Back to Events

Seminar series: Writing Slavery into Australian History

The Western Australian Legacies of British Slavery project, in collaboration with the National Centre for Biography, presents a series of online seminars around the theme of Writing Slavery into Australian History.  These seminars aim to explore the life stories of Australian colonists and their networks, and to produce new sources and methods for writing biographies that include slavery.

In August 1833 British Parliament abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, Mauritius and the Cape when it passed the ‘Act for the abolition of slavery throughout the British Colonies, for promoting the industry of manumitted slaves, and for compensating the persons hitherto entitled to the services of such slaves.’ While this momentous event has continued to be celebrated, it is often forgotten that many of those who benefited from slavery had ties to other parts of the British Empire, including the settler colonies of Australia, Canada and South Africa.

25 Feb

1200 AWST/1500 AEST

(Western) Australian Legacies of British Slavery, Jane Lydon

The celebration of British abolition has overshadowed memories of the country’s long prior history as the world’s leading slave-trading nation. In August 1833 British Parliament abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, Mauritius and the Cape. In place of slavery the negotiated settlement established a system of apprenticeship and granted £20 million in compensation, to be paid by British taxpayers to the former slave-owners. The end of British slavery took place around fifty years after the establishment of Britain’s settler colonies, commencing in New South Wales in 1788—however, their overlapping and interrelated histories have not been satisfactorily explored. In this talk I review the Western Australian Legacies of British Slavery project, which aims to trace the movement of people, goods, capital, and practices from the Caribbean to WA by applying a biographical method. Following the experience of the Ridley and Walcott families exemplifies some of these patterns of movement. 

→ Register here

4 Mar

1200/1500

‘I am not a Kanaka or a N____’: slave pasts and kidnapped men in the Pacific, Emma Christopher

Albert Messiah, alias Arthur Fredrick Augustus Plantagenet Messiah, is an enigma, yet somebody that history records enough about to beg many questions and reveal some answers about slavery and associated questions of freedom, ‘blackness’ and racism in Australian history. A man of African origin from the small Caribbean island of Antigua, formerly a slave society producing sugar, Messiah went to sea as a ship’s cook and sailed to the UK. Then, after jumping ship in Tasmania, he worked on Pacific Labour ‘recruitment’ voyages, the industry that, often by trickery and deceit or worse, found men in the Pacific Islands and took them to Queensland’s sugar plantations. In an industry often likened to the Atlantic slave trade—just about stamped out by this time, though enslaved people were not yet emancipated in Brazil—he was one of many men of African origin who worked in this role, but he was certainly the one who left the biggest impact. Aboard the labour ship Hopeful in 1884, by Messiah’s account things turned deadly: men and women from New Guinea were kidnapped, and those who resisted murdered, as the ship filled its hold with workers for Queensland. Back in Australia he reported what he had seen, setting off a chain of events that would lead to several hundred men and women being returned to their islands and the Hopeful’s crew sent to jail, two condemned to death. It created a scandal: ‘white’ men were very rarely sentenced to hang on the words of a ‘black’ man. If Messiah was, as he always claimed, born in the Caribbean island of Antigua, then he never experienced the crushing chattel slavery of the West Indies first-hand, being born in the years after emancipation. By choosing seafaring as a profession, he found a way to maximise his spatial freedom. By all accounts, therefore, his biography is not one that should fixate on the likely enslaved status of his parents and grandparents but rather on his own achievements. Yet adding this context back into an account of his life reveals much, as it surely influenced what occurred in Australia, as too it utterly transformed what those in the Australian colonies assumed about him. This paper will explore what reading slave history back into black seamen’s lives within the Pacific Labour arena reveals. In Messiah’s case it underscores his allegation that people arriving onboard the Hopeful were victims of a crime against humanity, just as his own forebears had been. That he would make these assertations at great cost to himself, all the while being forced to repeat that his dark skin did not make him either a Pacific Islander or an Indigenous Australian but a citizen of the British Empire, casts new light on accusations of slavery in the Queensland labour trade.

→ Register here

11 Mar

1200/1500

Pastoralism, Aboriginal labour and the shift towards convict transportation in Western Australia, Jeremy Martens

By the end of the 1830s, the bloody conquest of the Avon valley east of Perth was largely complete.  A years-long campaign of state sanctioned violence against the Ballardong Noongar, which reached a climax in 1837, firmly established settler sovereignty over a fertile and well-watered region that had already become the centre of Western Australia’s expanding pastoral industry. In July 1839 the Perth Gazette remarked that the York district, which had ‘been lately disturbed by the aggressions of the natives’, was now ‘partially restored to a state of tranquillity’. Even so, ‘some caution and vigilance in the intercourse with the natives’ was still required, for the scarcity of labour in the colony renders it necessary to employ the aborigines in herding cattle and tending sheep. We hear with pleasure that their services are considered valuable, and that no apprehensions are entertained by the settlers of their abusing the confidence reposed in them. These blacks are, however, a singular race, and it will require many years of experimental suffering and forbearance on both sides—on the part of the whites as well as the blacks—to bring them to any conception of our laws, or adherence to our habits.' This paper examines the Western Australian pastoral industry’s demand for and dependence on Aboriginal labour from the late 1830s until the mid-1840s, in the immediate aftermath of the conquest of the Avon valley. Pastoralists frequently cited the shortage of cheap, reliable labour as the main impediment to the expansion of their industry; and it was in this context that significant attempts were made from the late 1830s to recruit Noongar workers, from both the Swan coastal plain and the Avon valley itself. It was the failure to enlist, retain and discipline a sufficiently large and dependant Indigenous workforce during the 1840s that led pastoralists instead to lobby the colonial government to recruit labourers that would be more easily controlled; an effort that included calls for indentured workers from Asia and, from the mid-1840s, a campaign led by the York Agricultural Society to introduce convict transportation to Western Australia.

