problems, favoured by many, was the development of a cotton and perhaps a sugar industry to be worked by cheap non-white labour, preferably from India. Others, however, vehemently opposed the idea of importing indentured labourers and, like their New South Wales counterparts, likened the practice to slavery. Drawing on arguments made by abolitionists over the treatment of Indian labourers in other similar contexts, like Mauritius, opponents of Indian immigration raised concerns over the potential for the practice to ‘degenerate into a species of slavery’ (North Australian and Queensland General Advertiser 15 July 1862, 2). Their strong preference was for the labour requirements of the colony to be met by free British and European migrants.

Despite their protestations, however, a Select Committee appointed to ‘investigate the whole question of coolie immigration to Queensland’ saw merit in arguments both for and against the use of indentured labour. It recommended that European immigration be supported with public funds and that ‘no restrictions should be thrown in the way of planters desirous of procuring Asiatic labour at their own costs and under the proper supervision of the Government’ (Moles 1957, 1348). By then, however, regulations on Indian labour migration in the British empire specified that Coolies could not be hired by private individuals unless government regulations providing for their protection were in place. The British Secretary of State for the Colonies thus suggested that the government of Queensland adapt the regulations that were put in place to allow the resumption of labour migration from India to Mauritius in 1842 (Queensland Legislative Assembly 8 August 1861). After some negotiation, in 1862 the Queensland government gained India’s ‘tentative approval’ for a set of regulations, which allowed for the introduction and protection of Indian labourers (Moles 1957, 1349). Yet, the refusal of the Queensland government to abide by India’s requirement that it provide a fixed salary to emigration agents based in India rather than pay a commission for each labourer recruited, first delayed and then ultimately prevented the arrival of Indian workers.

Intended as a further safeguard against exploitation, Queensland’s refusal to abide by India’s terms marked an awkward point of tension in their early relationship. Evidence of this tension was still apparent twenty years later when the Queensland government began a new round of ‘negotiations with India to secure “coolie labour”’ for the sugar industry (Griffiths 2017, 55). In this instance, it took more than two years before ‘regulations acceptable to both governments’ were finalised and approval was given by the British Government in India for Queensland to begin recruiting Indian indentured labourers (Griffiths 2017, 65). Once again, however, the scheme did not progress: this time it was Queensland that withdrew, preferring instead to focus on amending legislation governing the recruitment of South Sea Islanders and developing incentives for European indentured labour.

The south sea islander labour trade

In the midst of strenuous debate 1861 over how best to meet Queensland’s growing labour needs, Robert Towns, after whom Townsville would be eventually named, added to his existing holding a large tract of land appropriated from its traditional owners along the Logan River, forty miles south of Brisbane. His intention was to establish a cotton plantation to be known as ‘Townsvale.’ To meet his labour needs, Town’s initially proposed the importation of Chinese labourers for his enterprise, but with tensions running high over violent clashes on the Victoria and New South Wales goldfields, his idea was met with stiff resistance. Towns’ solution was to source labour from the Pacific Islands, beginning a trade that would last for more than four decades and would see almost 62 500 South Sea Islanders brought to Queensland to work, primarily in the sugar and cotton industries (Australian Human Rights Commission 1992, 73; Kennedy 2004). Most came from the Loyalty Islands (New Caledonia), the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), and later, the Solomon Islands. Although they and their descendants prefer to be known as South Sea Islanders, at the time they were most commonly referred to as ‘Kanakas,’ the Hawaiian word for ‘man.’ What is more, although most were Melanesian, throughout the nineteenth century they were erroneous referred to as Polynesians. While some came willingly, signing multiple contracts and travelling back and forth between Queensland and their island homes, others were recruited through means of coercion, deception, and kidnapping.

As with previous efforts to import foreign labour, from the very start debate over the use of indentured labour from the Pacific Islands centred on whether the labour recruitment practices engaged by Queensland’s cotton and sugar planters respected and upheld the Islanders’ rights to liberty and free will or amounted to overt or covert slavery (Saunders 1982, 20). Within days of landing at Lytton near the entrance of the Brisbane River on 15 August 1863 carrying his first shipment of 67 South Sea Islanders, Towns and his labour recruiter, Ross Lewin, were embroiled in controversy (The Courier 22 August 1863, 5). The North Australian forthrightly declared that ‘the slave trade had commenced in Queensland’ before equating this ‘trade in human flesh’ with the Peruvian slave trade and likening Towns to Benjamin Boyd (20 August 1863, 4). Thanks to the movement of missionaries between the Australian colonies and the Pacific Islands, the exploits of Peruvian recruiters who, in the previous year had enticed or kidnapped 3125 Pacific Islanders to work as domestic servants or labourers in Peru’s guano mines, had become reasonably well- known in Australia (Maude 1981). Posing the issue in terms of human rights, The Sydney Morning Herald (28 December 1863) had cast the Peruvians as ‘a mongrel population, to a great extent debased to the lowest degree and insensible of human rights,’ and whose actions ‘mock the name of liberty.’

