Violence and Colonial Dialogue: Australia-Pacific Indentured Labor Trade 0824830253, 9780824830250, 9781435666153

Citation preview

(Continued from front flap)

makes valuable observations on the dynamics of racial construction in the colonial world, and develops novel perspectives and strategies for the telling of colonial pasts. The resulting dialogue between coercion and agency provides an important intervention in existing debates over the meaning of colonial history. Empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated, Violence and Colonial Dialogue will be of considerable interest to Pacific and Australian historians and anthropologists and those studying colonial societies, indentured labor, and related topics.

Tracey Banivanua-Mar teaches colonial and human rights history in the Department of History, University of Melbourne.

Of related interest

UNSTABLE IMAGES Colonial Discourse on New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, 1875–1935 Brenda Johnson Clay 2005, 360 pages Cloth ISBN 978-0-8248-2916-2 Unstable Images concentrates a critical gaze on this discursive side of colonialism through close readings of a series of Western texts on the people of New Ireland from the 1870s to the 1930s—when the status of the New Ireland–New Britain region changed from precolonial to German control and finally to a League of Nations–mandated Australian administration.

Texts and Contexts Reflections in Pacific Islands Historiography Edited by Doug Munro and Brij V. Lal 2005, 264 pages Cloth ISBN 978-0-8248-2942-1 Texts and Contexts is concerned with the development of Pacific Islands history as a specialization in its own right. Specifically, this volume examines the foundational texts that pioneered and consolidated the new subdiscipline and served as the building blocks and stepping stone for further developments in the field. Thirty-five texts, all of which represent defining points in the development of Pacific Islands historiography, are examined.

Jacket design by Santos Barbasa Jr.

BANIVANUA-MAR

Jacket photo: “Fig Tree on the Logan,” The Queensland Album of Photographic Scenery: First Series (Brisbane: Watson & Co. Publishers, 1874), State Library of New South Wales, Mitchell Library Collection.

VIOLENCE AND COLONIAL DIALOGUE

PACIFIC ISLANDS STUDIES/HISTORY

D

VIOLENCE AND COLONIAL DIALOGUE

The AustralianPacific Indentured Labor Trade

uring the post-abolition period a trade in cheap and often cost-neutral labor flourished in the western Pacific. For more than forty years, it supplied tens of thousands of indentured laborers to the sugar industry of northeastern Australia. Violence and Colonial Dialogue tells the story of its impact on the people who were traded. From the beaches and shallows of the Pacific’s frontiers to the plantations and settlements of Queensland and beyond, a collective tale of the pioneers of today’s Australian South Sea Island community is told through an abundant and effective use of materials that characterize the colonial record, including police registers, court records, prison censuses, administrative reports, legislative debates, and oral histories. With a thematic focus on the physical violence that was central to the experience of people who were voluntarily or involuntarily recruited, the history that emerges is a powerful tale that is at once both tragic and triumphant. Violence and Colonial Dialogue also tells a more universal story of colonization. Set mostly in the British settler-colony of Queensland during the last forty years of the nineteenth century, it explores the brutality embedded in the structures of a colonial state, while attempting to recover the stories that such processes obscured. In so doing it delivers insights into the operation of violence in colonial relations,

TRACEY BANIVANUA-MAR (Continued on back flap)

University of Hawai’i Press Honolulu, Hawai‘i 96822-1888 www.uhpress.hawaii.edu jack mech.indd 1

10/27/06 11:30:49 AM

Violence and Colonial Dialogue

Publication of this work was supported by a grant from the Research and Graduate Studies Committee, Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne, and by a publication grant from the University of Melbourne.

VIOLENCE u and u Colonial Dialogue The Australian-Pacific Indentured Labor Trade

Tracey Banivanua-Mar

University of Hawai‘i Press / Honolulu

© 2007 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 12 11 10 09 08 07

6 5 4 3 21

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Banivanua-Mar, Tracey, 1974– Violence and colonial dialogue : the Australian-Pacific indentured labor trade / Tracey Banivanua-Mar. p. cm. Based on the author’s thesis (Ph.D.). Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8248-3025-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8248-3025-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Indentured servants—Australia—Queensland—History. 2. Sugar workers— Australia—Queensland—History. 3. Sugar trade—Australia—Queensland—History. 4. Pacific Islanders—Australia—Queensland—History. 5. Great Britain—Colonies— Australia. 6. Australia—Race relations. I. Title. HD4875.A85B35 2007 331.11'73—dc22 2006022270

Maps by Manoa Mapworks, Inc.

University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Designed by University of Hawai‘i Press Production Staff Printed by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group

For my grandparents, who started it.

Contents

1. 2. 3. 4.

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Violence, Language, and Colonial Dialogue

1

The Frontiers: Savages, Going Native, and the Rightness of Might

20

Survival, Arrival, and Growth: The World Islanders Built

43

The Settler Colony: Kanakas, Blacks, and Racial Borderlands

70

South Sea Islanders Resisting Kanakas: Identity, Consciousness, and Community to 1906

5. The State: Inside Colonial Violence, Law, and Order 6. Bulimen, Hardwork, and Muscular Tension

101 121 149

Conclusion: Structural Continuity and the Violence of Forgetting

175

Notes

187

Bibliography

231

Index

261

vii

Acknowledgments

THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN and prepared with the financial support of an Aus-

tralian Research Council grant and the collegial support of the Department of History at the University of Melbourne. Large sections of the book are derived from my PhD, during which I was fortunate enough to receive the finest supervision from Patrick Wolfe and Patricia Grimshaw, who were so unshakably supportive that I could not have finished without them. Without Patrick I would not have even started. His assistance has been deeply influential and inspirational. Pat’s support since the PhD, her encouragement, advice, and guidance, was probably a prime reason the book ended up being written. Thank you both. The book has also benefited greatly from the input, questions, and criticisms of those who have read it in various states of completion, from my two PhD examiners, Dane Kennedy and Henry Reynolds, who read it in its embryonic and earnest form and made helpful and encouraging feedback, to the manuscript’s anonymous reviewers, some gracious and some not. To one reviewer whose reading was especially engaged and generous, I am particularly grateful for his or her comments. Gillian Barrett, who also read a full draft of the book, I do not know where to start thanking you so will start with thanking you just for reading it. At various stages of its development, the book has benefited from the sorts of conversations that change everything, which I have been fortunate to have with friends and colleagues, in particular Julie Evans, Kalissa Alexeyeff, Tony Birch, Gary Foley, and of course, Sera Mar, who can fly, and Shauna Hurley, whose birthday album is in the mail. Josaia Banivanua Mar mentioned a taro patch in the village one day and upset two chapters in a good way. Peter and Margery Gregory, you hung on for a long time—I wish I had been quicker; and Akenisi Moceikete and Ma Kim Gun, I think this was all for you. Finally, Nick Volk, on whom many of the ideas in this book were sounded out over many

ix

x

Acknowledgments

long hours of rambling discussion, thank you for being everything. Your meals, music, and mind contributed endlessly. m

The argument outlining the structurally embedded nature of violence in the colonial project in Queensland was previously published as ‘‘Consolidating Violence and Colonial Rule: Discipline and Protection in Colonial Queensland,’’ Postcolonial Studies 8.3 (2005): 303–320. Sections of the conclusion were previously published as ‘‘ ‘No Aboriginal Native of . . . the Islands of the Pacific’: South Sea Islanders and the Distant Vote of the Commonwealth,’’ in Selective Democracy: Race, Gender and the Australian Vote, ed. John Chesterman and David Philips (Melbourne: Circa, 2003), 71–88. I thankfully acknowledge permission to republish these sections. I am grateful for permission from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to use extracts from ‘‘The Forgotten People’’ by Matt Peacock, which was first broadcast as a three-part series on Broadband on ABC Radio National on 10– 12 January1978 and reprinted by permission of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and ABC Online. Copyright 1978 ABC. All rights reserved. Permission was also granted to use extracts from the full tapes of these interviews held by the James Cook University Oral History Project. Extracts from the tapes of interviews recorded by Clive Moore and Patricia Mercer and held by the James Cook University Oral History Project have been used. I gratefully acknowledge the permission of Clive Moore to publish these extracts. In accordance with restrictions of access, interviewees remain anonymous when referred to in the following study, and other identifying features have been removed. Thanks also to the Department of History and Politics at James Cook University for allowing me to use a room for three weeks while I listened to the tapes. Material from the Queensland State Archives has been reproduced with the permission of the State of Queensland. The maps in the book were produced by Manoa Mapworks. Permission has been granted by The Journal of the Contemporary Pacific to reproduce map 2. The State Library of Queensland provided permission to reproduce images from the John Oxley Collection. The image ‘‘Fig Tree on the Logan’’ from Edward H. Foster’s ‘‘The Queensland Album of Photographic Scenery’’ from the Mitchell Library on the book’s cover has been reproduced with the permission of the State Library of New South Wales.

Map of the Southwest Pacific and Queensland

Map of the Pacific Ocean

Introduction Violence, Language, and Colonial Dialogue

FROM 1863 AROUND sixty thousand men, women, and children from diverse

islands in the southwestern Pacific labored for bonded periods of at least three years in the burgeoning sugar industry of the young British colony of Queensland. In the aftermath of the abolition of slavery, these laborers provided the essential cost-neutral, coercible, and colored labor that was deemed essential to the economic viability of white settlement in the tropical belt of Britain’s Australian colonies. As such the trade continued for forty-odd years until, at the turn of the twentieth century, amidst the determined and defensive efforts of the Australian colonies to federate as a white nation, the trade was abolished. From 1906 the majority of the ten thousand Islanders resident in Queensland were deported. In the time they had been there, these Islanders, who came from coastal and inland populations of islands in the Solomons, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, and even Kanaky/New Caledonia and Fiji, managed to plant the seeds of a newly forged community. Theirs is a vast story of displacement and diaspora that itself is only part of the much larger story of the catastrophe of colonialism in the Australian and western Pacific region. The following study could be introduced through reference to any one of the thousands of fragmented life stories in colonial archives that distill in a single person’s experience the myriad impacts of this catastrophe. The story of Kelah, from Epi Island in Vanuatu, is just one. On 12 October 1874 an inquest into the death of ‘‘a Polynesian Labourer’’ called Compan, who had last been seen in the company of ‘‘Keelah (Polynesian)’’, found his cause of death to have been a ‘‘blow from an axe’’.1 Kelah was tried and convicted for Compan’s murder the day after the inquest and was sentenced to death. By 11 November he was in Brisbane Gaol awaiting his sentence. Confined alone in his tiny cell, Kelah’s distress and illness concerned even the hardened jail officers who complained that, amongst other things, Kelah was ‘‘in the habit of screaming out frequently’’. When the sheriff visited Kelah in his cell, he ‘‘endeavoured to get [Kelah] to speak, and found that the only word he could say was ‘yes’—He appeared excited, and not very well and it seemed to me as if he wished to make me understand something but was unable to do so’’.2 1

2

Introduction

Kelah had been in Queensland only a few days and had been convicted, sentenced, and imprisoned without an interpreter. After his visit on 11 November, the sheriff placed Kelah under daily medical observation and wrote to Alfred Davidson, a local campaigner for the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Societies, telling him of Kelah’s distress and ‘‘requesting him to endeavor to get some Polynesian who could converse with Kelah, as I thought he wished to say something’’.3 Three days later Davidson was able to find an interpreter who did not speak Kelah’s language but ‘‘could converse a little and through this imperfect medium some information was procured’’. Davidson was told what he had expected to hear, that ‘‘in their own country the prisoner would have killed and eaten [the interpreter] if he could’’. It was this, he explained, that caused Kelah’s crime, for ‘‘through fear . . . and not being able to speak to the Santo men [on his plantation] he became much afraid of them and took his island mode of defence by a first stroke’’.4 This imperfect translation offered Kelah, for the first time, some explanation for his confinement. What it was he had appeared to want to communicate, however, was never recovered. Following his visit, Davidson petitioned the Queensland government to reduce Kelah’s sentence, arguing that Kelah was a ‘‘Cannibal Savage with no knowledge of moral responsibility and holding human life so cheap as to kill men simply for food is entitled to much consideration when his crime is to be tested by the light of our knowledge’’.5 In this ‘‘unknown jurisdiction’’ Kelah had not been able to learn soon enough that killing was an offense. Hanging him would act as no moral message to other cannibal savages, but a lifetime of hard labor and solitary confinement, by imposing prolonged suffering, would act as an ongoing ‘‘caution and warning’’.6 The colonial secretary’s office agreed with Davidson’s logic, and by July the following year Kelah’s death sentence had been commuted to a life of penal servitude. The last that is heard of Kelah was during a visit by the colony’s immigration agent and four interpreters, after two months of solitary confinement. By this time, his screaming and agitation had given way to a silent, immobile stillness, and ‘‘he could not be induced to open his lips, but seemed to treat everything said to him with a stolid indifference, and did nothing but gaze vacantly round his cell’’.7 In this glimpse of Kelah’s life we see reflections of the undertows that brought him to Queensland and ultimately to Brisbane Gaol. These are the subject of the following study of the structures and imperatives of settler-colonial rule on the one hand and an interspersed account of the multidimensional autonomy of emergent South Sea Islander communities on the other.8 The connecting theme of this twofold scrutiny is violence, both as a physical impact and as a discursive presence that distorts our attempts to recover South Sea Islanders from the past. Just as Kelah’s words and behavior were explained and interpreted

Violence, Language, and Colonial Dialogue

3

with reference to his status as a cannibal savage, the majority of the historical fragments of Islanders’ lives that made their way into extensive colonial archives similarly did so through obscuring and distorting discourses of violence. Demographic and descriptive material that captured glimpses of Islanders’ responses and adjustments in Queensland often emerged only through discussions of their colonial caricature, the so-called ‘‘Kanaka menace’’, and the racially prescribed physical and moral dangers that they were seen to pose to the colony. So, too, individuals like Kelah often spoke most freely through coronial inquests and court cases that, for reasons that will be explored, were commonly for charges of assault, grievous bodily harm, murder, and other such violence-related offenses. This tendency is hardly surprising. The labor trade took place in the western Pacific, or Melanesia, in the traditional site of South Sea pirates, seafaring yarns filled with savage cannibals and island women, and the violent romps of the Pacific’s Kurtz figures like Asterisk and Charlie Savage, who had ‘‘gone native’’ under the seductive powers of the western Pacific’s imagined savagery.9 The indentured labor trade was easily integrated into this literary tradition. Infamous captains like Bully Hayes and the notorious incidents we will consider in this study (such as the Carl in 1871, the Jason in 1875, and the Hopeful in 1884) were readily combined with the supposed savagery of Islander recruits to promise exciting tales of ‘‘cannibal cargoes’’.10 Western Pacific Islanders, whether as ‘‘Polynesians’’, ‘‘Melanesians’’, or ‘‘Kanakas’’, have been wedded to violence in colonial records and the story of the labor trade by a common discursive tradition.11 This tradition, which we could call Melanesianism for the sake of clarity, was arguably as total in its representational and social impacts as any Orientalism. To speak of Melanesianism is not just for the sake of finding a shorthand way of talking about this resilient literary and administrative discourse. The term also encompasses the connected constructions that were common to the varied names applied to western Pacific Islanders. It signifies that representations of Islanders as black, savage, tribal, violent, and physical were intimately related to the colonial project of constructing and containing a colonizable, oppressable, and exploitable object and were more than just a set of haphazardly similar constructions. Finally, Melanesianism emphasizes the structural logic and continuity of representations across geographic and temporal change. Being alert to this helps us to locate, dust off, and identify the filters through which can be viewed the stories and experiences of the first generation of Islanders in nineteenth-century Queensland. To underscore what this might achieve, we can return to the communicative inadequacies underpinning Kelah’s distress in 1874, for these act as both insight and metaphor. After his sentence was commuted to life in July 1875, Kelah’s trace in this archive abruptly ceases, and we are left knowing little of his fate or his

4

Introduction

past. Context tells us he was brought to Queensland to work a fledgling colonial industry. But we do not know under what circumstances he was brought— whether he was kidnapped, coerced, tricked, or merely transported at his own request. Had he known what he would experience in Queensland or why he was there? What and who had he left behind in the Islands, and did he mourn this loss, or was it a relief? If his recorded words in 1874 are true to those that actually came out of his mouth, what scared him in Queensland? What caused his distress in Brisbane, and what did he think as he ‘‘gazed vacantly’’ around his cell? Finally, how did he survive the months of solitary confinement? Had he had any prior knowledge, had he seen or heard of an industrial prison before he was confined to one? Although Kelah could have answered all these questions, the colonial world, with all its reams of paper and wells of ink, when it mattered was incapable of recording or hearing his story and was not equipped with the language and words to do so. Colonialism’s archives and disciplines of knowledge have notoriously obscured access to the voices and histories of colonized peoples such as Kelah.12 But, as is demonstrated by the glimpses of this one person about whom we know so little, the voices of colonized peoples, while perhaps not always recorded, were never silent. Distorted and fragmented though their voices may be, piecemeal grabs of their interpreted presence nevertheless pepper colonial records. In Kelah’s case, while he could not talk in jail, his actions could. His distress and agitation suggest in the broadest of terms an individualized legacy of colonial demands on the labor, land, and resources of the western Pacific. His actions were what led to the flurry of colonial correspondence that revolved around the issue of the unrealized potential of his uninterpreted words.13 In a way his agitation and violent behavior became a communicative channel through which an imperfect medium confirmed, as perhaps was inevitable, the colonial knowledge of Kelah’s cannibal savagery. The imperfect structures bridging the gap between Kelah’s actions and colonial administrators’ understanding of it were composed of woven-together pidgin notions and knowledge of Islanders that was constituted by a language, Melanesianism, whose concepts and words have continued to speak for histories of the trade. As such, language, and in particular the imperfect medium of so-called Pidgin, is an appropriate metaphor for the conceptual arrangement of the following study. Pidgin languages, which developed as a functional means of communication between colonizers and colonized, have the capacity to communicate and represent, as well as construct and reflect, social structures and relations of power. Such a recognition of the role of language in the transmission and reflection of culture and society is not new. Indeed, indigenous languages have long been reduced in their colonial renditions to gibberish or dialects, implying,