→ Register here

18 Mar

1200/1500

James Stirling, first governor of Western Australia and imperial investor, Georgina Arnott

Admiral James Stirling arrived on Noongar land in 1829 to proclaim it the British colony of Western Australia. Officially, he represented the British government. Unofficially, he represented the commercial interests of his family, a collection of British naval officers, East India Company administrators and directors, imperial merchants, shipping magnates, their wives and their descendants. Stirling pursued the colony as an investment opportunity, first with the Colonial Office and then through land selections, the manipulation of market conditions and private capital-raising schemes. This pursuit was shaped by three, interrelated social phenomena. Firstly, numerous strands of his family had become wealthy through transatlantic and Caribbean slavery. Secondly, British government incentives for establishing a colony on the western side of Australia strengthened at the same time as it was shifting away from the ‘slave colonies’ and certain forms of unfree labour. And third, this shift placed pressure on the Stirling family to secure new income streams to maintain affluence and power. This seminar will explore these dynamics and ask: in what ways does the intergenerational biographical method expand and enliven, or alternatively risk reducing, our understanding of the legacies of British slavery in the Australian settler colonies?

→ Register here

25 Mar

1200/1500

Echoes of slavery in the colonisation of Western Australia’s north, Malcolm Allbrook

As Western Australia agitated for self-government in the 1880s, its colonists were caught in a dilemma. They needed to show the Colonial Office, which had threatened to retain management of the north, that the colony effectively controlled the furthest reaches of its vast land mass and that it was able to marshall the resources to develop them. The availability of cheap and reliable labour had been an almost intractable problem since the first days of the colony. Various solutions had been attempted—Indian indentured labour, convictism, Aboriginal labour contracts—with varying degrees of effectiveness. With the colonisation of the Gascoyne, Pilbara, and Kimberley after the 1860s the system of Aboriginal labour, initially under the provisions of the Masters and Servants Act, prevailed. Yet its heavily policed nature—the enforcement of labour contracts, labour gangs, neck-chaining, punitive expeditions against ‘uncontrolled’ populations—left the colony open to allegations that it tolerated conditions tantamount to slavery. Media allegations and complaints to London threatened to derail to path to self-government; indeed the Crown retained control of Aboriginal affairs until 1898, reserve powers that were seen by colonists as a great slight on their ability to govern. The colonial government though steadily moved to control the optics of the situation and introduced a new protectorate that allowed it to preserve a labour force that remained subservient yet avoided the obvious trappings of slavery.  As Henry Prinsep, Chief Protector of Aborigines between 1898 and 1907 and the architect of the Aborigines Act 1905 put it: “Neck chaining has not a pleasant sound to it, but perhaps that is the worst of the problem.”

→ Register here

1 April

1200/1500

National Biographies and Transnational Lives: legacies of British slavery across the empire, Zoë Laidlaw and Georgina Arnott

Britain’s involvement in the slave trade and slavery affected the lives and fortunes of many nineteenth-century immigrants to the Australian colonies. Some transferred capital directly from plantation economies to newly burgeoning settler colonial societies; for others, the connections were more diffuse. As historians have shown, the Australian colonies provided individual immigrants with an opportunity to refashion their existing reputations or even create them afresh. At the same time, collective colonial and settler identities were asserted in cultural, social, economic and political fora. This seminar explores dictionaries of biography as sites for the mutual constitution of individual and national (or colonial) identities. Alongside a consideration of how slavery and the slavery business feature in the Australian Dictionary of Biography and the Biographical Dictionary of Western Australians, it explores how Britain and its other settler colonies remembered, forgot, or suppressed, the legacies of British slavery in their national biographical dictionaries.

→ Register here

8 April

1300/1500

Exhibiting Slavery, Paul Arthur and Isabel Smith (Edith Cowan University)

Representations—and silences—relating to slavery in exhibition spaces have changed significantly over time. One of the earliest examples was the 1851 Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace. Three ‘fugitive’ enslaved African people fled the United States to London and displayed their formerly captured and enslaved selves for all ‘civilised’ nation states to see. There are many tensions to be examined between the transatlantic slave trade and the colonial origins of museums. Following some early instances through the mid-twentieth century, in the 1990s exhibitions on slavery multiplied across the Americas, Europe and Africa. Globally, much was occurring—colonial rule in Africa had ended, political leaders began offering national apologies for past atrocities, people of African descent were developing national and international alliances and movements, and the horrors of the Holocaust were being remembered and critically discussed in the nascent field of memory studies. Representations of slavery within museums and other sites of memory have transformed in conjunction with evolving contexts in global politics and social movements. The recent ‘biographical turn’ in museums has been particularly wide-reaching. This paper will investigate these shifts in narrative and interpretive strategies, within global social, political and historical contexts, referring to exhibitions from the Americas, Africa, Europe and Oceania.

→ Register here

15 April

1600/1800
UK 0800

Roundtable: Linking the Legacies of British Slave-ownership to Australian colonization

UK Partner Investigators Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland and Alan Lester talking to the Australian team. 

→ Register here