Despite widespread criticism of their operations, nine months later another 67 South Sea Islanders arrived on the Uncle Tom, recruited by Ross Lewin to work on Towns’ cotton plantation. By then, Lewin had gained a reputation as a ‘man-stealer and kidnapper’ (Maude 1981), with some accounts suggesting that he may have learnt his trade working for the Peruvian labour recruiters prior to taking up his post with Towns (Hunt 2007, 40). In the years that followed and with the rapid development of the sugar industry in northern New South Wales and Queensland, other growers and planters, including several who hailed from international slave trading families, began recruiting labourers from the Pacific Islands (Christopher 2020, 242).

Opposing the labour trade

Throughout this period, opponents of South Sea Islander labour recruitment insisted that the practice was a form of slavery, drawing on anti-slavery rhetoric and the support of international networks to pressure the government to prohibit the practice. In Brisbane, anti-slavery efforts were led by a small abolitionist society established by Robert Short. As a former resident of the West Indies, Short had firsthand experience of the evils wrought by slavery, both on the enslaved and on the social and political development of slave-holding societies. By 1867 he had made a name for himself as a vocal opponent of South Sea Islander labour recruitment, publishing regular letters in The Brisbane Courier and delivering public lectures on the subject at the School of Arts in Brisbane. The general crux of his argument always the same: the South Sea Islander labour trade was ‘nothing more nor less than incipient slavery in disguise’ (The Brisbane Courier 5 September 1867, 3). This was not a novel characterisation but drew directly on terms used by anti-slavery activists in Britain and America to describe French efforts to encourage free immigration from Africa and India to work in its plantation colonies of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Cayenne. In one of his letters, Short included a lengthy extract of an article by the English sociologist and feminist anti-slavery activist, Harriet Martineau, published in the Edinburgh Review (1858), which described immigration from Liberia to the French colonies and American plantations as ‘a disguised labour trade’ (The Brisbane Courier 29 October 1867, 3; Logan 2009, 183). Almost a decade later, Short drew on the article’s contents to explicitly compare the South Sea Islander labour trade to the Liberian trade and to argue that the ‘policy of importing “free labourers”’ that had been ‘denounced … throughout the civilized world as a revival of the slave trade’ in the African case, had been ‘resuscitated in Queensland’ (The Brisbane Courier 29 October 1867, 3).

Short was assisted in his campaign by William Brookes, Member for North Brisbane between 1864 and 1867. Described as a ‘rabid abolitionist,’ Brookes also promulgated his argument on the pages of the Brisbane Courier (Docker 1970, 100). However, his arguments were also driven by his longstanding belief that:

Coloured labour means ruin; ruin in body and soul as a British colony; ruin to our trade. It means an entire suppression of … all our morals, our religion, our civil and constitutional liberties. (in Docker 1970, 100)

That is, like many earlier opponents of Indian labour, Brookes fundamentally believed in the superiority of white workers.

By the late 1860s Short and Brookes had taken their campaign to London, corresponding on a semi-regular basis with members of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, an organisation established in 1839 to achieve ‘the extinction of the slave-trade by means of the universal abolition of slavery’ (The Anti-Slavery Reporter 1900, 2). Although the society was not unaware of the situation regarding South Sea Islander labour in Queensland before then, it was not until 1868, when evidence of kidnapping, deception, the sale of Islanders by their chiefs, and a one-in-five mortality rate during a recruitment voyage by the Syren came to light, that it began to show serious concern about the matter. In the years that followed, the Anti-Slavery Reporter described the Queensland labour trade as ‘a clandestine slave-trade’ (1870, 68–70), ‘worse than real slavery’ (1890, 183), ‘slavery in disguise’ (1894, 24), or simply as ‘kidnapping’ (1872, 15). Originally published in the London Quaker journal The Friend (December 1868), an article written by Brookes detailing atrocities committed aboard the Syren was also re-published in almost all the major newspapers through the Australian colonies, sparking significant debate about the legitimacy of Queensland’s approach to the problem of labour shortages.