Violence, Language, and Colonial Dialogue

5

in direct reflection of the social forms they were seen to communicate, a lack of complexity, structure, and dynamism. In addition, the languages or jargons of colonial exploitation were called and ridiculed as ‘‘pidgin’’, or second-rate and crude imitations that lacked the complexity of the imperial language. In Queensland the language Islanders spoke in communication with white society was also taken as an informative indication of that essence. Widely seen as radically simplified imitations of the colonizer’s language, pidgins provided many chroniclers with a means of lampooning, vilifying, and caricaturing Islanders as imperfect recipients of white virtue and vice. In 1892, for example, B. F. S. Baden-Powell wrote in a brief description of the social effects on, and incompatibility of, Islanders with British civilization that ‘‘[i]t is very comical to hear them being instructed in their ‘pigeon’ English . . . and most difficult it is to keep one’s serious aspect when one hears the reverend Instructor referring to the Creator of all things as ‘Him Big-Fellow Master’ ’’.14 With origins as a jargon whose terms were limited to concepts of physicality and material exchange, Pidgin was often seen to mirror, in its apparent lack of the linguistic virtues of refinement, spirituality, and poetry, the natives who necessitated its creation. Its communicative value lay only insofar as it taught natives the pragmatic economy of speech, and as Florence Young despaired in her memoirs of time as a missionary: ‘‘The only possible method of reaching [Islanders] in Queensland was in the jargon known as ‘Pidgin English’. . . . How could deep spiritual truths be taught, when the only words available were those used in the crudest necessities of daily life?’’ 15 At the heart of the problems that plagued Young lies both the metaphoric and methodological significance of pidgin languages in the context of this study. On Queensland’s plantations and recruiting vessels, and in the Pacific’s sandalwood trade before that, Pidgin emerged as a language that made available the crudest necessities of daily communication in colonial relations and trade. As such, its capacity to communicate information to European chroniclers on subjects beyond basic material and physical realities was effectively limited by European notions of the Kanaka. Even when trade jargons developed the subtleties and complexities of language, they became unintelligible to English speakers and needed to be simplified and translated to their elementary form.16 When Islanders spoke in the records, therefore, they were recorded in the most functional of Pidgin’s words and concepts by English-speaking scribes. For example, as we will see in chapter 2, when Islanders gave evidence to the Kidnapping Royal Commission of 1885, their expressions of depression, grief, sadness, anger, and fear were filtered through layers of translation. From the Pidgin of the translator to the anglicized Pidgin of the commissioners who listened, expressions of emotive responses were stripped to raw and understated emo-

6

Introduction

tion. ‘‘I cry’’, for example, was modulated only by ‘‘I too much cry’’, and anger and resentment over what they had experienced was limited to being ‘‘angry’’ or ‘‘cross’’. Fortunately in 1885 the commissioners atypically let interviewees speak fairly freely by asking the open-ended question at the end of an interview, ‘‘Do you have anything you want to say?’’ They also recorded nonlinguistic communications, such as one interviewee’s ‘‘expressive pantomime of grief’’, an articulate expression of his feelings about his own recruitment.17 These rare interviewing techniques meant in this instance that people had slightly more communicative possibilities than were generally on offer in the limited word capacity of the labor trade’s language. That they were atypical techniques underscores the communicative limitations of the colonial divide, where the underlying depth and meaning of Islanders’ spoken words as they appear translated and recorded was often lost or diluted. Just as linguistic communication was reduced to its elemental level in communicating with white Queensland, shaped as it was by the perceived simplicities of Kanakas, so, too, was the behavior of Islanders interpreted through the language and concepts of existing colonial discourses. As such, what appears in existing records is potentially only the superficial expression of layered depths and meanings. While the growth of Pidgin as a language alerts us to imposed limitations, restrictions, or distortions, it also reflects the growth, expansion, and experiences of Islander communities. As a linguistic gauge of colonial relations, Pidgin’s social properties were initially fixed along the ‘‘vertical (master-servant)’’ axis of communicated power relations.18 Hence ‘‘bulimæn’’ for police, ‘‘hardwork’’ for sugar, and ‘‘master’’ for employer, when viewed in conjunction with their English derivatives, implicate the vertical social context of the development of the language.19 But Pidgin developed into a language on a horizontal axis. Its speakers were mostly Islanders, and Pidgin stabilized and expanded in Queensland by the 1880s along the same trajectory as colonial languages like Tok Pisin and Bislama in the Pacific. Through its use as a horizontal form of communication between Islander laborers, a language emerged with ‘‘more complex grammatical structures, stable lexical core, [and] social conventions concerning linguistic correctness’’ and a capacity to act as ‘‘a means of social identity’’, ‘‘social cohesion’’, and ‘‘self-expression’’.20 It also emerged from the same sites, and at the same time, that the Islander population was coming together as communities, and it both facilitated and reflected this process.21 The development of Pidgin therefore distills the story told in the following study. Just as Pidgin emerged by the 1880s as a language in its own right and was galvanized by social and historical circumstances, so, too, did a distinct and new expression of community identity begin to emerge from the broadly diverse island groups in Queensland. Hence to hear Pidgin spoken clarifies that while it had origins in English, its development is tempered by the lengthened vowels, softened con-

Violence, Language, and Colonial Dialogue

7

sonants, and steady rhythmic motion of Island languages. Islanders’ Pidgin in Australia, like the South Sea Islander communities who spoke it, was not the exclusive product of colonization, nor of any of the individual Island languages that contributed to its development. Its rhythm and life as a language came from the first languages of the majority of its speakers, and as an autonomous collection of all these it exceeded its origins as a colonial jargon. The same was true of the horizontal histories that Islanders forged in Queensland by 1906. The notion of the vertical and horizontal social properties of a language is mirrored in the conceptual arrangement of this study. As previously discussed, the colonial record tended to contain Islanders’ words only in anglicized or elementary Pidgin, rather than the richer and more developed language. In other words, the horizontal range of the language remained only partially visible from the vertical view provided by colonial records. This had its social parallel. Returning to Kelah, he appears to us through the simplified vertical structures of colonial communication and gaze. This narrow vertical channel merely dropped in on a segment of Kelah’s horizontal reality, but his experiences of recruitment, his reasons for attacking Compan (if he did), and the range of circumstances that led to his distress in jail remain out of view. Like tunnel vision, the vertical channel recorded only a fragment and did not encompass the breadth of the horizontal scope of Kelah’s reality. This study thus seeks to patch such fragmented views as an impression of the horizontal breadth and depth of Islanders’ worlds in nineteenth-century Queensland. It seeks to do this by scrutinizing the texture of the vertical structures under which people lived. In this way, a dialogue between the vertical and horizontal is attempted where Islanders’ agency, resistance, and consciousness can be celebrated, but not at the expense of minimizing scrutiny on the violent capabilities of colonization. This is a balancing act that adds to existing attempts by historians of the labor trade and colonialism more generally. A survey of such scholarship serves as a convenient means of elaborating on the structure of this study through which the suggested dialogue is approached. Viewing the Vertical: Violence and Colonial Society Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence. –Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

The violence that attended the vertical structures of Islanders’ worlds, and which occurred on the beaches of Pacific islands and in the cane fields of Queensland’s sugar districts, cannot be considered in isolation from the concurrent pio-

8

Introduction

neering violence of Australian settler-colonialism. As is developed more fully in chapter 3, the exploitation of Islanders’ labor was predicated on the dispossession and removal of Aboriginal people in Queensland, which cleared their land for European industries. In Queensland, as in the Pacific, the violence of the initial frontier periods of colonization was a topic of wide discussion and moralization. An account of this is not only contextual, but also points to the wider applicability and relevance of the questions with which this study engages. Established as a colony of settlement at the end of 1859, the rapidity and brutality with which Queensland’s frontiers were cleared of indigenous peoples, colonial industries established, and statehood acquired by 1901 intensified and clarified discussions of violence. During the identity-building process of the turn of the century, violence was often evoked as the inevitable symptom of the initial stages of invasion. The pioneers celebrated as the true grit of Queensland’s settlement were classically those who had ‘‘rafted over rivers alive with alligators, fought with hostile blacks, starved and thirsted and come narrowly out of Death’s jaw more than once’’.22 In colonial literature, violence underlay the affectionate humor of nostalgic reminiscences of the grog-soaked, roughas-guts pioneer. ‘‘His’’ world was one of wild pub brawls that spilled into the streets,23 with levels of grog consumption that killed the tough and fortified the toughest,24 amidst eccentric social customs and hardships of a colonial existence.25 These cathartic drunken brawls, in the sugar towns at least, were frequently of a racial character: ‘‘Black and white are generally together on a Saturday night’’ and ‘‘those boys are continuously kicking up a row with the Coolies in the streets’’. As Boolomal, an Islander who was a regular recipient of these attacks, stated, this ‘‘kicking up a row’’ consisted of ‘‘[t]he white boys every Saturday evening pelt[ing] the Polynesians’’ with dirt, bones, eggs and ‘‘rotten liver’’.26 Such larrikinism, as it came to be known and celebrated, had a very colonial character in its assertions of whiteness and ownership. Violence had something of an atmospheric quality in Queensland that seeped in from its frontiers, which were steadily and violently expanding across indigenous peoples’ lands.27 George Carrington, an appalled new arrival in Queensland, wrote in 1871 that on one of Queensland’s frontier roads, ‘‘for more than a mile the air was tainted with the putrefaction of corpses, which lay all along the ridges, just as they had fallen’’, and he had seen ‘‘large pits, covered with branches and . . . secured by a few stones, and the pits themselves were full of dead blackfellows, of all ages and of both sexes’’.28 The private letters and diaries of settlers were scattered with references to, and observations of, this violence. Exemplary was settler George Cain’s comment, in a courting letter to Rebecca Miles before they married, that when Aborigines were euphemistically ‘‘dispersed’’, the ‘‘beggars here don’t rot; they dry like mummies and

Violence, Language, and Colonial Dialogue

9

precious queer looking articles they look too: dry and grinning. Well, they dont [sic] cost me a moments [sic] uneasiness’’.29 Violence was therefore understood and talked about in Queensland through a network of moralizing and through such euphemisms as ‘‘dispersals’’ and ‘‘dispersal raids’’ for massacres and killings. This is evident in the thinly veiled closing comments of Edward Kennedy’s autobiographical reminiscences of his ‘‘official work and personal adventures’’ with Queensland’s Native Mounted Police. Now I bring to an end these old-time events. Some experiences which befell me . . . cannot be published [like] the survivor of an old-time fearful massacre by the blacks. . . . Old Queenslanders will recognise the allusion when I state that a terrible vengeance was inflicted on the black fiends, and almost entirely by one man.30

Kennedy’s feigned obfuscation in this passage informs his twentiethcentury reader of the ‘‘old times’’ of Queensland’s settlement, when morality was coded differently by circumstances that made men tougher and harder and made right and wrong merely an equation of surviving, or punishing the ‘‘black fiends’’. ‘‘Old-time’’ travel narratives, social commentary, and parliamentary debates and discussion recognized violence as central to the pioneer’s trade. Imbued with a siege mentality, many evoked the hostility of the very land that settlers were attempting to occupy, while openly acknowledging and discussing the rights and wrongs of the ‘‘war’’ being waged by, and against, its owners. The climate, the bush, the distances, the droughts, floods, cyclones, sun, diseases, and indigenous, indentured, and immigrant nonwhites in Queensland were often evoked as that against which a constant battle must be waged and won. While this gave rise to a sense of triumphalism, based on the success of settling whites in the tropics, this cockiness was consistently interspersed with heightened insecurities and tensions about the physical and moral safety, sanctity, purity, and hygiene of bodily and racial integrity. As is developed in chapter 3, periodic swellings of anxiety in various districts characterized much of Queensland’s colonial period. District by district, this fear accompanied the first moments of European occupation. After the establishment of industry and perceived permanence, fears and anxieties shifted to such nebulous focal points as the existence of the so-called Aboriginal remnant on the fringes of colonial towns, the Chinatowns and Kanakatowns in the heart of colonial towns, the shifting ‘‘Kanaka menace,’’ indefinable miscegenation, disease and contagion, economic depression, and a host of other threats. It is with the siege mentality of this tropical settler-colonialism in mind that the moralities and legalities of violence, such as were expressed by jour-

10

Introduction

nalist Spencer Browne in 1927, might be approached: ‘‘It is hard to say when shooting is or is not justifiable. . . . In the wilderness, when it comes to a question of fighting for life, we cannot temporise [sic] with Exeter Hall’’.31 Browne’s frontier morality was based on a common colonial theme: violence and colonialism were naturally intertwined and co-dependent, and colonialism was violence. As we will see, this was commonly implied in relation not simply to indigenous/non-indigenous relations, but also to Islanders, and most visibly through such predominant narratives as that of the fatal impact. This perceived necessity for violence, or its conceptual inescapability in colonial relations, is explored more closely in this study’s inquiries into the colonial imperatives, ideologies, fears, and fantasies that drove, governed, and sustained colonial force. In doing so we can draw upon compelling insights of existing analyses of colonialism’s violence. Frantz Fanon’s statement from The Wretched of the Earth, cited at the start of this section, also evokes colonialism as violence. To elaborate, he wrote that the agents of colonial government ‘‘speak the language of pure force . . . [as] the bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of the Native’’, and violence generally ‘‘has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world [and] has ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the destruction of native social forms’’.32 The maintenance of power in his colonial world was dependent on the construction of a Manichean world, or a world of absolute opposites, whose dichotomies of good and bad and white and black were divided and policed along fault lines of raw, unfettered, and pure force. This theme of the central role of violence in the construction, homogenization, and elevation to power of internally diverse groups is particularly germane in this study. Fanon’s model draws out the crude functionality and ubiquity of colonial violence. But like Browne’s moral statement, such a model helps to mystify the existence of violence by rendering it inevitable beyond analysis, and self-evident, self-explanatory, and in need of little treatment beyond a description of its effects. The interactions of individual and state violence in the colonial regime, however, could be further explored. For as compelling as is the acceptance of the possibilities for violence necessitated by the model of a Manichean world of fat-bellied white quarters and emaciated black quarters, the role of human agency must be historicized, for violence surely cannot exist outside human activity. Michael Taussig’s ‘‘cultures of terror’’ and ‘‘spaces of death’’, on the other hand, focus much more on individuals, helping to extend our understanding of the violent impact of discourses of alterity. Taussig dealt particularly with the pathological liminality of violence on these frontiers or spaces of death. Colonial violence, he states, is a product of ‘‘epistemic murk’’—or spaces where mimicry, imaginings, silences, mythologies, and magic release humanity’s dark-

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est essence and concrete realms of reality are replaced with mystical ones. This epistemic murk epitomizes the space of colonial relations where the terrors of each side of the dichotomous colonial world clash, and where violence operates according to ‘‘long-standing cultural logics of meaning—structures of feeling— whose basis lies in a symbolic world and not in one of rationalism’’.33 Crudely stated, it was the discourses of the other and the colonized, with all their illusory qualities that were brought from the old world to its peripheries, that informed the colonial project and lay at the heart of colonialism’s talent for violence. This is certainly a model that resonates with colonial frontiers elsewhere, as Barry Morris has shown in relation to the frontiers of New South Wales.34 But while Morris and Taussig bring us closer to understanding how individuals commit acts of horror in ways that are not necessarily specific to colonialism, as is argued in chapter 1 in relation to examples of violence on the frontiers of the Pacific labor trade, the notion of a space of death can amplify the unspeakable and incomprehensible nature of such violence, rendering it a little socially and historically nonspecific. As such, a concentration on unfettered individuals freed by their fear from social moralities and legal boundaries has the potential to limit our analytical attention to the untamed frontier and the killing times so that continuity into the mundane, crudely functional, and enabling violence of colonialism’s more settled phases is lost. Chapters 1, 3, and 5 argue, therefore, that the violence of colonialism operated in ways that changed modalities and form, but which was essentially structural in nature and was therefore reasoned and rationalized and neither natural nor mystical. Queensland’s indentured labor trade is of course exemplary. The point of origin for most histories of the Queensland-Pacific labor trade tends to be Queensland, 1863, the time of the young colony’s acute labor shortage and efforts to establish, with a minimum of expense, an agricultural industry in a tropical climate considered fatal to European labor. This period of discussion, legislative attempts, and the eventual importation by Capt. Robert Towns of sixty-seven Islanders in 1863 and the eventual abolition of the trade and deportation of Islanders after 1906 have been chronological bookends. Between these markers, the gradual bureaucratization and regulation of the trade, beginning with the 1868 Polynesian Labourers Act, and the increasing momentum of importation and indenture, with its lulls and suspensions, have tended to mirror conventional colonial narratives where violence exploded with ferocity in the early days but dissipated as a lack of laws and morality gave way to administration. In earlier histories of the trade, narratives were very much focused on European pioneering endeavors in Queensland and the material impact of capitalist exploitation in the Pacific. Islanders often played the role in these histories of

12

Introduction

circumstantial facilitators of an indictment on the processes of colonial intrusion into the pristine precolonial, or prehistorical, western Pacific. It must be added that these histories were written against the amnesia of earlier Australian and Queensland histories, whose whitewash often wrote out of Queensland’s settlement the existence of indentured labor in any substantial form. Hence O. W. Parnaby’s Britain and the Labor Trade in the Southwest Pacific (1964), G. Bolton’s Planters and Pacific Islanders (1967), and E. Docker’s The Blackbirders (1970), in which Islanders played incidental roles, at least brought the trade to some level of popular recognition. After the 1970s more nuanced histories were produced that consciously sought to construct political and economic histories around Islander laborers themselves. Notable are Clive Moore, Adrian Graves, Peter Corris, Ralph Shlomowitz, and Kay Saunders, who concentrated on the conditions of recruitment, labor, and accommodation;35 the Queensland government’s various legislative responses to the fluctuating population of indentured, time-expired, and ticket-holding Islanders;36 and the quantification of economic and demographic aspects of the trade.37 Extending the tale beyond the simple ‘‘man-catching . . . of Stone Age cannibals’’ of versions such as Holthouse’s Cannibal Cargoes and Docker’s The Blackbirders (1970), they have placed Islanders at the center of histories of colonial activity in the western Pacific.38 Labeled revisionist, these developments have controversially reduced the focus on kidnapping and forced recruitment and attempted to emphasize the agency of Islander recruits. Any historiographical development that places Islanders in the center of their own histories is obviously a good one. But for all the exercise of agency on the part of Islanders, the labor trade was not, as many have written, a benign labor migration. It was a trade in labor. Searching for signs of historical agency should not preclude the ongoing recognition that the labor trade was premised on a determination to be profitable, which ultimately rendered negligible (unless profitable) the existence of agency.39 In other words, and in relation to current debates over the appropriateness of slavery as a description for the labor trade, resistance or agency take their meaning only from the oppressive context against which they are asserted. In the end, surely some measure of the ‘‘damage’’ inflicted can derive from the number of times we feel we must assert that people were resisting agents.40 The indentured labor trade did not have to consist exclusively of abductions and massacres to earn the label of violent and exploitative, for it was a system in which violence was embedded. It regulated the right to take mainly young men away from their homes for three years of coerced labor in a tropical industry considered fatal to white labor, with standards of accommodation that were too frequently fatal for Islanders, and with a standard of care that was systemically negligent. As is explored in chapter 5, throughout the life of the trade

