Dear ,

I’m sure you are aware of our annual signature event, the McIlwraith Lecture. You may also have seen a claim in The Courier Mail on Tuesday last week that McIlwraith tried to annexe PNG in order to “promote easy flow of slave labour”.

Keen to protect the reputation of our posthumous patron I fired off a letter to the Courier which you can read by clicking here. It wasn’t printed, nor has the claim been withdrawn.

This incident reveals a lot about the “culture wars” in Australia. I’m assuming that the journalists were fed the line by ideological culture warriors who want colonial scalps, and are not too fussy about facts.

But when it comes to the blackbirding trade in Queensland, the past is full of nuance, and some of the potential villains include The Brisbane Courier (predecessor of The Courier Mail), and Sir Samuel Griffith (McIlwraith’s great rival) whose name adorns universities, roads and federal electorates.

McIlwraith was never involved in the slave trade. He was born in 1835, and the slave trade was abolished in 1833, so the claim fails at the first hurdle.

Undoubtedly the Courier Mail was referring to the use of “coloured” indentured labour in Queensland, in which case they should have been more accurate, but again, as a bald statement of fact, they are wrong.

McIlwraith’s attempted annexure had nothing to do with indentured labour either. In 1883 his motivation was a matter of colonial security, attempting to forestall the Germans, Russians or French from annexing the territory themselves and putting Queensland’s security, as well as the security of its shipping lanes, at threat.

And McIlwraith’s strategic move was vindicated. It resulted in the British government proclaiming British New Guinea a protectorate in 1884, but four days after the Germans seized Northern New Guinea. If only they’d moved in 1883.

With the Chinese government currently seeking to establish a naval base in Papua New Guinea, McIlwraith’s concerns still resonate today.

But there is further complexity. McIlwraith did play a part in the indentured labour issue. In fact he lost an election in 1883 partly because of his support for the importation of “coolies” from India.

In the 19th Century labourers were recruited not just from the Pacific Islands, but also Japan, China, Malaya, India and even Europe.

Treatment of indentured labourers was frequently harsh, judged by our time, but standards for workers of all races were harsh.

Very many employees were subject to the Master and Servant Act, and earlier related laws inherited from the UK. These treated employment as a contract between people which could be enforced by the courts, including forcibly returning absent workers to their employers. Breach of contract could also lead to punishments, including jail or flogging. (See this thesis for an extensive analysis of this legislation). You could also lease out your employees to other employers.

Indentured labour was overlaid over that situation. It was an agreement by the employee to work for a period free, or for a reduced payment, to repay, for example, the costs of being transported  to Australia.

The main source of this labour in Queensland was the Pacific Islands and there were certainly grave abuses, some of which ended in the jailing of the organisers by Australian courts for offences up to, and including, murder.

Frequently the recruit would have no idea of the nature of the contract he was entering, even if he had the capacity to enter into one.

The main beneficiaries of this system were white planters, which included the Colonial Sugar Refining Company, still trading today as CSR Limited. One of the organisers of this trade was Burns Philp and Co, until recently listed on the ASX.

However, supporting or opposing this trade did not differentiate racists from non- or anti-racists. No, they were all racists back then.

The Brisbane Courier supported the trade. It also supported a separate state in the north, based on indentured labour. As the paper said on August 21, 1886:

In the North, as in every other tropical country under the sun, manual labour will sooner or later devolve upon coloured men; and it will be sooner, we are convinced, if separation [of North Queensland] takes place.

That the tropics were too hot for Europeans to labour in is surely a racist stereotype. Typically it was a position of the Conservatives, of which McIlwraith was one, and generally not of the Liberals.

However, the Liberal opposition arose from a view that the “coloured man” would undermine wages of the white man, and that democracy required racial homogeneity amongst the population.

There was aversion to various Asian cultures, with some, such as the Malays and Chinese, being ranked as worse than others.

McIlwraith thought Indian “coolies” would be more acceptable than Chinese, which is why in 1883 he sought the agreement of the Indian government  to the recruitment of Indians as indentured labourers.

After McIlwraith lost the election on the Coolie issue Samuel Griffiths instituted various racially-based schemes to encourage or discourage the importation of indentured labourers of different races, with taxes going as high as £30 pounds in the case of Chinese, or as low as £1 in the case of Europeans. He also discouraged Pacific Islanders by legislating to ban them from almost all work but field work.

Griffith’s efforts became the foundation of a white Queensland policy prefiguring the post-federation White Australia Policy, of which he can be said to be an architect.

While these arrangements sound alien to us, I wonder how later generations will view “Ten Pound Poms”, or Section 457 visas, the Pacific Labour Scheme, or the employment of backpackers in rural industry on work visas? The conditions are less onerous, but the aim is the same.

Some of this might concern you, and lead you to wonder why on earth we named the lecture after McIlwraith?

The explanation is relatively easy, although not as socially acceptable this year as last.

The idea of the McIlwraith Lecture is to inspire using the examples of real people who we invite to be our lecturers. It is also to foster an understanding that we stand here on the “shoulders of giants” who came before.

McIlwraith was a man of huge achievements, and some failings. He was a man of his time. Whether his idea of recruiting “coolies” was a failing, I’m not sure.  It puts him on the right side of the White Australia debate, but on the wrong side of the exploitation one.

He is certainly in no worse position than Samuel Griffith, The Courier Mail (successor to the Brisbane Courier), CSR, or Burns Philp.

The AIP views history as progress, which assumes that things have improved from what they were in the past. But to understand how good things are now, we also need to understand how they were in the past.

As George Santayana said:

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

We are seeing that truth played out as cancel culture ushers in new discriminations via intersectionality where race and other markers of group identity trump the character, beliefs and behaviour of individuals.

Our lecture, and its patron, are our contribution to remembrance as a springboard to progress. The Courier Mail would do well to explore its own past before it runs cheap shots from agitators and ideologues.

.Regards,

Graham Young
Executive Director