The case of the Syren was not however, simply a matter of domestic concern or a blight on its international reputation, but was implicated in Queensland’s relationship with the French administrations in New Caledonia and the Loyalty Islands.² By the late 1860s, the issue of French influence in the region was exercising the minds of the colonial governments in Australia. Not only were they concerned about French commercial ambitions in the Pacific but the question of whether Britain or France would take control of Fiji and the New Hebrides remained unresolved, leaving the colonies’ economic and strategic ambitions hanging in the balance.³ Added to this, the Australian colonies were becoming increasingly hostile to the French policy of ‘sending convicts to the Pacific, a matter of particular concern to colonies still seeking to live down their own penal origins’ (Bongiorno 2016). In this case, however, the criticism went the other way with complaints of kidnapping in French waters lodged by the Governor of New Caledonia and the French government. In response, the Queensland government passed the Polynesian Labourers Act of 1868, a piece of legislation designed to regulate international relations between Queenslanders and Pacific Islanders. To balance the competing demands of supporters and critics of the Pacific Island labour trade, it acknowledged that while ‘many persons have deemed’ the labour trade ‘desirable and necessary in order to enable them to carry on their operations in tropical and semi-tropical agriculture,’ the ‘prevention of abuses’ against labourers was also a necessity (Polynesian Labourers Act 1868: preamble). The Act introduced a range of measures to protect labourers, including a requirement that ‘a consul, missionary or other responsible person … sign a statement that recruits had been legitimately enlisted,’ intended to prevent kidnapping. With no consuls posted to either the New Hebrides or the Solomon Islands, that task largely fell to the missionary community.

Situated amidst the largest source of South Sea Islander labour, however, the evangelists of the New Hebrides Mission became the most vocal opponents of the Polynesian Labourers Act. They argued that the labour trade was ‘seriously retarding’ their missionary operations and raised concerns that the Polynesian Labourers Act would ‘degenerate into a slave trade’ (Kay 1872, 36–7 & iii). They also argued that rather than improving and regulating relations between Queensland and the islands of the Pacific, implementation of the Act was provoking further animosity. That animosity was acutely felt when Bishop Patteson of the Melanesia Mission was clubbed to death on the island of Nukapu (now part of the Solomon Islands) in an act widely interpreted at the time as revenge for the ‘nefarious practices that take placed in the labour trade for Queensland’ (The Newcastle Chronicle 11 November 1871, 2). His death helped rally supporters of the anti-slavery cause in the Australian colonies, saw Queen Victoria accuse Queensland traders of dishonouring ‘the name of the British Empire’ was a catalyst for the eventual introduction of legislation, in Britain and in Queensland, to further regulate the labour trade (Samson 1998, 117; Queen Victoria 1872).

Legal challenges

In the 1860s, 70s and 80s, others turned to the court system to challenge the legality of South Sea Islander labour recruitment practices. The first and most significant legal response to the practice of blackbirding in terms of universal rights was articulated in the case of the Jason at the Supreme Court of Queensland (R v Coath 1871). The case saw Captain John Coath found guilty of abducting and kidnapping nine South Sea Islanders during a recruitment voyage in February 1871. In the appeal that followed, Coath’s barrister, Charles Lilley QC, argued that even if his client had committed the acts he was accused of, ‘he had not actually committed a crime’ (Banivanua Mar 2009, 29). ‘The offence of kidnapping,’ he argued, ‘only arises where persons are taken from under the protection of the law of England,’ thereby suggesting that because South Sea Islanders were not governed by the law of England, they could not appeal to the rights it sought to protect (R v Coath 1871, 178). The Attorney-General, John Bramston, disagreed and argued that kidnapping was a ‘violation of that personal liberty which the law of England recognises in every man’ (R v Coath 1871, 181). If, at any point during the recruitment process the ‘right of the personal liberty of these men’ was breached, he argued, the crime of kidnapping had been committed (R v Coath 1871, 181). Chief Justice Cockle and Justice Lutwyche both concurred with Bramston and upheld the conviction. Their arguments were multifaceted, seeking at the same time to establish the universal applicability of the right to liberty, protect Queensland’s commercial interests and, by using law ‘as a tool of empire,’ extend the jurisdiction of common law ‘beyond British territory to regulate the conduct of British subjects in the western Pacific’ (Banivanua Mar 2009, 29). Cockle argued that although there were some circumstances in which the restraint of individual liberty could be justified (for example, as punishment in the form of incarceration), he could not find any justification for denying the liberty of the South Sea Islanders. Cockle also equated the labour trade with slavery and warned that allowing rights to be ‘violated with impunity’ (R v Coath 1871, 181) would harm the ‘moral authority and credibility of Britain and the common law in the savage world’ (Banivanua Mar 2009, 29) and endanger ‘the safety of commerce and the blessings it maintains’ (R v Coath 1871, 181).