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the death rate of Islanders far exceeded that of the entire European population, young and old, and male and female. At its worst, it was as high as 60 percent between 1883 to 1885 on the Colonial Sugar Refining Company’s Goondi estate. On the day-to-day level conditions on the plantations, without the supplemented diets Islanders would in time provide themselves, aided the spread and intensity of diseases from which they suffered terribly, such as whooping cough, tuberculosis, influenza, and dysentery.41 Inadequate diet, appalling sanitation, swampy and unhealthy living quarters, and negligent treatment of the sick and the dying, all in the context of the harsh conditions of labor in a climate acknowledged as being life threatening, were the legal and regulated standards that contributed greatly to Islanders’ bloated mortality. Sustained high mortality rates were therefore a regulated standard. Throughout the nineteenth century, the trade was subject to ever-increasing bureaucratic surveillance and regulation under the legislative folds of both Queensland and Britain, and by 1904, when the indenture trade in Queensland ended, it had been intensely scrutinized during the 1880s, suspended between 1890 and 1892, and regulated by ‘‘seven Acts of Parliament, eighteen Schedules, fifty-four Regulations, and thirty-eight Instructions to Government Agents’’.42 Many of these changes were the outcome of periods of intense interest in incoming reports of atrocities, murders, and kidnappings in the Pacific and of domestic reports on endemic violence on the plantations. Such periods of interest and inquiry, as we will see, assisted the process of institutionalizing and regulating into acceptance the mundane violence of the everyday. The structural presence of the violence of the labor trade becomes transparent in those economic histories focused on painting a picture of labor migration. Taking historical account of this regulated context, however, allows for more nuanced accounts of Islanders’ agency. For it allows the telling of the history of the traumatic impact of the trade on individuals whose stories, like Kelah’s, told of a quiet impact that did not attract the sensational cry of atrocity, kidnapping, or massacre and for whom debates about voluntary recruitment might seem ludicrously irrelevant. A telling example of this quiet impact is the story of Wandro from Aurora (Maewo) Island in Vanuatu, who in 1881 died, like many others in Queensland, from dysentery. The coronial inquest ruled that this was ‘‘probably aggravated by grief at the death of his brother Warraka, and by superstitious fear’’. Those who knew him said he died of grief. Wandro was eighteen and was in Queensland with his younger brother Joe Warraka, who also died from dysentery. The day his brother died, Wandro became ill, and ‘‘he stop outside along grass, he sleep along grass, he plenty sing out, he wanted Warraka’’. According to Frances Atkinson, who was in charge of his care, on ‘‘Saturday he told me that Warraka was calling him plenty on Friday night’’.43 Wandro died

14

Introduction

in the cane fields three days after his brother. His story contains no shocking violence, no obvious villains, and, as the inquest reported, his death was due to disease with ‘‘no signs of violence’’. But his death was one that resulted from a system whose dynamics, and the ideology that drove it, were subtly and overtly violent. The dynamics of colonialism’s violence are developed in the chapters that follow through three concentric sites of colonial interaction and through the threads of violence that link them. These include the frontiers on the beaches and shallows of the western Pacific (chapter 1), the borders and fringes of socalled ‘‘inside’’ or ‘‘settled’’ districts in Queensland (chapter 3), and the administrative heart of the inside districts, where we consider such wider underpinning philosophies as that of the civilizing mission (chapter 5). The argument that emerges is that colonialism was not a system of total violence. Rather, colonial violence was the product of an interplay between the purely functional of economic imperatives and land grabs and the deeply psychological of Taussig’s culture of terror. Beyond the increasingly recognized killing times of the frontier, the stabilizing colonial context allowed and necessitated more subtle modalities for violence. This account of the vertical context of the world that Islanders negotiated throws suggestive light on the traces they left in the archives throughout the nineteenth century. I hope that this will enable us to dissolve the discursive and racial mythologies that have continued to interpret Islanders’ histories. Deciphering the Horizontal: Islanders’ Worlds in Colonial Context The analysis of the vertical colonial world discussed above will be firmly anchored in peoples’ experiences of it through interspersed chapters (chapters 2, 4, and 6) that look more closely at Islanders’ worlds up to and including deportation in 1906. As stories unfold it becomes very clear that Islanders did not simply survive the traumas of, at worst, kidnapping and years of abuse and, at best, alienation and exploitation. Although contained and constrained, they generated autonomous communities in Queensland that constantly shifted and adjusted to new or intensifying pressures from the colonial world. This story is not, however, being told for the first time. People like Faith Bandler, Noel Fatnowna, Mabel Edmond, and the contributors to oral history collections have produced personal or local histories from the 1970s onwards that are richly textured with detail and experience.44 So, too, a significant body of work emerged from the same period that focused on recovering social and cultural aspects of Islanders’ community histories. Of particular significance is the pioneering work of Clive Moore, Kay Saunders, Peter Corris, and Patricia Mercer. Their

Violence, Language, and Colonial Dialogue

15

intent and value was to center Islanders’ agency, autonomy, and cultural integrity in the history of the Queensland cane fields and to bring important tales of survival and adjustment to economic histories.45 While I do not wish to disregard or displace this latter body of work, it is a body of scholarship that is not unproblematic. Historians inherited, as a tool of analysis and interpretation, the idea or epistemology of ‘‘Melanesia’’, which reaches well ‘‘into the intellectual and even theological traditions’’ of European colonial practices in Australia and the Pacific.46 As such, and to varying degrees of subtlety, Melanesianism has continued to provide the language that has spoken these histories. A cursory scan of publication titles gives some indication of this and of the way people tended to be described persistently and meaningfully as Melanesians. On the one hand, this tendency was contemporaneous with the emergence in the 1970s and 1980s of the strategic essentialism of ‘‘the Melanesian Way’’ and the appropriation by Islanders of ‘‘Melanesia’’ as culture, indigeneity, and kastom or a principle means of defining postcolonial identities.47 The persistent signifying of people as Melanesians by historians may therefore be partly respectful of this. However, these histories were not accompanied by a matching re-inscription or scrutiny of the colonial connotations that automatically accompany the idea of Melanesia. Nomenclature, then, is superficially indicative of an underlying implication that Melanesian ethnic and cultural differences determined social accommodation, resistance, and adjustment. In the following excerpts from Saunders and Moore (respectively), for example, peoples’ resistance to plantation conditions were explained in passing as retaliation against the humiliation of being beaten or coerced by overseers and owners ‘‘which they felt sorely, for their own societies stressed the dignity of physical prowess, warfare and combat for men’’.48 Similarly, the abuse of alcohol in Islander communities towards the end of the nineteenth century was explained as being due in part to being ‘‘ ‘niggers’ shunned by Europeans’’ in Queensland, a fact ‘‘[t]hey can only have resented’’ because ‘‘Melanesians are a proud race with a warrior tradition’’.49 Here, people’s reactions to being humiliated, beaten, coerced, or shunned are placed firmly in the context of a Melanesian’s warrior- and pride-driven response to such social circumstances. In these instances the reference to the idea of Melanesia hardly seems to matter. Indeed, the reference to people’s former status serves to effectively underscore the extent of colonialism’s infantalization of adults. But it nevertheless flags a discursive slippage into existing frames of reference asserted by the term ‘‘Melanesia’’. While the mentioned references were fleeting, with little apparent impact on their deeper historical substance regarding resistance and countercultures, such unqualified references to warrior pride, warfare, combat, and physical

16

Introduction

prowess draw authority from colonial discourses on Melanesia, and in the process perpetuate them. These were subtle examples of more overt statements such as Moore’s ‘‘[p]hysical violence and recalcitrant behavior are typical Melanesian responses to aggravation’’, and that in ‘‘seeking deaths in compensation for deaths, Melanesians did not feel obliged to kill the person they thought directly responsible [and were often] satisfied with any death’’.50 These statements are unreferenced and therefore self-authorizing. As such they recapitulate discursive types and intensities of violence that were seen as inherent Melanesian characteristics. As casual and unreferenced statements they imply an ethnic reflex as the self-evident source of people’s behavior. In so doing the potential is there for social and historical conditions to be rendered as simply ethnological experiences. Themes of Islanders’ natural tendency towards unbridled revenge, murderous brutality, and violent irrationality have been more often communicated through metonymic references that are more subtle and enduring. A most persistent example of this includes accounts of violence within the Islander community that have been unquestioningly presented as intertribal warfare and feuding. As will be discussed in chapters 4 and 6, notions of tribalism have readily been adopted as explanations for questions whose answers, as chapter 6 explores, might just as well be economically, socially, and historically located. Melanesianism’s trope of tribalism, for example, has authorized and made credible such unreferenced assertions as Moore’s: ‘‘[t]he next year two more Islanders were killed near Alexandra; one of them was cooked and eaten. Similar violent skirmishes took place all through the nineteenth century for a variety of reasons’’.51 Repetition provides authority for this statement. Although this study does question the extent to which intragroup violence within Queensland’s Islander community has been proportionately situated in its historical and social context, questioning the claims is not my point. Rather, my point is that it was not deemed necessary to provide explanation, qualification, or evidence for such an extraordinary and sweeping statement. Presented within a context of Melanesian intertribal violence, the attending savagery of habitually cooking and eating victims had already been authorized for reader and author alike by generations of a colonial knowledge that was developed in direct consult with colonial acts of violence. My critique is not intended as an attack on the work of previous generations of historians to whose pioneering efforts this study is indebted. Rather, it is a critique of the way we inherit, reference, and perpetuate colonial knowledge. Here the enduring insights of Ranajit Guha, Lata Mani, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and others are clearly relevant.52 In the absence of scrutiny on the discursive and physical conditions of oppression under which available information on

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the colonial past was deposited, we run the risk of repeating those conditions by staying within the established paradigms of knowledge on which such oppression was founded. In other words, the historical notion that Melanesians, or Kanakas, were essentially driven and motivated by the base instincts of tribalism, primitivism, and savage violence was an idea that dehistoricized people’s physical actions and essentialized Islanders’ violence in a way that displaced it from its social context. Melanesianism in a sense provided for an effective ‘‘prose of counter-insurgency’’ that contributed endlessly to their imposed condition as black, indentured, and inferior. Without interrogation of the function of this knowledge we run the risk of not only repeating it, but also recapitulating the structural conditions of its creation. Hence my focus in the above critique is not so much a dismissal of the work on which this study builds, and to this I will return. It also constitutes a more general analysis of the strength and resilience of colonial knowledge and the historical contribution that representations of Islanders as being exclusively motivated by physicality and violence has made to the colonial mechanisms of their oppression. Viewing Islanders’ histories within the constraining parameters of Melanesianism is ahistorical and casts Islanders’ social and cultural adjustments in Queensland in a culturally retentive or deterministic way. And yet, in contrast to earlier populist histories like Holthouse’s Cannibal Cargoes, which regurgitated existing racial images, the empirical rigor of revisionist histories like Moore’s, Saunders’, and others’, and their intent and alignment with the contemporary political struggles of South Sea Islander people at the time of their research, is their most instructive element. Their will to conduct careful and revisionist research actually highlights the powerfully persistent discourses that attend our efforts to decolonize history. Our attempts to reconstruct colonized histories from the sources that originally contributed to the colonization and containment of indigenous peoples are frustrated continually by the discursive limitations and filters left by their colonial authors. In the face of this, the question remains whether, as a result of such a critique, there is anything that eludes this contamination and whether or not we can gather anything from the colonial record beyond an insight into discursive production. I think there is and I think we can. If we strip records of their identified overtones and undertones and scrutinize discursive filters, we are able to capture evocative glimpses and ‘‘countersigns’’ of Islanders’ lives in the sugar districts.53 Like other mediums of colonial imagery, we can read colonial observations so that the overlaid interpretations that prescribed meaning can be tentatively separated from the concrete observation. Colonial imagery, after all, whether visual or textual, remains a record not just of how things were viewed, but of what was viewed. Given the limited detail and depth in records that Islanders were able to

18

Introduction

leave in the nineteenth century, every image based on concrete observations, such as Kelah’s physical behavior in Brisbane Gaol is invaluable. His behavior, though at first indecipherable to the colonial record, became the symptom of what would be exclusively interpreted as cannibal savagery by Alfred Davidson. In the discursive context of the colonial world, Islanders’ innate cannibalism, savagery, bloodthirstiness, infanticide, and head hunting were an automatic association and did not need to be seen to be observed. Symptoms were more than enough, and these symptoms, because they were recorded, remain a valuable historical detail. Hence when seeing through the eyes of those who chronicled a world they already knew, we are not necessarily doomed to being blinded by what they thought they saw, or blind to what they did not know they saw.54 That Kelah was in jail and both silent and agitated is a fragment from which we can learn, and the method used in the following chapters is that of keeping this substance while distancing its interpretation for separate scrutiny. In attempting to read against the dominant discursive grain, we can find cumulative value in every ‘‘trace of independent initiative’’ and every resonant trace of Islanders’ voices or presence in the records.55 Locating these leaves a collection of detail that can be placed together in relation to one another and their historical context. As such, this study does not seek to merely fill gaps in a narrative whose terms of communication, after all, have not shifted. Instead, the composite picture that emerges from chapters 2, 4, and 6 is a ‘‘rough-textured and deeply streaked’’ impression of Islanders’ worlds that, without closure or claim to totality, makes its own fracturing and the structure of oppression that fractured it the underlying topic of scrutiny.56 The first of the three horizontal chapters consists of a consideration of Islanders’ immediate experiences of and adjustments to the labor trade and sugar districts. Chapter 4 examines the colonial record for expressions from individuals and communities, of emergent identities, consciousness, and other socially cohesive movements. Chapter 6 considers to what extent so-called intertribal violence and violent behavior amongst Islanders in Queensland can be shaken loose of the powerful containments of colonial discourse and repositioned within the physical and historical context established in previous chapters. While it is clear from existing historical work that Islanders maintained, to differing degrees, the cultural practices, languages, and histories they brought with them to Queensland, these chapters argue strongly for understanding Islanders’ construction of a new and old social world in terms of maintenance and articulation rather than merely cultural retention.57 The difference is more than semantic and is explored more fully in chapters 4 and 6. Most simply put, articulation talks about social change in a way that steps out of the confines of the twin demons that plague attempts to discuss indigenous and

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colonized peoples’ identities: racial or ethnic essentialism on the one hand and ‘‘repressive authenticity’’ on the other.58 As such, it is hoped that these horizontal chapters will be brought into dialogue or conversation with the vertical context in a meaningful way. This brings me again to this study’s conceptual framing. Rather than assuming two sides to this story—that of the colonizer and the colonized—the conceptual framework adopted in this study, through the linguistic metaphors of the vertical and horizontal social world, is that of two interlocked perspectives. These are defined more by the relations of power that shape them than by traditional dichotomies of black and white or colonizer and colonized. My hope is that the intermittent dialogue between the vertical and horizontal plains of Islanders’ world will provide a chance to re-view and re-frame what has been told in existing histories. This study draws partially on new material and partially on what has been considered by other historians, but asks of it new questions, for it is in the reformulation of new questions for old sources, rather than just the uncovering of new information to fill in gaps of ‘‘compensatory histories’’, that historical understanding can advance.59 Parliamentary and archival records, published memoirs and journals, colonial press, written histories, and the Black Oral History Collection recorded by Clive Moore and Patricia Mercer in the 1970s, and by Matthew Peacock for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, have all been closely considered in this study. The study limits itself to the records, and occasionally the existing memories, of those people who lived through the period preceding deportation in 1906. For this was the loose period within which the historical foundations of Australian South Sea Islander communities were laid. The history of how the community recovered from the losses of deportation and survived and thrived during the years of the White Australia Policy, the Depression, and their emergence as full Australian citizens in the 1960s is a distinct and sequential volume in the story of the South Sea Island peoples’ struggles and survival, and one that must be told in dedicated volumes. It is my hope that this study will add to our understanding of the sheer breadth and depth of the impact of colonialism in the nineteenth century, on Islanders specifically and colonized peoples more generally. In addition, in returning to Kelah, it is also hoped that an awareness is maintained throughout these chapters that every story and detail that is told, every individual whose story is plucked from the records, represents only the outer edge of an enormous realm of experiences that were not recorded and are not recoverable from the colonial world.

1. The Frontiers Savages, Going Native, and the Rightness of Might

Whilst looking at all this [I was] imagining the noble savage arrayed in a mantle of scalps, fastened with human hair, and dyed in blood, disposed in graceful festoons around his manly form; leaning on his long spear tipped with human bone, and thoughtfully masticating on a morsel of his last victim, as he anxiously gazed on the approaching ship, and considered how many meals her crew would provide for himself and his cannibal brethren. –W. E. Giles, A Cruise of a Queensland Labour Vessel to the South Seas

While away I heard sounds of firing, and returned on deck and saw . . . Scott, Dr. Murray, Captain Armstrong, and others firing down into the hold [where] the natives were fighting amongst themselves, and trying to break open the hatchways. . . . There was firing on and off during the night. I fired myself, once or twice. –Testimony of Matthew Deviscoe, cited in G. S. Searle, Mount and Morris Exonerated

ON 13 SEPTEMBER 1871, an unknown number of Buka Islanders who had been

recruited for service in the Pacific’s indentured labor trade on plantations in Fiji were massacred on board the labor vessel Carl in the northwest Pacific. The massacre would become an infamous indictment on the worst atrocities of the labor trade. It would stand as testament to what was seen as the notoriously savage and decivilizing nature of the frontiers of colonial incursions, and as such confirmed the western Pacific’s status as a vulnerable and permeable border between civilization’s morality and law and the well-known realms of savagery beyond. Although by the 1870s many western Pacific islands had been incorporated in various ways into the sandalwood and bêche-de-mer trades that had been visiting the area for at least thirty years, the region remained in the hearts and minds of many a colonial observer as the Pacific’s heart of darkness. In-

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The Frontiers

21

deed, to some significant extent the more remote regions of this area, in Papua New Guinea and West Papua, continue to be imagined as the final frontier of modernity.1 In the nineteenth century the status that western Pacific Islanders— or Melanesians, Ocean Negroes, and Black Islanders—occupied in the colonial world’s developing taxonomies of mankind can be gauged by the violence that was visited upon their shores and beaches. The indentured labor trade, while not typified by the extreme case of the Carl massacre, was nevertheless the product of a systemic violence that drew its moral acceptability from the position that Islanders were widely seen to occupy on that sliding scale of civilization. In other words, as this chapter will explore, the automatic association of Islanders with savagery, cannibalism, and blackness, in concert with the self-defensive, punitive, and preemptive violence that was visited against them, was the dynamic that produced Melanesia as a colonial frontier. Indeed, it was only by locating their operations on a frontier between savagery and civilization that advocates of the labor trade were able to claim moral authority in the eyes of a vocal British and Australian public skeptical of race-based labor regimes in the post-abolition period. This is where the extreme nature of the Carl massacre fits in. For in that instance, the cannibalism and savagery of Islanders was matched by the madness, decivilization, and moral waste of the crew of the Carl, whose condemned violence was, in the process of being condemned, distanced as an aberration that compelled further colonial intrusion. This study begins on the frontiers of the western Pacific islands partly because it was the first point of contact for many who went to Queensland—but that is not the only reason. By exploring the dynamics of the violence that took place so openly on the frontiers, we can also detect relationships and themes that carried over to the more regulated centers of colonial activity in Queensland. In what follows in this chapter, we develop a composite picture of the western Pacific as a colonial frontier and consider the extent to which it was an epistemically murky and liminal site, a ‘‘space of death,’’ as it were, from which the governed and regulated colonial territories would eventually emerge. Through a broader consideration of the kind of colonial violence that was disowned, such as massacres, and that regulatory violence that carried overt colonial commission and legitimacy, we will situate the frontier at the heart, rather than fringe, of the colonial project. The frontier was in fact regulated by its imagined illegitimacy and was as functionally central to the project of settlement or resource extraction as the administrative annexations of indigenous lands, bodies, and resources. Particular attention will be paid to the clarity of violence on frontiers and the discourses that provided the moral framework and legal space within which it operated. We begin, therefore, with the discursive constructions of this region as Melanesia, the idea of which was so frequently seen as the source and

22

Chapter 1

cause of outbreaks of violence. The role of the physical reality of a colonial presence, of its violence, was therefore crucial to discursive authentication. In going on to consider the massacre of 1871 with this context in mind, we will see that in many ways such incidents helped to legitimize the wider colonial project. We can see, then, in the final section of the chapter, that the regulatory practices of British colonial interests in the area and the suppression of indigeous resistance gained their moral imperative and sanction through that Melanesianism, or the Pacific’s own Orientalism. The Genealogy of a Colonial Frontier I wished to explore the wondrous islands of the South Seas, of which I had heard a great deal for a boy of my age. To me those were the islands of the real Robinson Crusoes, where I too might find my cannibal man Friday, perhaps dress myself up in a goatskin, and eat the tropical fruits that would be growing profusely just outside my door. I imagined how thrilling it would be to chance upon a cannibal feast in full swing, with cooking-pot and all, and human bodies lying about, picked bare, and bleaching in the tropical sun. How I should lay about me and slay the vile wretches, setting free with my own hands the miserable captives who had been destined for the pot! Yet, now that I have reached mature age, and look back upon those days of somewhat fanciful romance, I do not know that I was far astray from reality. –John Cromar, Jock of the Islands

The western Pacific, like the rest of the south Pacific, occupied a space in the colonial imagination of the nineteenth century as the epitome of the natural world and the home of the most habitual cannibals and savages. Here law was suspended, rules were relaxed, and the fetters and controls of civilization were thrown off. John Cromar’s autobiographical account, given above, of his times in the islands is indicative of the themes of fear, colonial martyrdom, native savagery, and European decivilization that permeated colonial writings, both fiction and nonfiction, and produced the western Pacific for European audiences throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the chosen passage, Cromar’s imaginings, illusion, reality, and violence intermingled in productive ways, and the process by which he authorized his imaginings in the final sentence was not unusual. Melanesian savagery and cannibalism has traditionally been an openly imagined reality that gained authorization through its exoticism and conformity and longevity over time, and has been materialized through an ever-intensifying and potentially violent colonial presence. Noting this is intended to say nothing of whether or not the cannibalism and other

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represented practices of Pacific Islanders actually existed or not. As William Arens might say, in the context of its colonial reality, the question is a moot one.2 Rather, it notes the relationship that existed between the physical reality of colonial intrusion in the western Pacific and the evolution of the idea of Melanesia, complete with it savage cannibals, by which this intrusion was shaped. The idea of Melanesia was constituted in the nineteenth century by disparate writings and images of colonial travelers, settlers, missionaries, and administrators in the Pacific, Australia, America, Britain, and across Europe. Every author and individual contribution differed individually in agenda, purpose, worldview, philosophy, and racial education and delivered knowledge about diverse islands of the western Pacific from the islands of Fiji to those of the Solomons. Yet despite this diversity, the collective product was Melanesia, a governable, exploitable, and utterly knowable region where cannibalism, violence, and primitiveness homogenized the breadth and diversity of language, time, ethnicity, and geography in the region. A distinct feature of representation in this region was the automatic relationship that was drawn by traders, missionaries, and settlers alike between color and depth of savagery. This of course was connoted by the term that came into vogue by the end of the nineteenth century—‘‘Melanesia’’. In contrast to the neighboring South Pacific, or Polynesia, the name Melanesia denoted race rather than geographical location. The eastern, lighter-skinned ‘‘Polynesian’’ Pacific tended to be characterized by abundance (Polynesia) and exotica and personified by the Polynesian princess, with all her appealingly savage (semi-naked) and passive femininity. Melanesia, however, was defined not by its geographic features but by its black (Melanesian) inhabitants, and far from being characterized by feminine exotica, it was embodied by masculine and black physicality.3 In travel writing, government debates and correspondence, the press, and early anthropological and ethnological writing during the colonial era, the people of the islands of Melanesia were epitomized by a single theme: ‘‘cannibalism went on unchecked and tribal warfare was the order of the day’’.4 With cannibalism setting the normative cultural standard, depravity excelled: ‘‘the ceremony of torturing . . . was a form of entertainment almost as popular as the cannibal feast that followed’’.5 Violence became known as an essential and pervading characteristic of Melanesian cultural and social behavior where even ‘‘the dances . . . are the very essence of joy as well as of war. Blood-shedding is allied with laughter. These people are humorous life-takers. Killing is no murder, but merely a jubilant episode’’.6 Hence while we know from the work of Gananath Obeyesekere that cannibalism was an established literary feature of what he calls the ‘‘savagism’’ that attended European imaginings of the entire Pacific, the additional savage features of rampant masculinity, club law, tribal warfare, head-hunting, slavery, torture, and a general

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bloodthirstiness tended to be reserved as the literary conventions of Melanesian discourses.7 The uniformity of representations of Melanesian cannibalism was chronologically or temporally defiant. As late as 1928, for example, Robert Fletcher’s ‘‘Asterisk’’ alias described his unexpected arrival in the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) as being the ‘‘dark and silent . . . home for dreadful mysteries. (As a matter of fact it is still the scene of cannibalistic orgies)’’. On finding himself unexpectedly in Melanesia, those ‘‘merely interesting islands inhabited by ugly semicannibalistic savages,’’ instead of that which he yearned for, ‘‘the lotus charm’’ of Polynesia, he related his accounts with no sense of discovery. He, like travelers before him, knew ‘‘the Pacific like a book’’.8 Indeed, it was this familiar literary and untouched Melanesia of the nineteenth century, rather than the twentieth century colonial territory of the New Hebrides, in which Asterisk consciously immersed himself and of which he became a part. Asterisk wrote and published within an established genre that regularly wrote out the swift cultural, economic, and political changes that were being affected throughout the islands by colonial religions, markets, and governance. This ahistorical production of Melanesia, while an interesting literary feature, is mentioned here to highlight the thoroughly automated association that existed between Melanesia and Melanesians, and the notion of untouched savagery. Asterisk’s evocation of cannibalism as a presence as tangible and self-evident as darkness or silence was timeless to the extent that he did in 1928 what many did throughout the nineteenth century in conjuring cannibal savagery merely through the act of conjuring Melanesia. This was a place, which in its remoteness and exoticism and availability to colonial exploits was destined to become synonymous with the social practice not simply of anthropophagi, but of cannibalism—the term specific to colonialism.9 Cannibalism in turn authorized Melanesia’s distance from civilization to one of those places deeply embedded in the collective European imagination ‘‘of fable and story-book . . . [which were] filled, not only with dragons and lions, but with cannibal men’’.10 Colonial writers were thus overt in setting out not to discover or prove its existence, which needed no proof, but to imagine it, see it, and describe it. To exemplify this process, we can look briefly at the specific genealogy of the Fiji Islands, which became in British and American colonial writing in particular the very essence of the Melanesian ‘‘Cannibal Isles’’. Here we see clearly the knitted-together strength of the knowledge of savagery and cannibalism in formation. For Fiji, like Melanesia more generally, no future other than being a place epitomized by savage cannibalism existed in the context of colonial expectations of the fringes of the known world. In1784, on the return leg of one of Capt. James Cook’s voyages of discovery in the Pacific, he announced the existence,

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via Tongan informants, of ‘‘Feejeeans’’, a people from undiscovered islands that ‘‘[n]o European . . . [had] as yet seen’’ who were ‘‘addicted, like those of New Zealand, of [sic] eating their enemies whom they kill in battle’’.11 From 1784, therefore, before Europe geographically discovered Fijians, it was established that they were cannibals. Encounters that followed were those such as the crew, after the mutiny on the Bounty, who charted some islands in the Lau group, but did not land. By the 1790s, the idea of Fijian cannibalism was firmly established despite a lack of contact with Fijians. In 1796, the missionary voyage of the Duff set sail for the Pacific following, and due to, the widespread popularity of Cook’s journals and the resulting concerns of the London Missionary Society that ‘‘a new world hath lately opened to our view . . . [where] savage nature still feeds on the flesh of its prisoners’’.12 The resulting voyage put the islands of Fiji on British maps, affecting not the discovery but the confirmation of cannibal ‘‘Feejeeans’’ who had already been materialized by Cook. In 1796 the Duff passed through the northeastern islands of what they ‘‘knew’’ from Cook’s journals must be the ‘‘Feejees’’ and sighted vast numbers of ‘‘natives on the beach with spears in their hands’’ and ‘‘smoke in the trees’’. Days after this sighting, the Duff struck a reef, and in those frightening moments of imminent shipwreck, the crew ‘‘figured [the Feejeeans] dancing round [them], while [they] roasted on large fires’’, as they knew that ‘‘the Feejees were cannibals of a fierce disposition, and who had never had the least intercourse with any voyagers’’.13 Although like Cook the crew of the Duff never witnessed the consumption by Fijians of human flesh, their cannibalism was confirmed first by the crew’s existing knowledge, which stemmed from deep within the collective colonial imaginary and was confirmed by Cook, second by their location in a place already known to be the home of cannibals, and third by the symptoms they glimpsed on distant beaches— smoke, jungle, spears, and natives. Like the crew of the Duff ’s epistemic journey, this process of location and description through fear became something of a tradition in writing on the western Pacific, where peoples’ knowledge foreshadowed what they found when they arrived. Invariably, as for Cromar and Asterisk, they discovered that their fantasies, imaginings, and stories were well founded, and all their experiences merely confirmed and embellished what they already knew of cannibalism and its recognized corollaries (extreme violence, tribalism, and treachery). As such, the discourse took on a life of its own with a vitality that was irrespective of and independent from the physical reality. For in such an atmosphere, stories of cannibalism were abundant and commonly stood in for observed reality. In Fiji, for example, observations were more often of a colonial framework of knowledge built by the canons of previous authors. Themes and tropes, whose foundations often lay in hearsay, persisted through monotonous recurrence throughout the

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century, and like whispering games each author’s repetition contained its own permutation. In 1845, for example, Charles Wilkes of the U.S. Exploring Expedition noted that he had heard Fijians would eat human flesh ‘‘even if decomposition [has] begun before it is received’’.14 Thirteen years later, in 1858, missionary Thomas Williams also noted that ‘‘while the Fijian turns with disgust from pork, or his favourite fish if at all tainted, he will eat bokola when fast approaching putrescence’’.15 In 1881, long after Britain’s annexation of the islands and the solidification of colonial rule, St. Alfred Johnston repeated the claim that Fijians ‘‘will touch nothing that has become tainted, but sooner than lose any part of a human roast they would eat it when the flesh would hardly hang together’’;16 nostalgically recalling ‘‘the Fiji of ten years ago’’ in 1881, C. F. Gordon Cumming stated that corpses dug up after ten to twelve days ‘‘could only be cooked in the form of puddings’’;17 and finally, in 1890, when addressing the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, Rev. A. J. Webb stated authoritatively and in a scientific context that the Fijians would eat decomposing corpses dug from graves that could only be ‘‘done up into puddings’’.18 Hearsay by now was scientific truth. The regularity and permutations of this particular theme of eating putrefied human flesh typifies the independence of this discourse from observed conditions. For just as none of the authors above claimed to have seen the practices they described, amongst the many nineteenth-century texts on Fiji and Melanesia more generally only a handful of authors ever claimed to have seen the act either of consuming human flesh or its savage embellishments.19 This observation is not made in order to engage a debate about the ethnological realities of the western Pacific. Rather, the ease with which extraordinary practices like eating rotting human flesh became scientific knowledge illustrates the strength of the truth of Melanesian savagery. In the context of Britain’s discovery and opening up of new worlds ready for colonization, we can thus observe something of a historical impossibility that Islanders of the western Pacific would be anything other than savages. If viewed from its purely functional angle, the ‘‘Cannibal Isles’’ were in a state of lawless savagery and were governed by superhuman violence, but were in such a state of primitivism that the light of civilization, in the shape of trade, labor, and the bible, could yet offer redemption. It is crucial, then, having acknowledged the standards of discursive construction, that we do not simply dismiss Melanesia as a ‘‘man-eating myth’’.20 To do so would overlook the role that discursive production played in physically fashioning the Pacific as a colonial frontier. Although the idea of Melanesia drew on deeply embedded imaginings of savagery, there were inherent standards of authenticity that lent potency and longevity, but which inextricably tied imaginings to the material reality of colonial intrusion.

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m

Throughout the nineteenth century, colonial intrusion in the western Pacific included British, French, German, Australian, and U. S. traders, settlers, and missionaries who traversed what was a remote and profitable frontier that yielded rich supplies of copra, sandalwood, sugar, bêche-de-mer, souls, and of course cheap and coercible labor. The labor trade in particular, whether supplying Queensland, Fijian, or New Caledonian plantations, with its insatiable demand and volatile mix of being both a profitable and mobile trade, was arguably the most immediate and far-reaching of the intrusions. While debate continues regarding whether or not it was a benign facilitator of labor migration in which Islanders voluntarily engaged or a coercive and thinly veiled slave trade, one thing remains certain. Throughout the life of the trade, a lack of consent from individual Islanders rarely stood in the way of recruiters’ profits, and while not always overt and ever-present in labor recruiters’ behavior, violence and aggression continued to underpin the viability of colonial trades in the western Pacific. As Dorothy Shineberg recently argued in relation to New Caledonia’s trade, while kidnapping may have waned with time, it always remained a possibility.21 The trade’s regulated standards, after all, were framed by and set within the parameters of the essentially violent concept of indenturing Islanders under coercive contracts that bound them to three years of tropical labor that was considered fatal for Europeans. In the case of the Queensland trade, its regulation and standardization after 1868 under Queensland and British law gave it an air of being a respectable and fair, if not equal, economic exchange. Although this regulation became more restrictive throughout the rest of the century, it would remain flexible and unenforceable enough to ensure that the trade remained economically viable. It was, after all, widely recognized by recruiters, planters, and colonial officials that ‘‘a certain amount of laxness from the regulations was necessary as if these rules were strictly adhered to no islanders at all would be recruited’’.22 There was, therefore, a recognized range of legally lax methods of recruiting in the absence of willingness from Islander recruits. William Wawn, for example, when recruiting on the Fanny in New Ireland in 1883, described setting sail with those who came out to the ship to trade. ‘‘Agreements’’ would often be signed, or the gravity of the labor contract explained, in order to make them legal, but only when they were at deep sea, for as Wawn put it, ‘‘many of my recruits must have engaged themselves on the spur of the moment; and, as soon as they began to feel sea-sick, or home-sick, it was too probable some would desert, so long as their home was in sight’’.23 Other semi-legal methods of recruiting when such profits were at risk included practices ranging from Wawn’s subtle misleading, to outright kidnapping

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from beaches or canoes, to trickery (such as dressing up as missionaries, giving ‘‘joy-rides’’, or using any method to get Islanders to willingly board a trading vessel).24 These and similar methods became normalized throughout the trade’s history not because they were used on every vessel (it would be ludicrous to claim that for over forty years Islanders continued to fall for the same tricks), but because they were commonly recognized as options. The labor trade therefore fluctuated wildly between varying levels of coercion on the part of recruiters and varying levels of willingness on the part of first-time and returning recruits. So, too, while Islander communities throughout the western Pacific engaged and negotiated with recruiters, they also actively and at times violently resisted them. It is in these fluctuating relations that ideas about Islander savagery were shaped and performed. The confidence of colonial trades in the western Pacific seem at first glance to be strikingly at odds with the fantastically embellished images of Islander savages that adorned many a published account of Melanesia. Within the narratives offered by traders themselves, the split between describing the most fearful of savage behaviors and the most benign of business transactions is striking. But the discursive function of Melanesia was to compel rather than repel colonial intrusion, and savagery helped to depoliticize resistance while at the same time serving as a self-evident imperative for colonial intrusion. Savagery frequently stood in for reason in dealings with Islanders, and their resistance or retaliation against recruiting vessels, rather than being recognized as active or political interactions with colonial projects, was frequently anthropologized and dismissed as ‘‘one of their sudden fits of passion, or covetousness which nobody can account for’’.25 Attacks by Islanders on vessels were almost exclusively described as mindless, indiscriminate, and unpredictable explosions to which cannibals were prone. It was in the act of understanding and preempting these violent explosions that colonial discourses were authenticated. Wawn, for example, scorned those who gained their knowledge of the western Pacific from a ‘‘Findlay’s Directory’’ statement that Islanders are ‘‘savage and warlike’’ and frequently pointed to his own anxieties and actions in avoiding and preempting attack as evidence of his experience and authority.26 Here and elsewhere, Melanesia was produced and made available in the physical interactions that took place between Islanders and colonial interests. Given the assumed ubiquity of Islanders’ violence, the ability to imagine, in order to preempt, became recruiters’ greatest weapon in equipping themselves on a daily basis with the means for self defense against that inevitability of Melanesian violence. As the experienced Cromar advised, ‘‘[I]t is always unwise to trust to appearances . . . treachery is nearly always their method, and constant preparedness and vigilance are essential’’.27 Accordingly, traders’ and travelers’ sensory vigilance found signs of treachery and imminent attack in a wide range

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of conditions, from the obvious to the undetectable. Islanders assuming ‘‘a most threatening and warlike attitude, dancing and gesticulating in a wild manner, yelling and brandishing their weapons’’ was one of the more obvious signs of attack.28 Timidity, glints in their eyes, shiftiness, restlessness, or aloofness were also taken as signs that they were ‘‘inclined towards hostility’’.29 The absence of women and children was ‘‘a sure sign that treachery was intended’’, as was the presence of women and children (a sure sign of deceptive treachery).30 An empty beach, a populated beach without anyone coming out to the ship, or a number of canoes being launched from the beach were all signs of attack.31 And while the sound of the blown conch, or beaten drums, was threatening, the silent presence of no conch or drums could also be ominous.32 This detection of danger and the undertaking of preventive measures such as retreat or attack became, in hindsight, an account of the survival of an averted incident. Fear was thus rendered a factually averted slaughter, attack, or cannibal feast through travelers’ and traders’ self-defensive imagination and physical actions. These tangible circuits of fear and action, or the ‘‘fright lines’’ of colonialism’s ‘‘nervous system’’, trace the slippages of imagery and fantasy, whether based in a prior reality or not, into a performed reality of power and violence.33 Fear and action generated standards of authenticity that grounded colonial imaginings of cannibalism in a productivity that was manifested in such physical realities as the massacre on the labor brig Carl. Such physicality disallows us from dismissing these discourses as the relatively harmless product of exoticism and fanciful nineteenth-century tourism. Guided by discursive representation, colonial behavior affected a material reality of poised violence affectionately caricatured by John Gaggin in 1900. With an awkward hand ‘‘more accustomed to other weapons than the ‘mighty pen’ ’’, he wrote of ‘‘old-time’’ Levuka, What a cosmopolitan place it was—the Paris of the vast South Seas . . . The tall black Tanna man, unclothed to the waist, his mop-like hair hanging to his shoulders, and bound in little tufts with the threads of cocoanut fibre, his ears full of tortoiseshell and mother-of-pearl ornaments, jingling as he strode—Tower musket in hand generally. Behind comes the soap-coloured Line Islander, or Tukalau, his long black hair like a horse’s tail, hanging nearly to the ground, with hand on his shark-tooth knife. Next comes the stately Fijian chief, with his tribesmen at his back, each with club or Tower musket on shoulder. . . . Through all this stalks the white—revolver on hip, generally half a dozen armed Tanna men or Solomon men at his heels . . . most of us habitually carried arms.34