Yet, it was Justice Lutwyche’s final judgment that, for the first time, cemented the place of liberty in Australia’s understanding of the principle on which its engagements with foreign peoples ought to be conducted. ‘[W]hether they are civilised or not matters not,’ Lutwyche wrote, ‘they have a right to liberty, which is inherent in all human beings’ (R v Coath 1871, 185). It was ‘a singular precedent’ that would later form part of Chief Justice Lilley’s judgment in the 1884 case of the Hopeful (Mortensen 2000). That case saw the recruiting agent, Neil McNeil and boatswain, Barney Williams, tried for the murder of a man named Tenepapa at Harris Island (now part of Papua New Guinea) and kidnapping of eight others. Drawing on Lutwyche’s argument about universal human rights in his instructions to the jury, Judge Lilley implored the jurors to put aside the widely-held belief that ‘the life of a black man was of little importance’ (Brisbane Courier 27 November 1884, 5). Both were found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. Three days later, five others implicated in the atrocities were tried, found guilty, and sentenced to hard labour, with the first three years to be spent in irons. Although public backlash saw the death sentences imposed on McNeil and Williams commuted and all but one member of the crew quietly released from Boggo Road Gaol in 1890, the point had been made: the right to liberty was a universally held human right.

Ending the labour trade

While persistent efforts by humanitarians led to increased regulation, the end of the Pacific Island labour trade came, not as the result of humanitarian concern or the adoption of universal principles of human rights in Australia, but as the result of the White Australia Policy operationalised in the Immigration Restriction Act (1901) and the Pacific Island Labourers Act (1901). In Alfred Deakin’s view, these two policies, the first of which sought to restrict non-European immigration to Australia and the second of which was designed to end the use of Pacific Islander labour before deporting remaining South Sea Islanders, were ‘necessary complement[s] of a single policy—the policy of securing a “white Australia”’ (in Lake 2003, 354). Of course, arguments suggesting that the national unity of the newly established federal Commonwealth of Australia could only be achieved through the imposition of racial unity served as a direct challenge to established principles of liberty and universal human rights. In short, they suggested that although individual liberty and other rights were theoretically universal on account of the common humanity of all human beings, the exercise of those rights was the exclusive preserve of the white settler population (Lake and Reynolds 2008, 26). Australia’s first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton, put the position plainly in his contribution to debate on the Immigration Restriction Bill when he stated:

I do not think … that the doctrine of the equality of man was really ever intended to include racial equality. There is no racial equality. There is basic inequality. These races are, in comparison to white races … unequal and inferior. (1901, 5233)

In bringing an end to Pacific Islander labour migration, issues of race trumped arguments about the economic benefits of indentured labour for the Queensland sugar industry (Birch 1965, 198).

Among those who opposed the Pacific Island Labourers Act, however, were planters supported by the Queensland Premier, Robert Philp, who feared the policy would ‘entirely destroy the sugar industry’ (in Birch 1965, 201). In letter to the Senate in November 1901, Philp drew on notions of racial equality, purportedly upheld by the British Empire, in an attempt to have the bill set aside by the Governor General. The Pacific Islanders were, Philp argued, ‘legal immigrants,’ many of whom had been in Queensland for long periods. The plan to deport them, he continued, ‘would cause “great inhumanity and injustice”’ (in Moore 2000, n.p.). Also opposing the legislation were members of the Pacific Islander community in Queensland who petitioned King Edward VII to overturn the deportation provisions of the act which, they argued, contravened their rights to ‘freedom, justice, and mercy’ (in Moore 2000, np). Although their petitions were dismissed, Lord Lamington declaring in the House of Lords that the question of how to deal with the Pacific Islander community was the exclusive preserve of the Australian government, others pointed out that this autonomy did not extend to acts of cruelty. One prominent article, published in The Queenslander in 1902, presented the issue as an explicit matter of human rights. ‘[W]e should know,’ it argued, ‘that beyond all Commonwealth law there lies the bar of human rights.’ That bar precluded measures that put its subjects at risk of death, ‘absolute exile’ or other harms. Also drawing on notions of liberty, free will, and moral sentiment, the article argued that the issue was not simply that deportation by force was ‘utterly against their will,’ but that it would require their reasons for wanting to stay, ‘reasons with which every just and human person must sympathise,’ to be overridden and ignored (The Queenslander 5 April 1902, 728). The issue, it concluded, was thus one ‘based on common human right … that the Kanaka is entitled to remain in Queensland if he prefers to do so, and that it would be a great and cruel wrong to force him back to his islands’ (The Queenslander 5 April 1902, 728).