Gaggin’s composite snapshot of Levuka visually distils a Melanesian reality within which violence is featured in constant anticipation and where the Carl

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Photo 1. Labor vessels ready to depart Queensland. Source: ‘‘ ‘Helena’ and ‘May’, Bundaberg’’. Date unknown. Photographer unknown. ‘‘Kanaka’’ Box, John Oxley Collection, State Library of Queensland. Negative number 2245.

massacre becomes less remarkable. In the harbor of Gaggin’s remembered Levuka, for example, we could place the Carl inconspicuously amongst Queensland-based labor vessels like the Lizzie, equipped with a ‘‘rack [holding] eight Sniders, above which eight revolvers were hung . . . [h]alf-a-dozen pairs of handcuffs completed the warlike equipment’’; or the Helena, seen with the May in port in Queensland (photo 1), prepared for recruiting with ‘‘stacks of Sniders and Winchesters, safe and handy in the cabin’’; with onshore activities such as those of James Hope writing his will, making good his debts, and being ‘‘offered a choice assortment of revolvers and breechloading rifles’’ immediately after making clear his intention to go recruiting in the darkest heart of Melanesia.35 Such preparations, and recruiters’ and travelers’ relief at having survived and suppressed life-threatening incidents that did not happen, built a colonial reality in the western Pacific like Levuka where violence was commonplace and considered and where colonial aggression was instigated, guided, and regulated by the conventions of a powerful colonial discourse. This discourse, produced, generated, and authorized by colonial aggression created a physical frontier that was conceptually remote from the moral norms and sanity of civilization. Such

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were the atmospheric conditions that enabled and sanctioned more extreme acts of frontier violence. Frontier Violence: ‘‘A Disgrace to Creed and Country’’? Early in September 1871, the Australian labor brig the Carl was at deep sea in the western Pacific en route to Levuka in Fiji. After a three-day labor haul in the Bougainville area it had reached full capacity, and locked in its hold were eighty men, most of whom had been forcibly taken from their island homes. On the night of 12 September, disturbances broke out in the hold, and, concerned about regaining control but not willing to venture below decks, the crew fired into the air to quell the commotion. Although successful that night, the same action failed on the following night when disturbances broke out again. The de facto captain, Dr. James Murray, later testified that on that second night the Islanders in the hold ‘‘appeared to be breaking down the bunks or sleepingplaces, and with the poles so obtained [had] armed themselves as with spears and fiercely attacked the main hatchway’’. Rumors swept through the crew that the Islanders were setting fire to the brig, and either spontaneously or under order ‘‘there was a general rush to arms’’. The crew gathered around the main hatchway. Taking aim inside the hold they opened fire with the assistance of one of the passengers, Raby Wilson, who, ‘‘by way of directing the aim . . . threw lights into the hold’’. The shooting continued in peaks and lulls, throughout the night and for the next eight hours.36 At four in the morning, one of the crew, Matthew Deviscoe, went to the brig’s galley. As he later testified, I . . . served out some coffee to the men and passengers. While they were drinking the coffee in the cabin, one of the crew ran aft and said, ‘‘Why there is not a man dead in the hold’’, and Mount said, ‘‘That is well’’. Dr. Murray put down his coffee . . . and fetched his revolver. The second mate got an inch augur, and bored some holes in the bulkheads of the fore-cabin, through which Dr. Murray fired. . . . The first and second mates fired as well as Murray. After a bit Dr. Murray came aft. Lewis, the second mate, said, ‘‘What would people say to my killing 12 niggers before breakfast?’’ Dr. Murray replied, ‘‘My word, that’s the proper way to pop them off’’. . . . Everything was quiet, and breakfast was got ready.37

Following breakfast the cleanup began: ‘‘it was considered advisable to save what remained; the hatches were then thrown open, and those who were alive were invited to come up’’.38 When the hatches were opened, five or six people

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emerged unaided. Of those still in the hold, between thirty-five and fifty had been killed during the shooting. The morning and most of the day was spent dragging the dead and injured on deck. The dead were thrown overboard. Of the injured, between sixteen and forty-five of those who were obviously injured had their hands and feet tied and were also thrown overboard. The total number of Islanders killed during the massacre was estimated at seventy.39 Infamous in the story of the Pacific labor trade, the weight of numbers and cool barbarity of the Carl massacre still has the capacity to shock, and in the 1870s it momentarily rocked the ‘‘civilized world’’.40 Accordingly, some members of the Carl’s crew were swiftly and publicly brought to justice. The sentence of death commuted to life imprisonment was handed down to the captain, Joseph Armstrong, and first mate, Charles Dowden, who were convicted with the evidence of Dr. James Murray and sentenced in Sydney on 20 November 1872. Immediately following the sentencing of Armstrong and Dowden, two passengers, Henry Mount and William Morris, were tried and convicted for murder in the Australian colony, Victoria, and were sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labor. They were later released on appeal, and although their release was overturned, Mount and Morris were never recaptured. The moral outrage with which the massacre was received in Britain and the Australian colonies intensified existing calls to regulate British traders and increase a military or regulatory presence in the western Pacific region. In that same year, Britain passed the Pacific Islanders Protection Act, or the Kidnapping Act, in an attempt to rid the trade of its worst crimes. On the one hand, this regulation, the sentencing of Armstrong and Dowden, and the attempts to bring the passengers Mount and Morris to justice was indicative of genuine outrage and the humanitarian influences in the Colonial Office. At the same time, however, these processes served to distance the massacre from its enabling colonial context, and in so doing disowned it as a product of the wilds of Melanesia. The Carl massacre, we must remember, was entirely the product of the labor trade. Until13 September1871, the Carl’s cruise had been remarkable only for its relative ordinariness. Standardized methods of recruiting in the absence of open willingness from Islanders had been used. This included methods that ranged from typical trickery to kidnapping by ‘‘rescuing’’ Islanders as they attempted to swim home, having had their canoes smashed with a specially rigged piece of iron.41 In the hold of the Carl on the day of the massacre well over eighty men had been crammed in conditions that were cramped, dark, musty, and cold, with minimal sanitary facilities. Such a ‘‘foul atmosphere, [with] . . . natives packed together like sardines’’ was not unusual, but rather a legally standardized condition of the trade.42 In these holds, seasickness, dysentery, or illness due to

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radical changes in diet and the trauma and confusion of first-time recruits who had been kidnapped, tricked, or coerced were regular, and access under such conditions to precious fresh air was limited and often available only through the hatchways. Finally, the chains, handcuffs, rifles, and Sniders that would be used during the massacre were standard-issue equipment on these vessels, and accounts of life on board were often blasé about the frequency with which forceful physical restraint and punishment was utilized.43 The publicity and infamy that surrounded the Carl massacre effectively obscured this everyday and unremarkable context through a distancing process that was well illustrated in an 1875 pamphlet arguing for the exoneration of the gentlemen passengers Mount and Morris. The massacre, according to the pamphlet’s author, G. S. Searle, was simply the result of villainy in the shape of the de facto captain of the Carl, Dr. Murray. Protected as Queen’s evidence for the trial of Armstrong and Dowden, Murray had never been arrested or tried despite being the one reputed to have cried the order to ‘‘[s]hoot them, shoot them, shoot every one of them’’ on the night of the massacre. In Searle’s hands, Murray was a caricature whose individual evil provided a simple exonerating narrative. The extremity of his villainy was evidenced by his father’s public condemnation of him as a ‘‘disgrace to creed, country, and family’’, who was deserving of being the first to ‘‘ascend the gibbet’’ in the event of any capital punishment.44 Described as ‘‘one of the most unmitigated villains which even the blackest pages of the annals of modern crime can furnish’’, he was the quintessential piratical slaver of the South Seas: a greedy, cruel, barbaric coward for whom ‘‘there seems but one palliation for his depravity. It is not quite certain whether he was not sometimes mad’’.45 The other cause of the violence in Searle’s exoneration was the status of the victims. The spark for the massacre, he tells us, was a panicky attempt at self-defense in light of the horrifying news that below decks the ‘‘natives’’ were ‘‘firing’’ the ship, had escaped from the hold, and were about to take possession of the vessel. Shooting was initially due to panic and confusion, but gave way during the night to cold and calculated vengeance in the case of the crew, and for Mount and Morris, a terror-induced, stupefied obedience to the half-mad orders of the bloodthirsty Murray. Searle’s concluding case for the innocence of Mount and Morris was simple: if they killed anyone in the hold that night (which in any case could not be proven because with so many killed, who could say who fired the fatal shots?) they had had little choice. The order had been given to fire down the hatchway . . . What then was the course to be taken? Murray, at once drunkard, murderer, and temporarily mad, was in

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charge of the vessel, a captain and crew of hardened ruffians . . . [and] savage and cannibal islanders, about 80 of them, down below, trying to . . . get possession of the vessel . . . as a preliminary to killing and eating everyone on board.

Mount and Morris, rational and civilized gentlemen that they were, merely fell ‘‘back on the first law of nature, self-preservation’’, and joined the killing.46 Searle’s flippant reference to the voracious appetite of the savage cannibals below decks was an exculpatory call for understanding through a metonymic reference to the remote and isolated site of the massacre—Melanesia. It was a bid to get those ‘‘ladies and gentlemen sitting comfortably in their own drawing rooms’’ to make an appropriate moral judgment, given the ‘‘danger there might be’’ in the otherworldliness of Melanesia, so remote ‘‘from civilized life and laws’’.47 The reference tapped into that deeply embedded knowledge of Melanesia that resonated with danger and adventure amidst attendant caricatures of the perpetually hungry Pacific Island cannibals. Here, according to the first law of nature, violent cycles of native savagery and European self-preservation were infinite in a decivilizing atmosphere where ‘‘going troppo’’ or becoming native was the result of prolonged doses and where ‘‘island-rot in their veins’’ propelled Europeans’ descent into violent savagery.48 Succumbing to decivilization was commonly portrayed as particularly infectious to certain classes whose susceptibility to ‘‘going native’’ was inherent and whose fevers of violent savagery were correspondingly intense. These white natives, or ‘‘beachcombers’’, were the ‘‘the greatest vagabonds on the earth’’; they were ‘‘lawless and unscrupulous ruffians who infest these beautiful islands . . . [and were] unequalled for cruelty and treachery’’; and they were the miscreants and ‘‘veritable waifs and strays of humanity’’ that had ‘‘sunk to the degradation of the natives’’.49 In Searle’s frontier narrative, therefore, guilt for the excesses of violence on the Carl lay, in the end, with the savage realm of the frontier itself. Here the orders of an insane and sadistic individual in power were followed in a panic by the degraded and decivilized crew whose moral weakness and ruthless, as opposed to legal, pursuit of profit in a savage land had met its inevitable end. Searle’s narrative, while his own, was not unique in its drawing from established frontier narratives of violence. These frontier narratives, with their reliance on a site of alterity and madness, falter in the face of the normality of even the extreme violence on the Carl. Moments of insanity caused by fear, panic, or obedience do not offer any coherence to the lulls in shooting during the long night or the rehearsed coolness of the breakfast break between the shooting and throwing victims overboard. Likewise, our comprehension of the Carl massacre as the product of collective madness is disarmed by the calm routine and discipline by which it was underpinned. Murray’s order to throw the injured over-

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board was not madness. Rather, it was in line with his later orders to wash out the blood and whitewash the hold of the ship, for in Levuka, recruits with bullet wounds might raise uncomfortable questions. Similarly unmad was the rational decision making and normality that blended with the killing: the passenger Wilson assisting the shooters to direct aim by lighting the hold, and Deviscoe preparing coffee and breakfast as on any other morning while the shooting continued. Comparable massacres for which we have existing detail in court records and Royal Commission investigations are similarly interspersed with calm images of routine. The Hopeful ’s 1884 voyage, for example, which like the Carl was plagued with violence, would become infamous for the recruiting procedures of a day when at least four Islanders were murdered.50 In a frenzied attack on canoes that came to the ship to trade, members of the Hopeful ’s crew shot two men, slit the throat of a third, and ‘‘rescued’’ eight men and a little boy from the water. [T]he little boy, being of no use as a recruit, was cast adrift on two cocoa-nuts, which were tied together and placed under his arms. The little fellow was seen to slip from the cocoa-nuts and was drowned in the surf. The canoe cut by McNeil had not sunk. It contained the body of the dead steersman. Williams cut the head off, and the mutilated remains were thrown overboard. There were now four natives in each boat . . . they were brought to the ‘‘Hopeful’’. . . . Williams, it was also observed, changed his trousers as soon as he came on board, and hung those he had taken off in the rigging.51

If madness can explain such attacks and mutilations, it must also be able to explain the humane but useless gesture of trying to save the boy and the blandness of Williams’ hanging out his washing. The Carl and the Hopeful massacres contained violence that was both crazed and calm, haphazard and selective, and unstable and disciplined. On the one hand, it would not be inaccurate for us to locate individuals’ behavior at the cloudy nexus of the pressures imposed by fears produced by cannibal discourses, and the conscience-deadening effect of the labor trade’s commodification of Islanders. However, it is the moments of calm routine that are almost more inexplicable than the violence itself and point to the need to interrogate further such imaginary afflictions as the supposed contagion of island rot or going native, the underlying concept of which was utilized so often to explain such incidents. Such frontier narratives exonerated colonial violence as isolated and individual aberrations that were as inevitable as any fatal impact when colonial business was conducted ‘‘between dangerous savages . . . and white traders

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who are often indiscreet and sometimes unscrupulous’’.52 As the individualized acts of the unscrupulous, frontier violence was dislocated from its enabling colonial context as the unfortunate product of the very conditions of savagery that regularly justified and necessitated colonial intrusion. Through such distancing, colonial frontiers became anomalous and historically and socially nonspecific. These frontier narratives resemble more recent explanations of colonial violence as being the product of a kind of subreality where violence is seen as the product of, or compelled by, an illusory and extreme context, an ‘‘epistemic murk’’ of fantasy, paranoia, fear, rumor, and myth from which the governed and bureaucratized colonial project is not yet emergent.53 While not disagreeing with this, it must be said that to stop our analysis here has the potential to contribute to constructions of the frontiers, which lead our focus away from colonialism’s legitimate dimensions. Conceived as spaces charged with death, terror, rumor, or myth, colonialism’s frontiers become a little mystified and rendered timeless and lawless by nature, with no definitive spatial or contextual specificity. This allows a slippage of colonialism’s frontiers into the realm of historical accident. Here they remain part of a liminal past constituted by individual, or multiplicities of individual, acts of culturally generated madness. Here lies the similarities with Searle’s exoneration where violence is reducible to the actions of the crazed or the disowned Lumpenproletariat of the metrapole who were attracted in droves to the savage fringes of civilization where they were externally or internally propelled into decivilizing spirals of violence. As we will go on to consider, not only do such narratives belie the role that frontiers played as regulated spaces of conflict, which both justified and necessitated colonialism’s intrusion as benevolent and moral—in addition, they participated in the past in that which they sought to explain. White Natives and Refining the Frontiers What is it that causes a certain class of persons to throw off all restraint and decency when they live under a tropical sun, and see other human beings with skin darker than their own? It is like flourishing a red flag before a bull to show an aboriginal of the South Sea Islands to some Englishmen; with the thermometer at 90 in the shade. They go mad. –George Palmer, Kidnapping in the South Seas

Colonial violence and conflict participated in the production of discourses that marked off and distanced colonial frontiers. This is not simply in terms of the displacement of the violence of the colonial project onto constructions of the

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objects of colonial aggression. In addition, there existed an enabling interplay between dichotomous notions of savage and civilized and legitimate and illegitimate violence, articulated in a process of performing and evaluating colonial aggression. Of particular relevance here is the way themes of going native helped to normalize and standardize colonial violence or conflict. Such explanations of insanity, individuality, illegitimacy, and illegality served, through separation, to sanctify official colonial violence and relationships of power. As such, they helped to define colonialism’s imperative of imposing legal, physical, and material jurisdiction. George Palmer, whose reflections introduce this section and who captained the British man-of-war HMS Rosario, in 1869 was charged with the role of investigating, regulating, and bringing to justice British recruiters who committed atrocities against Islanders. Throughout his memoirs he reflected, as he does above, on the causes of the devastation that had been committed by British recruiters, frequently settling on the need to look to the physical climate and embedded racism of colonial subjects to comprehend the inevitability of European descent into violent madness. Like Searle’s exoneration, Palmer’s conclusions comment on the infectiousness of savagery on the remote Melanesian frontiers, where travelers despaired of ‘‘conveying to [their] readers any idea of the strangeness of everything in those waters’’ and where colonial acts of violence blended with the strangeness to convey a space so savage and remote that a new realm of behavior, new moral structures, and a new ‘‘common law’’ were seen to prevail.54 Hence, while themes of going native or mad were part of the process that distanced the frontiers, in doing so they also helped to define and refine frontier protocol and standards of colonial behavior. While European natives as bad colonists were disowned and considered nonrepresentative of Britishness, they were also by nature representative of their polar opposite. That is to say, standards of colonial behavior corresponded with the prevalence of colonial misbehavior, for the demarcation of mad violence often necessitated and implied the shape of a rational and civilized form of violence. This legal or consciously civilized force itself functioned in accordance with paradigms of savage violence. There was therefore a regularity about the violence of the colonial presence, whether civilized or decivilized, which we can observe in the so-called ‘‘gunboat diplomacy’’ of British law in the western Pacific during the 1870s and 1880s.55 We will see that in one sense, the legal and legalizing violence that was exerted was itself a process of going native in that it was performed in accordance with the paradigms of perceived notions of native violence. Albert Markham replaced Palmer as the captain of the British man-of-war Rosario in 1871. Like Palmer, Markham was to bring law to the lawless and seek

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out and punish British recruiters’ atrocities. The atrocities he punished, however, were attempted and preempted attacks made by Islanders against recruiting and trading vessels, and his regulation of the labor trade manifested as a voyage that burnt Islanders’ villages, crops, and canoes throughout the Islands. He envisaged this not as contradictory, but as a central part of bringing the rule of law to Melanesia and as an engagement in civilized violence that was the antithesis of the ‘‘lawless ruffians’’ and savages he so despised. His resulting vision of civilized behavior in Melanesia, therefore, was that which rationally adopted the ‘‘common law’’ of the islands—tribalism: ‘‘It must be recollected, in all our transactions with these natives that they are ignorant savages. . . . It is their law, when a man belonging to a tribe commits any offence, to punish the guilty tribe, and not as in our law the guilty individual ’’.56 Tribalism, or tribal law, like cannibalism, spoke of indiscriminate, impulsive, and irrational violence, and it was precisely this type of violence that Markham consciously and, he thought, strategically emulated throughout the islands. One of the first ‘‘outrages’’ he addressed was at Nguna in Vanuatu where, he states, that in retaliation for the kidnapping of women by the Jason and later by the Donald McLean, the villagers had attacked the crew of the Fanny. On arriving at Nguna, Markham was concerned about ensuring the message was received that a ‘‘man-of-war was as much bound to protect them as to watch over the interests of white men’’. However, when shots were fired over the heads of Markham’s landing party, he ordered action: ‘‘Being unable to see our foes, and hearing the blowing of the conches on the surrounding hills . . . orders [were] given to set fire to and destroy a portion of the village’’.57 He later destroyed the rest of the village, several canoes, and, later still, a second village. Soon after this incident he went to Nukapu to avenge the killing of Bishop Patteson. He attacked on arrival ‘‘to show the natives our power and their folly in resisting, the ship was cleared for action, and three shells fired. . . . [Later] the order was given to fire into the bush, so as to clear it of unseen enemies . . . the village was fired . . . [and] several canoes were later destroyed.’’ The final example occurred on Aurora (Maewo) Island, also in Vanuatu, where a member of Markham’s crew was injured, but not fatally. Markham’s response was swift. [F]or the purposes of punishing these, treacherous and cold-blooded miscreants, who could have no other object than that of gratifying their own bloodthirsty passions, and killing for killing’s sake, in the murderous attack on the paymaster . . . we had to content ourselves with inflicting the very mild punishment involved in the destruction of their villages and canoes.58

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Four villages were razed, and crops, canoes, food, and other possessions were destroyed. Markham’s behavior was sanctioned as the extension of jurisdiction and legal order to lawless frontiers, and he himself described every act in terms of the colonial civilizing mission. In exacting the punishment of the destruction of a number of villages for the deeds of one person or one village, Markham’s reasoning was twofold. First, he argued that it was a lesson in the only educational medium Melanesians could comprehend—might is right. Second, he adopted ‘‘tribal’’ law in the hope that his punishment of whole communities would mean that the innocent ‘‘in revenge for the loss of their houses, would themselves punish the scoundrel that had behaved so treacherously’’.59 Markham therefore adopted a rationale and logic in his use of violence that was common to the frontier and that in a self-consciously civilized way engaged in an indiscriminate violence he felt would be recognizable to ‘‘ignorant savages’’. Markham’s style of retribution, repeated and intensified throughout the western Pacific by the five new men-of-war launched after 1873, was considered by many settlers and planters in Queensland to be too mild and civilized and ultimately not native enough. Denigrated as Exeter-Hall philanthropy, or ‘‘Exeter-Hallism’’, this was seen by recruiters and their supporters as being too concerned with the welfare of Islanders, hopelessly inappropriate for its context, and governed by inexperienced ‘‘men who although well meaning, have never traveled outside of civilized countries’’.60 Exeter-Hallism came under attack particularly during 1880, when resistance to the trade was peaking in both the Solomons and Vanuatu. The practice of shelling villages and destroying crops, canoes, and stores of food—commonly seen as a way to ensure ‘‘they will starve during winter’’—were increasingly considered dismally insufficient punishment.61 Insufficient, that is, and inappropriate for savages who were capable of understanding only the simplest of moral lessons: ‘‘might is right’’.62 Over the period 1863–1906, the discourse on punishment, retribution, and moral righteousness changed little in essence. The logic remained that colonial representatives had to exact an eye for an eye, fight savages with savagery, and ultimately abandon notions of a ‘‘civilized program’’ of punishment so as to out-savage the savage.63 This differed little from Markham’s reasoning, where the only limitations to be imposed on civilizing violence were to be set by the savagery of those to be civilized, the construction of whom was in turn directly correlative to the violence committed against them. This was not, as the following incident might indicate, a liminal or murky process, but one that was administratively articulated. The debate over the softness of Exeter-Hallism erupted in 1886, when

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Islanders in New Guinea fatally attacked the Queensland based vessel the Emily. A fierce debate erupted in Queensland’s parliament over whether or not to send the colony’s Native Mounted Police to New Guinea to avenge the murders. As the law of nature/natives was invoked, it correspondingly produced images of the savages to which it applied. As talk of government turning a blind eye to Queensland settlers conducting their own Queensland-style punitive raids on New Guinea intensified, so, too, did the images of New Guinea Islanders as head-hunting cannibals and ‘‘niggers [who wanted] a few skulls to adorn their huts’’, who had ‘‘no respect whatever for human life, whether white or black. . . . [T]hey will kill their own relatives, and eat them too, if they get a chance’’.64 On 25 November 1886, the special commissioner of British New Guinea, John Douglas, responded to the debate by ordering a punitive mission to ‘‘arrest the murderers [by making] use of the best means at . . . disposal to accomplish this’’.65 The order, carried out by Nicholas Minister, resulted in several Joannet Islanders being summarily tried and shot, while others who had been captured and held prisoner had ‘‘jumped’’ overboard ‘‘though manacled two and two’’ and had drowned. Minister also razed and burnt three villages and was said to have decapitated those he shot and ‘‘carried their heads to the Special Commissioner’s Deputy’’.66 Douglas’ reaction was one of indignation that his wishes were not fulfilled in the proper manner. It is necessary that the white man should, under proper limits, assert his power, and I should not myself hesitate to take life in order to vindicate justice, but I am most desirous to avoid not only the appearance, but the reality of practices which are as barbarous as those of natives themselves.

The practices he referred to that were as barbarous as those of the natives, was not the murders and rumors of decapitation (head hunting), but ‘‘the gratuitous burning of villages’’ in the belief that this would encourage ‘‘neighbouring tribes’’ to take the advantage and attack, and thereby exacting punishment on the Joannet Islanders. As Douglas argued, the British were too civilized to actively generate and ‘‘permit strife between neighbouring tribes’’, and it was the white man’s ‘‘duty to discourage and if possible, to repress intertribal devastations’’.67 Douglas’ response to Minister’s actions reprimanded him for engaging in tribal warfare, a process by which Minister had breached the limits of civilized violence with its rationalized levels of irrationality. The incident in New Guinea brings us to the centrality of the illegitimate in sanctioning colonial force. Here, condemnations of individual acts of colonial violence and discussion about the use and abuse of colonial force contrib-

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uted to the emergence of the banal and routine exercise of frontier violence. As long as the devastation of crops, canoes, and villages and summary executions were the adopted methods of imposing colonial law and order in the western Pacific, physicality and force remained the legitimate and regular form of communication between Islanders and Empire. This also confirmed the idea that the Melanesian ‘‘is too much of a wild beast to appreciate anything but the logic of force’’.68 As a ‘‘logic of force’’, then, violence was positioned as a normative feature of colonial contact that could only be regulated. We will return to this point in chapter 5, but the key observation here is that notions of going native, rationally meeting savagery with savagery, and out-savaging the savage were not only conceptually dependant on existing discursive categories, but in their physical performance, they also produced their own reality. These dynamics had continued relevance in Queensland. There, Melanesia forever remained a point of reference in negotiating the conditions of the labor contract and relationship between settler/planter and laborer. But in Queensland, Islanders were no longer natives as such. Their role in the settler colonial project was necessarily allied against indigenous peoples. This was registered in discursive shifts. Melanesian savages became passive and governable ‘‘Polynesians’’ or the social menace of ‘‘Kanakas’’, terms that denoted the shifts in power relations that will be explored in chapter 3. But the processes of contact and conflict, worked out on the frontiers of the western Pacific, remained as an undercurrent in Queensland, continuing to inform colonial relations on the plantations and in the sugar towns. In Melanesia the frontiers were constructed by tropes of savagery as places whose nature made them not only susceptible to, but also compelled, exploitation by the unscrupulous. Through exchanges between imaginings and physical responses, the idea of Melanesia became the cause and effect of colonial conflict. We have observed these processes as backdrops for the massacre on the Carl, the violence of which was incorporated into its own causative narrative through themes of European descent to savagery. As such, the captain, the crew, and their violence were the product not of colonialism, but of Melanesia’s compelling savagery. However the preparedness for violence of European recruiting vessels, the preemptive attacks of Markham’s firing and shelling of empty beaches, and the utilization of what Markham and Minister imagined was ‘‘tribal’’ morality remind us that the space of Melanesia was physically created through the discursive behavior of colonial conflict. While discourses of race and savagery that attend colonial frontiers produced colonial violence, therefore, violence also contributed to the process whereby categories of race were imagined, fantasized, and constructed in the context of colonial conflict. It was through these dynamics that the frontier was created as a moral and legal space where violence against indigenous peoples could be unleashed with an indis-

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criminate ferocity. The more violent and irregular it was, the more it served to define Melanesia as a space beyond the realms of colonial law and order. The integral functionality of this was the resulting moral imperative for further colonial intrusion and the extension of jurisdiction and control as the protective measures of a benevolent civilizing mission. As we will see in chapter 3, the dynamics of violence on the frontiers would prove to be resilient in the settled areas of colonial society where categories of exclusion would continue to offer a similar distance and accompanying sanction. We will consider first, however, the transition that Islanders made in journeying from their villages to the Queensland sugar districts.

2. Survival, Arrival, and Growth The World Islanders Built

Belong [the villiage of] Sevarowa. Been see big ship one day there three mast. I been see ship I been come along canoe. . . . My canoe go close up to ship alongside. Boys in canoe hold on to ship. Been see white man come along boat. . . . Tevapapa stand up on canoe . . . Macneil he fire and hit Tevapapa in the left breast (Witness points to spot). Tevapapa fall down. . . . Face down. Plenty blood come out. All boy jump out of canoe only little boy and dead man [stayed]. McNeils boat go after another canoe. I try swim along Sevarowa. All boy try swim to Sevarowa. . . . Jack in his boat catch me take me in boat and to ship. . . . Moyani jump overboard. Barney fire three times at Moyani. Third time catch him the back of the head he go down (Witness points to place) I was sitting up and saw the shots fired. . . . Barney brought Torquomy, Messylarus, Naquatta and myself on ship. Naquatta die long ship at sea. Torquomy, Messylarus and myself been brought Queensland. Me no want come ship or come long Queensland. Me like Sevarowa. I like go back Sevarowa. –Testimony of Dayanammo, 1885

THE TESTIMONY ABOVE was delivered by Dayanammo in the trial of Bernard Williams of the Hopeful for murders committed during the 1885 massacre discussed in chapter 1.1 His testimony reminds us that incidents of frontier violence were survived by those who often went on to undertake contracted labor on Queensland plantations before being returned home. In the case of those who survived the Carl massacre, many ended up laboring on cotton plantations in Fiji for over twelve months before being returned. Others did not survive, having died soon after their arrival from what the British consul for Fiji, Edward March, described as ‘‘consumption and the prostrating influence of deep dejection’’.2 How do people survive such violence, whether as extreme as the Carl or as subtle as gentle coercion and misrepresentation? How do they go on to adjust

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to new environments, work regimes, and social contexts? This chapter, which is the first of this study’s horizontal chapters, asks this question and considers the kind of world people built in the aftermath of the frontier. We begin with the peoples’ journey to Queensland and immediate reactions on arrival, move on to an account of the material world of the plantations, and consider finally the material cultures people practiced on and off the plantations. We end with a consideration of the material wealth and poverty of those returning to their islands at the end of their contracts. The focus of the chapter is on what might be considered the plainness of the everyday, on the houses people lived in, the goods they bought with their meager wages, and the reflections in their material desires of the remuneration they demanded. Rather than providing a definitive narrative, the account that follows patches together glimpses and voices to plot the depth and breadth of accumulated individual experiences. These scatterings of information have been gathered from a range of sources, from translated testimonies to the 1885 Kidnapping Royal Commission that was sparked by the Hopeful ’s voyage, to material observations of the mundane gathered from contemporary accounts of Queensland in the nineteenth century, to the memories of the first generation retained by those people contributing to the Oral History Collection recorded by Clive Moore, Patricia Mercer, and Matthew Peacock in the 1970s. The methodology of extracting kernels of information from discursive layers is adopted in this chapter, whose focus is squarely on the passing comments that present the obvious, the banal, the unremarkable, and the understated. Discursive layers are here understood as not just the interpretive presence of European scribes and chroniclers, but also include the potential interpretive prism of the present through which memory and testimony are recalled in records such as the 1885 Kidnapping Royal Commission and the Oral History Collection. Hence it is those moments of open questioning and free-flowing storytelling when information was unlocked by a reference, or smells, another memory, a tree, a landscape, or a building that are the focus of the following pages. This is what Ann Stoler refers to as the ‘‘minute emotional accommodations of the everyday’’, or that embedded information that most successfully eludes the influence of the present in which a memory is being told.3 In the Kidnapping Royal Commission of 1885 and particularly free-flowing interviews with Matthew Peacock in the 1970s, we see responses to recruitment and stories of emergent material cultures told either in passing or as the immediate and compelling answer to an open question. This information is often given so bluntly and matter-of-factly that to go on to state what appears to have been so obvious to the teller as a revelation of research is a touch embarrassing. That people cried in response to being kidnapped or planted vegetables from home to subsidize inadequate

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and tasteless plantation diets is therefore not presented as a discovery so much a re-presentation in a reconstruction of life after the frontiers. As has been discussed in the introduction, the material and social world that Islanders built in Queensland has been evocatively reproduced by historians in such regional studies as the monographs of Clive Moore, Carol Gisititin, and Patricia Mercer, and in personal histories produced by Noel Fatnowna, Faith Bandler, and Mabel Edmond.4 The following in this sense is not new, but seeks to add to such studies by bringing together a composite image set directly against the backdrop of the violent dynamics of recruitment. It therefore begins with a consideration of the initial emotive responses and physical reflexes of those people brought to Queensland under violent, coercive, or misleading circumstances. This is not to discount the responses of those who engaged willingly and for the second, third, or fourth time. Rather, it is meant to include the responses of those taken against their will as a starting point for understanding the varying degrees of autonomy that people exercised over their involvement in the trade. No matter the level of choice, I think we must not lose sight of the relativity of willingness in the context of a trade whose use of force and toleration of Islanders’ wariness was subject to slim profit margins. In the 1880s, for example, when resistance to the trade in the Solomons and Vanuatu was driving the cost of labor recruitment higher, recruiters simply turned their attention to the more untouched northern waters of Papua and New Guinea. Here profit was restored with the help of such massacres and kidnappings as was investigated by the 1885 Kidnapping Royal Commission and symbolized by the Hopeful massacre. Derryck Scarr, Peter Corris, Clive Moore, and Kay Saunders have variously speculated on the range of reasons why Islanders increasingly volunteered for recruitment throughout the nineteenth century. Circumstances on which they have speculated have included the escape from village or ‘‘tribal’’ politics, desire for European goods such as guns and ammunition, individuals’ quest for prestige and status, or simply the love of adventure. Some of these voluntary engagements they present as being premeditated, with potential recruits eagerly awaiting the arrival of labor vessels, while others engaged as they were swept away in the excitement of seeing returning laborers landed on the beaches with their new clothes, stories, trade boxes, and weapons.5 Some of those returning encouraged others to recruit or, like Kwaisulia and Powlanga of the Solomon Islands, became local agents for recruiters, encouraging and coercing the engagement of inland villagers who, from 1885, came to constitute 90 percent of all recruits.6 However, while there were people freely engaging in the trade, free will was not an absolute. As contemporary investigations such as the 1885 Kidnapping Royal Commission showed all too clearly, a willingness to board labor

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vessels or a willingness to engage in paid employment for a day, a week, or a month, while meeting legal standards of voluntary recruitment, could not be accurately described as ‘‘voluntary’’. Voluntariness was a matter of degrees. Whatever the circumstances of individual recruitments, the following chapter is guided by a sense of the range of compelling circumstances that span the spectrum from voluntary recruitment to abduction. A recruiting incident that W. E. Giles’ wrote of is exemplary of the ambiguity of coercion and free will that defines this spectrum. When ‘‘a middleaged man got into the boat and sat down as though intending to recruit’’, his chief, Takamba, forced him back on shore. The man pleaded with Giles, Takamba, and those keeping him on shore to let him recruit, until Giles and the recruiting boat left, ‘‘leaving the poor old man lying on the beach and crying’’. After asking Takamba, Giles stated that the man’s eagerness to recruit was due to the fact that his son had been recruited the previous day and he had wanted to go to Queensland to find him.7 Other recruiters and government agents described those situations that might have occurred on that previous day, where ‘‘boys [would] actually cry to come, but their brothers and fathers would kneel down and beseech them to force them back’’.8 These examples alert us to the distinction between individual and corporate or collective will made by Dorothy Shineberg in her recent study of the New Caledonian labor trade. Not only should we be aware, as Shineberg argues, of mistaking the participation of a community for the will of the individual, but in addition, we should also remain aware of the collective impact of individual decisions.9 This could result not only in the loss of loved ones but also in the creation of dependence on trade goods through population drains, which in turn helped to compel more individuals to consent to recruitment. Maintaining sensitivity for, or awareness of, these circumstances and the immediate context of the Pacific’s frontiers is enhanced by and enhances our consideration below of Islanders’ survival and adjustment to the radical social, cultural, and economic changes of Queensland’s sugar plantations. Negotiating Recruitment Adjustments began on the voyage to Queensland amidst what we know were the radical changes experienced by recruits on the labor vessels. Julian Thomas, writing of his journey on board the Lizzie for the Melbourne Argus in the 1880s, told of an incident that highlights just how fundamental these changes could be. Our yams nearly all gone, and many still refusing to eat rice, Mr. F. [the government agent] said he must adopt heroic measures. With a great deal of sound and fury he told the boys they must ki-ki rice, or else—! The boys did not appear

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to be very much afraid of him, until one morning two of them were detected throwing their allowance overboard. . . . Terrible in his wrath, Mr. F. glared at the two Ambrym boys, ‘‘You want yams, do you? You’ll have rice, and you’ll eat it!’’ He handcuffed the lads around the ankles. . . . So they bolted the rice till their eyes were nearly shooting out of their heads . . . hereafter there was no trouble on the rice question.10