In the end, arguments about national unity trumped appeals both to human rights and to economic prosperity and the South Sea Islander community in Australia was subjected to what Moore describes as ‘one of the cruellest pieces of legislation we had’ and Davis calls ‘Australia’s most inhumane mass deportation abuse’ (in Prince and Lester 2021). Between late 1906 and 1908 more than 7500 South Sea Islanders were deported from Australia with devastating results, both for those who were expelled and those who remained. Many of those sent ‘home’ had left with their parents as small children or, for other reasons, no longer had strong familial or cultural connections to their islands of origin and found adjusting to their news lives extremely difficult. Families were torn apart with some members being granted one of 1654 official exemptions which permitted them to stay in Australia, while others were forced to leave. Those who remained faced discrimination, the imposition of further legislation restricting their ability to work, and limited access to education and health services. The ramifications of that discrimination and disadvantage continue to be felt today (Queensland Government 2019).

Beyond its impact on the descendants of the South Sea Islander indentured labourers, Australia’s historical labour recruitment practices and immigration policies continue to have ongoing ramifications for its relations with contemporary nations of the South Pacific. Events marking the 150th anniversary of blackbirding in the capital of Vanuatu, Port Vila, on 7 June 2013 sent an unequivocal message to the Australian government. At the centre of the commemorations was a re-enactment that ‘depicted people in chains, stolen away and then callously returned, dumped off ships on strange islands’ (Moore 2016, 168). Leading the crowd in a chorus of ‘Shame on You!’ Prime Minister, Moana Carcasses Kalasil condemned Australia both for its historical role in blackbirding and for its contemporary ‘failure to mitigate its legacy’ (Sullivan and Sullivan 2020, 167). The following month a re-enactment took place at Ormiston House in Queensland to mark the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the Don Juan. Echoing earlier pleas for an official apology, participants also called for restitution for the estimated $38–40 million in wages that was never forwarded to the families of deceased South Sea Islander workers.

Conclusion

Contrary to popular accounts that locate the origins of Australia’s engagement with human rights in the 1940s, debate over human rights began in the Australian colonies more than a century earlier. Much of that debate centred on the use of indentured workers to meet the labour needs of the colonies and drew directly on human rights arguments developed by the international anti-slavery movement. Likening the practice to slavery, opponents argued that the methods of labour recruitment employed in the Pacific Islands routinely involved the clear violation of universal rights to liberty, free will, and freedom from harm, human rights owed to all human beings, regardless of nationality or race. Yet, efforts to regulate or end the labour trade between the Australian colonies and the Pacific Islands on the basis of rights-based arguments vied for supremacy with the pursuit of prosperity and national unity. In the first instance, efforts to bring the trade to an end faced entrenched resistance from those who sought to prioritise the prosperity of the white settler population over the human rights of the labourers on whose toil much of that wealth was built. In the second, it saw both the human rights of South Sea Islander labourers and the economic fortunes of plantation owners and investors set aside in favour of a racially determined immigration policy (though it too had economic elements). In common with one another, both denied the universal applicability of human rights, willingly subordinating the rights of South Sea Islanders to suit the so-called national interest.

Although their ultimate outcome was highly problematic, debates over the use of indentured labour marked the most sustained engagement of the Australian colonies with ideas of human rights. Those debates not only shaped ideas about who was owed rights in the domestic affairs of the colonies, but underpinned Australia’s engagement with other peoples and nations in its international relations. To that end, understanding the place of human rights in Australia’s early international relations does not simply meet the need to provide a more accurate and comprehensive history of its development before the 1940s. On the contrary, it is in the considering Australia’s early engagement with human rights that we may well find the foundations of its contemporary approach to human rights in its foreign affairs.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under grant FT190100335.

Notes on contributors

Renée Jeffery

Renée Jeffery is a Professor of International Relations at Griffith University, an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. Her research focuses on transitional and post-conflict justice in the Asia-Pacific and, more recently, on human rights in Australia’s foreign affairs. Her tenth book, provisionally titled Unity and Prosperity: Human Rights in Australia’s International Relations is forthcoming.

Notes

1 Exceptions include Chappell, Chesterman, and Hill 2009, 8; and Charlesworth 2002.

2 France annexed New Caledonia in 1853 and the Loyalty Islands in 1864.

3 Despite persistent petitions from the Australian colonies, Britain did not agree to take control of Fiji until 1874, while the New Hebrides became a joint British and French condominium in 1906.