Food was a basic change, but more subtle conditions, such as those that arose from the cramped conditions on board, left no less of an impression. As Faith Bandler wrote of Wacvie Mussingkon’s recollections of life on the ships, recruits ‘‘were herded closely together. Even at home, when doing the dances of custom, they had never been so tight together that they had trodden on each other’s feet’’.11 The cruise of the Bobtail Nag in 1877 provides one picture of the conditions below decks. On her return home the vessel was hit with dysentery, and W. E. Giles’ record of the voyage gave an almost daily report of burials at sea. In the cramped conditions in the hold, the government agent found one Santo Islander ‘‘standing up and leaning against the bunks stark stiff dead’’.12 As dysentery took hold of all on board, the Bobtail Nag also ‘‘began to leak fearfully’’ until the ‘‘sea water covered the lower tier of bunks in the hold whenever the vessel rolled, compelling all the recruits to crowd together in the upper tiers’’.13 In the voyage of this ship we have some indication of how, with the disease, illness, and climatic conditions of voyages, the average monthly mortality rate for Islanders to Queensland could be three per thousand, compared to less than one per thousand for European migrants to Queensland.14 On arriving on board some people may have dealt with their ordeal through the support offered by the many strengthened friendships and links across islands and languages that were forged on these voyages. For as Thomas wrote with surprise, ‘‘[m]en from the same island danced together, as they slept together, as you saw them with their arms round each other’s necks, sharing perhaps a cocoa-nut. But all the boys were friendly, and yet they came from hostile islands!’’ 15 When possible, dancing, singing, and praying brought some relief, and as Thomas wrote, by the1880s ‘‘all ships in the trade encouraged ‘sing sings’, to pass the recruits’ time and keep them from homesickness’’.16 They would sing, he stated, ‘‘on the deck’’ while ‘‘idly beating time with pieces of wood’’, while at night there ‘‘were opposition bands of singers, and from the bunks on port and starboard came the swelling chorus. Time was kept by the beating of many feet’’ and ‘‘when a real ‘sing-sing’ occurred, the performers were all turned up on deck . . . and there was a full house, comprised of crew and passengers’’.17 The texts mentioned above provide vivid and rosy images that formed part

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of a conversation that supported the labor trade. Nevertheless, through these accounts we capture glimpses of the mundane detail of the everyday nature of Islanders’ adjustment, of rice thrown overboard, conditions whose crowded nature left dying recruits standing, and images whose eccentricity or unexpectedness runs counter to the mandatory narrative of tribalism of the kinds of publications in which they appear. Of value, too, are the exceedingly rare moments in colonial narratives when authors like Joseph Melvin realized against their better judgment that ‘‘though many of them [recruits] were savages in reality, there was much of ordinary human nature in them all’’. Melvin went on to describe these personalities in an exercise that was unique amongst the chroniclers of the labor trade. Na Loot, he said, was curious; Ro Roie was ‘‘tender-hearted and highly sensitive’’; Muc-ah-taie ‘‘was one of the unobtrusive sort, handy and willing, but never in the way’’; Nak-Kie ‘‘was continuously on the poop begging everlastingly for matches’’; and finally, Beer-beer was a regular island larrikin and an artful dodger as well. . . . [He] haunted the poop and made himself a nuisance by mimicking everything said or done there, careless whom he thus held up to ridicule. He was an echo of the captain’s orders and of the boatswain’s laugh, and he strutted about caricaturing everyone. If driven down one gangway he instantly popped up on the other side.18

Although a caricature, Melvin’s description nevertheless samples the everyday and animates individual recruits in a way that many did not. This is a value shared by the 1885 Kidnapping Royal Commission where Islanders, who were so thoroughly homogenized in colonial discourses, appeared as individuals with shared experiences and responses. They suggest also some of the ways in which people responded beyond survival to their immediate conditions when kidnapped or recruited under legal or semi-legal conditions. They experienced a range of different circumstances, but for all the sea voyage was plagued by confinement, monotony, and poor food at best, in such potential circumstances as the disorientation of displacement amongst strangers whose language and actions might have been unintelligible, in possible physical contexts of chains and handcuffs and lodgings in holds that might have reeked with the stench of illness and death. These were the immediate beginnings of the adjustments Islanders made to a set of social and physical circumstances in Queensland that would continue to be incorporated and negotiated on their arrival. m

On 25 November 1884, Komyoyo from Marshall Bennett Island and Womakada from Normanby Island arrived in Townsville on board the Heath, which had

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been at sea since 19 July that year. Both Komyoyo and Womakada had been recruited under, at best, false pretences and were horrified to learn in Townsville of how long they were expected to stay in Queensland. As Womakada stated during the1885 Kidnapping Royal Commission, when he was (falsely) informed in Townsville that he was to be here for ‘‘three yams’’, which for Womakada meant six months, ‘‘I cried . . . for my island’’.19 A month later they arrived on Pioneer Plantation near Ayr with another small group from the Heath. Within hours they left Pioneer and made their way back to Townsville over the following week, only to be arrested for absconding and returned to the plantation. They left again, and again after that, and each time they or other members of the Heath group left they were arrested as absconders and returned to Pioneer, only to abscond again at the nearest opportunity. This continued until the Queensland government finally returned them to their islands at the end of 1885. Theirs was far from an isolated case, particularly during this 1883–1885 period. Recruits from the neighboring Kalamia Plantation and Islanders across the sugar districts were also absconding, taking ‘‘to the bush and even [stealing] boats, in which to coast northward, in the hopes of reaching their homes. . . . [A] few . . . got as far as Cooktown, or Torres Straits’’.20 The trend was partially reflected in the rise of charges under the Masters and Servants Act (absconding, refusal to obey orders) between 1883–1885, when the numbers jumped from 70 in 1883 to 111 and back to 2 in 1885.21 This widespread absconding was one response to conditions in Queensland. Because Islanders were rarely asked why they absconded, however, it often went on record as an instinctual reaction devoid of strategy or intent. As local inspectors’ explanations to the inquiring Queensland government went, this display ‘‘of a spirit of resistance’’ and attitudes of ‘‘active aggression’’ when ‘‘any attempt at recapture’’ was made was because recruits had come from ‘‘strange islands’’ on the basis of which there was ‘‘nothing very surprising in the spectacle of an islander who has perhaps never done a continuous day’s work in his life, endeavoring to escape from a discipline that must be excessively irksome to him’’.22 Employers also sought instinctual and internal rather than social explanations. On Pioneer, where the Heath recruits would not stay put, the numbers and determination of absconders perplexed D. Donald, the manager, who wrote in a letter dated 4 October 1884, There is still a good deal of sickness among the N Ireland [sic] boys—another died this week. . . . [T]hey are getting every affection and medicine—There is one cranky, we have been searching for five days—I am much afraid he is gone— another went cranky, but fortunately it was during the day and he is nearly right. We put the hobbles on him and still keep them on.

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Soon after Womakada, Komyoyo, and the rest of the Heath group absconded, Donald wrote again, [T]hese New Guinea boys have rather had the best of us. . . . We brought them up last Sunday afternoon. . . . They had plenty to eat and then went to the humpy near here—I went to see them again before turning in and they were all as jolly as possible. I told the old boys to look after them and had not been gone half an hour when they said they had cleared.

A week later he wrote again that we have been searching all the week for the Heath boys without much trace— An aboriginal we have tracking got one—last night we heard from Burns Philp that six of them had turned up in Townsville—They are safe in the depot—We have two boys here from Kalamia [Plantation] as interpreters—We gather from them that they were frightened of the old boys and so ran away, but that they knew them now and they will not go off again.

Over the next month Donald’s letters were filled with updates on the situation regarding those who had not been found until, on the last day of January, he reported that ‘‘the three N Guinea boy [sic] absconded one night this week without the faintest cause—We petted them and treated them kindly in every way. . . . [T]hey are very, very dear labour even if they did not bolt’’.23 Finally, in May that year, following the collection of evidence from the Kidnapping Royal Commission and the results of the findings, he wrote that more had absconded but thankfully were to be sent back to their islands by the Queensland government, the loss for which ‘‘will not be as much as they are physically unfit to do an ordinary days [sic] work’’.24 Without the evidence offered by Islanders who were interviewed by the Kidnapping Royal Commission we might be left with these opaque explanations that were offered on both official levels and in the privacy of correspondence between managers and planters. The interviews of the Kidnapping Royal Commission, however, reveal that for others at least there was no natural aversion to labor, nor irrational inclination to abscond. As Seli and other Sudest Islanders on Hamleigh Plantation explained to the commissioners, ‘‘I stop here, but I have not heard about three yams [equivalent to three years]. . . . When four moons were finished, I said, ‘White man on schooner had told us a little time’, so I rolled up my things to go, but master say, ‘No run away, go back again to work, wait and see big master’ ’’.25 Both Komyoyo and Womakada told the commissioners that they had ini-

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Figure 1. Mortality rates of Pacific Islanders as compared to those of the entire colony and those of Europeans, 1868–1906. Source: Registrar-General’s Annual Report (1868–1871, 1875–1906), Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1868–1871, 1875– 1900), Queensland Parliamentary Papers (1901–1906).

tially absconded because ‘‘other boys said ‘Have you got spear?’ among ourselves we thought they would fight us, and so we ran away’’; ‘‘We thought, seeing the knives, that when we slept they would kill us’’.26 This was similar, with subtle differences of emphasis, to the reason Donald had written. However, the reasons they gave for continuing to abscond ‘‘without the faintest cause’’ were intricately tied to the conditions around them, where the mortality rates for 1884 spiked at 15 percent compared to 8 percent the year before and 10 percent the following year (figure 1). Common reasons people had given in evidence to the commission were that, as Tanadu of Sudest Island put it, ‘‘I am frightened of dying’’ before getting home.27 Komyoyo, Womakada, and others also stated that ‘‘[t]wo boys were sick and died; we were frightened of doing the same’’; ‘‘Boy was sick and died; by-and-by another fellow sick; we got frightened, and so ran away’’; ‘‘Plenty boys were sick and plenty died, and so I ran away’’; ‘‘I was getting sick; I was frightened, so ran away’’; ‘‘[P]lenty boy sick, and die; I am frightened and wish to go’’.28 The 1885 Kidnapping Royal Commission interviewed 480 Islanders from the sugar plantations on the Burdekin Delta and on the Johnstone, Herbert, and Pioneer Rivers who had been recruited on the Ceara, Lizzie, Hopeful, Forest King, Heath, and Sybil between 1883 and 1885. Their stories of arrival in Queensland overwhelmingly told of ambiguous recruitment, confusion, and acute grief over the islands, villages, and families that had been left behind. Like Komyoyo and

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Womakada, the majority arrived in Queensland either with little idea of what they had agreed to or, more commonly, with the understanding that for calico and other trade goods they would work for one, two, or three months on another island or on the ship. Most expressed deep grief upon learning their fate, and when asked why this was so by the commissioners, their answers were simple: Barama and Tipatapatana from New Guinea stated, ‘‘I too much cry . . . because I like my country; I no want to stop here’’ and ‘‘I like my place, and so I cry’’.29 Others, such as Tatiaga from Joannet Island, had left behind loved ones: ‘‘I am married. I cried plenty’’;30 and, like Moroton and his friends, their people and families: ‘‘I cried for my people’’, ‘‘I cried then for my father and mother and my wife’’;31 and others, like Andow from Joannet Island, worried for his people: ‘‘My people plenty cry for me. I want to go back. I am frightened of dying here. I have a wife and she plenty cry. If I die here I no see her, or father or mother’’.32 Within the linguistic limitations of the interview process, where interviewees’ words were translated from their language to Pidgin, and then to the anglicized Pidgin of the interviewers, ‘‘crying’’ was often the singular expression of a ranging depth of emotive responses.33 Peoples’ descriptions of their adjustments in Queensland therefore tended to be more expressive than their recorded words. Most of those interviewed in 1885 had been in Queensland for some time and described to the commissioners how they had adjusted in those early months. While some, like Womakada and Komyoyo, had decided to try and get home, others, like Seli and the Sudest Islanders, had kept close track of their passing time in Queensland. Eiwuseta from Basilaki, for example, had kept vigil on a ‘‘notching stick’’ in his house on which he ‘‘counted moons, and cut for each moon’’. Those who had been kidnapped, however, such as Ueuega from Moresby Island, who had boarded the ship on the understanding that it was to go fishing, stated that when told he was to go to Queensland instead, ‘‘I went below and cried’’, and his subsequent time in Queensland had been a daily routine where ‘‘when I have finished cutting; lay down my knife and go to the house and cry’’.34 These accounts came from the fairly atypical Kidnapping Royal Commission whose express purpose was to ask victims to testify to their experiences of recruitment. While the immediate responses of people interviewed cannot be taken as definitive examples of sixty thousand people, there are comparative accounts that agree with the stories told to the Kidnapping Royal Commission. Assistant immigration agent Richard Sheridan, for example, stated in evidence in a Select Committee investigation into the labor trade in 1876 that throughout his time as immigration agent he could say with confidence that the vast majority of Islanders he saw arriving in Queensland for the first time had little idea of the nature of their labor agreement, based on ‘‘[my] own examination of the

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Islanders when they come to sign and the great difficulty I have to make them understand what three years mean, having seen them put up two fingers when I said three, and seeing them cry when they have understood me to mean three.’’ 35 While these accounts of being misled, kidnapped, and exposed to other traumatic experiences are not universal, they remain indicative of the kind of homesickness, alienation, grief, regret, and hope that governed to varying degrees the initial adjustments and acclimatizing of particularly first-time recruits to the disciplined labor of the plantations. Managing Labor An impression of the immediate adjustments Islanders made to plantation conditions can be statistically gauged. As William Canny stated in1876, the first year in Queensland for newly indentured Islanders was the most fatal period, and he generalized that on ‘‘plantations where an exceptional number of deaths have taken place they have all taken place amongst the new arrivals’’.36 Ralph Shlomowitz and Clive Moore, too, have argued that mortality rates were higher for Islanders in their first year of indenture because of their susceptibility to European diseases, to which they lacked immunity.37 But pulmonary illnesses such as consumption, and dysentery or diet-related illnesses thrived in deprived environments that eroded physical constitutions, and it was these kinds of diseases that persisted, beyond the initial period of vulnerability, as the most common causes of death amongst Islanders.38 We might therefore consider the conditions of plantation life a bit more closely before settling simply for the explanation of exotic epidemiological environments. The first year after arrival was a time of the most massive disruption, when the intensity of grief, homesickness, and disorientation was compounded by the rigors of acclimatizing to new climatic and viral environments and adjusting to intense labor regimes and radically altered social and work patterns. The majority of Islanders were set to plantation labor that was hot and exhausting, and though it varied according to season, its daily routine was monotonous.39 Descriptions of Islanders at work ranged from the rosy ‘‘spectacle of so many dark faces and forms, and woolly heads, in the houses and on the roads and in the fields’’, where Islanders ‘‘as plump as partridges and [shining] like dollars’’ labored ‘‘fat and grinning . . . in the fields’’, to images of drudgery: ‘‘they looked when at labour more like prison gangs than groups of free workers. They appeared to work sullenly’’.40 These descriptions give us few clues about the nature of plantation labor beyond the fact that Islanders worked in gangs. However, Islanders themselves described the labor as exhausting—a description that is enshrined in the language that developed on the cane fields where the Pidgin

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word for sugar corresponded with ‘‘hard work’’.41 In explaining his ‘‘sullen’’ description above, author Michael Davitt went on to state that having spoken to as many Islanders ‘‘away from their masters and overseers’’ as he could, he found that in ‘‘no single instance did man or woman of them say, in reply to my questions on the point, that they liked the work or the country’’.42 This would correspond with Warum-woreahre’s explanation for absconding in 1885: ‘‘I came here, worked and worked; I was tired; two moons were up, and I ran away’’.43 The labor that Warum-woreahre referred to was large scale, hot, and heavy. Plantation sizes varied from 640 acres at Narbrook to 4,242 acres at Pioneer or 13,000 on CSR’s Homebush and could be run by an Islander workforce of over two hundred that was generally segregated from European laborers and the small number of Malaysian or Chinese and seasonally engaged Aboriginal laborers.44 Plantation labor, particularly in the first twenty years of the trade, was on a massive and intensive scale revolving around a seasonal cycle and organized daily by an average routine of ‘‘6 a.m. to 6 p.m. and a full hour off at midday and from 6 to 4 o’clock on Saturdays’’.45 For Islanders, the nature of the labor they did on the plantations can be summarized with the following: the ‘‘principle tools the Kanaka was taught to use were the hoe, mattock, axe, digging bar, shovel, fork, stone hammer and of course the cane knife’’, while they were generally barred from using the less back-breaking machinery, for ‘‘they would be no good with machinery. They’re too careless’’.46 This labor, as implied by the available tools, was intensive and manual and consisted of clearing, planting, weeding, cutting, and loading. The felling, burning, and clearing of scrub and bush, the uprooting and burning of tree stumps, and the drilling and blasting of rocky and stony ground for cultivation were often an important part of plantation labor as new crops were constantly established. Cultivation and the planting of cane setts followed, where Islanders would follow [a plough] in each furrow and remove any tree roots and stones, and after these were carted away the land would be harrowed. . . . [A] two horse team hitched to a double mould board plow and operated by a white labourer, would open up drills five feet apart. Bags filled with cane plants . . . were carted and placed in heaps at the ends of the drills, from here the plants were collected in armfuls and dropped in the furrow about one foot apart, the Kanaka walking in the drills pressing each plant in the loose soil with his foot.

Outside of clearing, cultivating, and collecting, the seasonal routine consisted of weeding and pest control. During the 1890s, for example, when the industry was struck by cane grub, the grub was often hand picked out of the ground by gangs who would collect them from the furrows; the ‘‘day’s collection

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Photo 2. Planting cane under a watchful eye. Source: ‘‘Kanakas—Mackay, ca. 1870s’’. Photographer unknown. ‘‘Kanaka’’ Box, John Oxley Collection, State Library of Queensland. Negative number 21683.

for each would be anything up to a kerosene tin full’’.47 This was done in the stifling heat and extreme humidity of northern Queensland’s spring and summer months. As was stated by a press correspondent for the Lower Herberton District in 1878, the summer season could be extreme: ‘‘it is no joke using the hoe with the thermometer often at 110° in the shade’’, and in the shelter of the cane ‘‘the air is still and the moist heat tremendous through the summer months’’.48 From February to June the labor ‘‘consisted chiefly of ‘trashing’—that is to say, stripping off the dry and superabundant leaves by hand to admit the light and air freely to the lower part of the canes’’ as well as ‘‘banking up the roots, and keeping down the weeds’’.49 Harvesting could begin as early as May but usually began in June and could end as late as February, but usually in December. On plantations in the Bundaberg District during the 1880s an average of twelve to fifteen Islanders would cut the cane, with at least two gangs of four loading anywhere from eight to ten horse-drawn drays, which would ordinarily be driven by a European worker, who would also stack the bundles. The average yield of this sort of system was, according to Herbert Turner, ‘‘some 40 tons’’ of cane a day, or the potential processing of 68,000 tons of cane by one central mill in one four-month season in the late 1880s.50 Although by the 1890s the horse-

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Photo 3. Workers, an expanse of cane, the burning sun, and a little breeze. Source: ‘‘Kanakas—Cairns District, ca. 1896’’. Photographer unknown. ‘‘Kanaka’’ Box, John Oxley Collection, State Library of Queensland. Negative number 27783.

drawn drays were widely being replaced by trains, the labor-intensive stacking and cutting remained. As Flora Lugard wrote for The Times, While one row of blue-shirted Kanakas is busy under the waving plume of green, which gradually fell before the advancing knives, another row is engaged in picking the cut cane from the thick litter of leaves amongst which it lies. . . . The work is heavy . . . and the bearers sink sometimes knee deep in the trash that lies upon the ground.51

Not all plantation labor was fieldwork. Women, girls, and the smaller and younger boys could be given domestic rather than field labor on the plantations as housegirls and houseboys, a job that held its own hardships resulting particularly from the tensions that might arise from the more intimate proximity between families and laborers. As was recorded in the oral history projects of the1970s, one interviewee recalled her grandmother’s split earlobe, a permanent scar testifying to the rough treatment they could experience under common attitudes that having a ‘‘Mary’’ clean your floors was a guarantee that they would end up dirtier.52

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[T]he mistress hooked her finger in the lobe [a large hole from having pierced her ears on the Islands] and pulled her over to what she wanted her to do (she couldn’t understand what the mistress was talking about) and she broke it. . . . [W]hen we were kids, we saw grandmother’s ear like that. She said that they would get flogged and the little girls were very badly treated too—they were very, very badly treated . . . they were whipped or flogged and made to do what the woman told them.53

Not least of the particular difficulties of domestic labor was its engendering of isolation and the physical and cultural distance of those in domestic versus those in field labor. As an interviewee in the1970s recalled of her father, who was so young when he was recruited that ‘‘he didn’t know what it was to shave’’, in Queensland he became the houseboy. While helping to raise the planter’s seven children, ‘‘he said he used to have to stand helplessly and watch his own people get flogged’’ and see his ‘‘own blood spilled’’ and ‘‘knocked down in the fields and made to get up and go on working’’ from a relatively sheltered, but largely powerless, domestic position.54 While fieldwork was exhausting, therefore, its gang nature could potentially ease loneliness, decrease alienation, and provide some level of protection, support, and experience, particularly for recently arrived ‘‘new chums’’.55 Women and children were not, however, ‘‘nearly always given house work and cooking’’, but were also given both field and millwork.56 Contemporary observers recorded women in the cane fields. Percy Clarke described seeing ‘‘big strapping women . . . laughing shrieking Amazons’’ in the fields and ‘‘[n]igger women in picturesque colours [feeding] . . . three great rollers’’; while Davitt, who so admired Islander women, who reminded him of ‘‘a Connemara peasant woman digging turf ’’, recorded seeing them working ‘‘like a man if not nursing a child’’.57 The substance of such images—women in the fields—is supported both by oral histories and statistics. The children and grandchildren of those women who stayed in Queensland were told of, or remembered, their mothers or grandmothers doing field labor beside the men while pregnant or nursing, strapping their babies on their backs or leaving them in the care of older children while working in the cane fields.58 Relevant statistics also show that in 1891, with three-quarters of Islander women in Queensland employed under the category of ‘‘Sugar Growers’ Labourer’’ (587), only a handful of these women could have been employed in domestic labor. Indeed, of those who were employed off the plantations in 1891 and who were not ‘‘children at home’’ or ‘‘wives’’ (76 and 31, respectively), the great majority were employed as ‘‘agricultural labourers’’ and ‘‘general servants’’, and only 4 were ‘‘cooks’’.59 The great majority of Islanders’ time during their initial period of inden-

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Photo 4. The Sower—planting cane. Source: ‘‘Kanakas—Bundaberg District, ca. 1897’’. Photographer unknown. ‘‘Kanaka’’ Box, John Oxley Collection, State Library of Queensland. Negative number 142325.

ture was spent within the routines of the unyielding grind of the plantations’ labor and seasons, their standard-issue meals, whose variety was reliant on rice and potato seasons, and sleep. We have some descriptions of the end of the working day, at six or seven p.m., when ‘‘as frolicsome urchins school-released, do the gangs make for their huts . . . sky-larking, all are talking or shouting’’ while some ‘‘stride along to the strumming of their jews-harps or reed mouth organs’’.60 As with the images of shrieking, buxom Amazons and shining, rolypoly boys whistling while they worked, the value of these accounts is limited by the filters through which such sights and sounds were recorded. Amidst the discursively laden, infantilized image above were hints of Islanders’ lives outside the labor gangs: mouth organs, ‘‘jews-harps’’, and the constant thread of music.61 The frolicsome march was also en route to the barracks, kitchens, and social areas where the rest of the laborers’ time was usually spent and, as Charles Eden described, where ‘‘when work was over, they used generally to congregate round the fires, and sing and smoke for a time, soon however, turning in’’.62 Every working day would wind down with a collective meal, and all would descend on the kitchens and sit either at tables provided or around the grounds in groups or alone, with a standard meal, which, like the morning and mid-

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day meal, consisted of salted, or what was called Kanaka, beef, bread, potatoes or rice, and sugared tea. The number of people catered for at these mealtimes could be up to and over three hundred people, three times a day, resulting in a sheer volume of food that gives an indication of the nature and flavor of the meals. With the third of these meals the average day under the control of the planter ended.We will now turn to the time that belonged to Islanders, that time between about seven or eight in the evening and five or six in the morning. Life On and Off the Plantations In the early days of the labor trade, planters initially attempted to house Islanders en masse in generic bunk housing. This, however, was one of the more fundamental ways in which Islanders asserted their independence and identities. Across the sugar districts they generally insisted on establishing their own style of housing in preference to the generic large-scale housing provided by planters. Louis Hope, for example, stated in 1869 that there were, on his plantation, ‘‘four nations amongst them; they mess together, according to their islands. . . . From the first they separated themselves into different messes. The Lefoo and Mare men mess together; the Tanna men by themselves and the Sandwich men by themselves’’. They each lived in ‘‘various little huts of their own. I have put up a building, but they have put little places up themselves’’.63 On Bingera Plantation in Bundaberg in the 1890s, Islanders arranged the housing so that people from the same island groups lived in close proximity to each other. So, too, on Fairymead, laborers had individual rooms with doors that were ‘‘fastened with a bar across the door inside’’, in a ‘‘big fellow iron house’’, and Charles Eden described the Tanna Islanders on his plantation, who built their own house on arrival ‘‘with bunks rigged up like a ship to sleep in’’.64 These descriptions do not just tell us how housing was arranged; they also offer rare glimpses of their interior, as does Will Lawson’s semi-fictional account of house contents: ‘‘The huts were placed at a distance from the bungalow around a rough-shaped quadrangle; [they] had been occupied for some time, and in some of them [were] accordeons [sic], and banjos and even mouth organs’’.65 In 1893, having surveyed the Islander quarters of most plantations north of Mackay, Mary Lugard wrote of these houses that the new chum’s ‘‘life . . . is the home life of the savage. He has no furniture but the wooden bed and blankets provided for him, and no possessions’’.66 Called ‘‘humpies’’ and ‘‘grass houses’’, these homes were condemned as fire and health hazards by the government’s Polynesian inspectors, who, like Lugard, merely saw Islanders’ preference for their own housing to be the result of their ‘‘natural love of dirt’’ and

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resistance to the civilizing influences of plantation labor.67 Through these authors’ visions of continued savagery, however, we can see evidence of the increased establishment of these houses as homes. Lugard noted that over time these ‘‘humpies’’ did become homes and were often full of furniture, pots and pans, mosquito curtains, and musical instruments that had been bought or made while in Queensland.68 Davitt also described the houses in the late 1890s, adding that he ‘‘noticed both at Mackay and Maryborough, rude attempts at ‘art’ on the doors and walls of their residences. Figures of men and animals—none of an obscene kind—are made with chalk or pencil on wooden rails and doors and show evidence of some natural artistic talent’’. Peoples’ ability to build their own houses and to create privacy differed over time and from plantation to plantation. Recent archaeological surveys of plantations in the Burdekin and Ingham Districts have indicated that the extent to which Islanders were able to exercise autonomy over their housing varied extensively, and in some areas planters tightly regulated the spatial organization of Islander laborers in relation to European laborers and in relation to other islands. Although very little architectural evidence remains in these areas, enough exists to tell us what the spatial organization was like. On most of the plantations surveyed in a study undertaken by Licoln Hayes, Islanders’ housing areas were positioned at a removed distance from, but in a direct line of sight with, the plantation owners’ house. On plantations like Macknade, Pioneer, Kalamia, and Seaforth, however, current mature Pacific mango, coconut, fig, and banyan trees are in positions that obscure the line of sight from both the planter’s and manager’s housing. Given the Pacific varieties of the planting and the patterned placement of tree planting around Islanders’ quarters, it is reasonable to assume, as Hayes does, that these were planted by Islanders as screens for the sake of both privacy and the personalizing of landscapes and living spaces.69 The regimentation of plantation life in the 1870s and 1880s was spatially reflected in ways beyond the segregation and surveillance enabled in the placement of Islanders’ settlements. On Mackade, Hamleigh, Kalamia, and Ripple Creek plantations, Hayes detected a clear hierarchy in the relative placement of settlements along servicing watercourses. Islanders were always downstream of all settlements, and on Macknade were downstream from not just the residences of the planters and white staff, but also from the mill.70 The structured hierarchies that we can observe in surviving archaeological evidence, where Islanders received the most polluted water and lived in the lowest-lying miasmacollecting areas, reflect also on the kinds of rations Islanders might have received, particularly on the bigger plantations. As Moore and Mercer have evoked in their own and joint research, within a system whose regulations for food were analogous, as Davitt put it, to ‘‘feeding canaries on beef’’—that is, ‘‘gen-

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Photo 5. Housing, gardens, a banana tree, and families. Source: ‘‘Group of South Sea Islanders standing outside their bark hut dwellings, Queensland’’. Date unknown. Photographer unknown. ‘‘Kanaka’’ Box, John Oxley Collection, State Library of Queensland. Negative number 64761.

erous, but scarcely calculated to make them sing and live long’’—wherever possible, Islanders planted their own gardens and fished and hunted to supplement their standard-issue diet.71 Again, surviving growths near the sites of Islanders’ residences near Ingham and the Burdekin of wild red ginger, bananas, mango, bamboo, taro, pumpkin, cassava, guava, and yam are existing ghostly reminders of gardens described across the sugar districts throughout the nineteenth century.72 These gardens provided vegetables and fruit: ‘‘lettuce, cabbage, China-nuts, bananas, tomatoes, passionfruit and yams’’, while hunting provided ‘‘pigeon, scrub turkey or duck and frequently wallaby’’.73 This was a practice that was generally approved by planters, for when growing their own vegetables, as Eden pointed out, they ‘‘hardly drew upon the store at all’’.74 In the hearths of mounds of Islanders’ dwellings on Seaforth Plantation in the Burdekin, archaeologists have found the remains of beef bones and shellfish shells, along with plantings of the medicinal and meaningful pandanus and vi-apples.75 Not only did Islanders on Seaforth cook and harvest their own

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Photo 6. Examples of housing on the plantations. Source: ‘‘Kanakas—Mackay District’’. Date unknown. Photographer unknown. ‘‘Kanaka’’ Box, John Oxley Collection, State Library of Queensland. Negative number 182760.

food, therefore, but the physical signs remain to indicate that amidst planteradministered medical care that rarely consisted of much more than hefty doses of castor oil—which doubled as a punishment—Islanders grew their own herbs and maintained the administering of their own treatments and medicines.76 Related accounts abound of Islanders insisting on conducting their own ceremonies when people died, performing them with the purchased, acquired, or established material manifestations—bibles, hymnbooks, church clothes, protective plants from around homes and meeting houses, and other protective items—of their religious and spiritual practices in the islands, both indigenous and Christian.77 Over the life of the trade, Islanders’ quarters on the plantations more and more took on the appearance of settled homes. Their separation from planters’ and overseers’ dwellings, initially arranged to maintain power relations, took on a more assertive quality in protecting privacy for the occasional recreational events such as feasts, dances, and the increasingly popular church meetings. Often scorned by Europeans, such organized events were described as ‘‘singsings’’ and in terms overlaid with images of savagery.

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For two or three weeks before the event, ducks, pigs, sheep, fowls, and goats were arriving by twos or threes, besides a cask or so of a liquor suspiciously like whiskey, and other such trifles. . . . [E]very man or woman’s duty was to put himself or herself outside as much food as the . . . accommodation of their interiors allowed. . . . The blazing fires with some scores of niggers from far and near around all busily engaged at first in eating, secondly, in drinking, thirdly in dancing and singing, fourthly in attempting the same operations, and lastly, in assuming a placid recumbent posture under the clear moonlit Australian sky.

Although the description continues with ‘‘anyone by chance, stumbling on such a camp would have felt quite creepy and gone away quietly, fearing to be dished up as cold ‘long-pig’ on the sideboard’’, it nevertheless corresponds with the wealth of information regarding these widespread practices ‘‘of getting up concerts and athletic sports, of which they are very fond’’.78 Feasts, gatherings, and so-called sing-sings broke up and relieved the monotony and routine of plantation labor and played a role that was recognized as an essential pressure valve by some employers who themselves occasionally provided for such occasions. Hence whether or not this assertion of independence on the part of Islanders was a political strategy of survival and resistance, planters also found economic and political value in allowing certain levels of independence.79 It was for this reason, for example, that planter John Campbell from the Ingham District provided a Christmas Day celebration when he ‘‘killed the pigs for them, made plum puddings for them, and gave them a regular feed and they were very jolly indeed’’.80 In 1879 the Lower Herberton correspondent, too, reported that planters allowed and facilitated Christmas Day celebrations. Christmas has come and gone. . . . On the plantations the day was kept in grand style, if feasting and sport count for anything. . . . [T]he whole day was devoted to the amusement of the Islanders, who, although the sports were new to nearly all of them, entered into them with spirit, and their shouts and roars of laughter showed that the object of the promoters in each instance was fully accomplished.

After a day of races, ‘‘high jump’’, ‘‘sack and three-legged races’’, and other sports, a ‘‘grand pyro-technical display at Macknade . . . concluded the day’s proceedings, when all went to their huts for a night’s feasting and dancing. . . . [L]ittle work was done the next day’’.81 Similarly, in Bundaberg the church- or mission-run ‘‘annual pic-nic’’ on Boxing Day meant days of sports such as football (rugby) and novelty races, feasting, and religious service.82 On a more regular basis than these large annual events, throughout the

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Photo 7. An annual picnic. Source: ‘‘ ‘Won by a touch’ Kanakas—Johnstone River District—At the Goondi Annual Picnic’’. Date unknown. Photographer unknown. ‘‘Kanaka’’ Box, John Oxley Collection, State Library of Queensland. Negative number 2245.

sugar districts Islanders spent Sundays or Saturday nights traveling distances of up to twenty or thirty miles between plantations maintaining contact between family and friends. In the Cleveland area in 1869, as Hope testified, Islanders took the opportunity on Sundays to ‘‘go and visit their friends in the neighbourhood, I believe, in fishing, and various ways’’.83 In Bundaberg, at a spot called ‘‘Sandy Camp’’, Islanders went on Sundays to swim, fish, and hunt for birds with their guns if they could afford them or the spears and bows and arrows they made in Queensland. After lighting fires around one of the many rocks that were then covered with oysters, ‘‘the ashes were brushed away’’, and when the fire went out ‘‘the oysters were readily detached, and provided, with the addition of bread and a billy full of tea, quite a meal for as many as 6 or 7’’.84 Increasingly towards the end of the century, Sundays also included church, school, or Sunday school attendance, particularly in Maryborough, Mackay, Bundaberg, and on the Burdekin, where Christian missionary influences were most firmly established.85 At Walkerston, for example, the well-attended Sunday school and night schools, with reading, writing, arithmetic, and religious instruction, were provided by the Presbyterian minister in rounds of four nights a week.86 On Hambledon, Cairns’ model plantation, where two hundred Islanders

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Photo 8. Some island music. Source: ‘‘Kanakas—Innisfail, ca. 1902—Kanakas entertaining themselves on their day off from the cane fields’’. Photographer unknown. ‘‘Kanaka’’ Box, John Oxley Collection, State Library of Queensland. Negative number 128210.

were employed in the 1890s, a school was established where ‘‘some of the boys . . . can read and write excellently’’, and others held ‘‘prayer meetings and services whenever opportunity offers’’.87 On Bingera Plantation in the late 1880s, English literacy classes were offered and taken up in the plantation school, while the Church of England Sunday school was popularly attended by up to two to three hundred people each week.88 While this demand for Christian instruction indicates the extent of missionary activity both in Queensland and the Islands, Islanders’ desire for an education in the literary currency of Queensland is also reflective of their increasingly diverse range of social traditions and practices specific to, or shaped by, the colonial experience. Outside the limitations imposed by plantation routines, Islanders’ adjustments to the changes in Queensland and within the labor contract, on both an individual and community level, included the establishment of ranging levels of social and cultural independence from the control of planters and overseers. This autonomy, limited though it was, also included ranging levels of economic independence, particularly amongst those who had been longest in the colony. As such, the local sugar towns increasingly became popular and functional meeting places. As Bundaberg’s police magistrate testified in 1889, ‘‘at least 200

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or 300 [Islanders would congregate] in town of a Saturday night’’.89 Similarly, Mackay’s Hill End in the early 1880s, which had ‘‘a church . . . two bakers shops, a blacksmith’s shop, two general stores and a public house’’, became a place of convergence for plantations in the district and was ‘‘the favorite resort of most of the Islanders employed on the north side of the Pioneer river . . . who visit the place especially on Sunday nights’’.90 The effects of these visits on the towns were most loudly complained of by planters. In Ayr, John Drysdale of Pioneer complained in1889 that ‘‘every Monday there are ten or twelve men off work through the effects of having been drunk on Sunday’’.91 Considered ‘‘shamming’’, these practices were complained about colony wide: ‘‘it is noticed that there are always more boys unable to work on a Monday than on any other day of the week’’.92 By the end of the century, the seasonal economic solvency of Islander laborers was becoming increasingly good for European businesses in the sugar towns.93 As Walter Paget of the Nindaroo Planters Association (Mackay) stated in 1889, ‘‘[T]he kanakas [sic] wages are all spent in purchasing goods in Mackay’’, and when a ban on Islanders in Bundaberg was lifted in the late 1880s, local merchant Michael Duffy stated that ‘‘the business people were glad to get them back again’’.94 This included businesspeople like Robert Wright, Bundaberg’s bookseller, who would ‘‘have crowds of [Islanders] in on Saturday nights’’ buying ‘‘large quantities of tobacco and hymn books’’.95 Indeed, the Port Douglas watchhouse records, where the sundries of all Islanders taken into custody were listed, shows that those who were arrested on Saturday or Sunday night in Macrossan and Wharf streets had with them pipes, tobacco, pocket knives, or combs, and nearly all had money ranging from one pence to five pounds.96 In other words, Islanders came to the sugar towns, where they were often unwelcome, for the chief purpose of spending their wages on clothes, musical instruments, hymnbooks, bibles, tobacco, alcohol, meals, and the whole range of goods that their standard issues on the plantations lacked. Spending habits are highlighted here not only as an indication of the kinds of lives that were lived off the plantations; the focus on material aspects is also an indication of the ways people adjusted to the changed circumstances in Queensland and began to draw value, however limited, from their circumstances. The material purchases were not simply the practical items of the everyday, but also included cherished items and items of luxury ordinarily reserved for planters and whites. As interviewees stated in the 1970s, stiff collars, false and gold teeth, neckties, spectacles, and personal portrait photos were increasingly popular purchases.97 Bikes, too, were cherished items, and in Mackay they were a prized possession amongst those Islanders who remained in Queensland after 1906. In the 1970s, their proud owners were remembered as characters who would polish their bikes daily so they ‘‘used to shiiiine!!’’, carry them through puddles

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to keep them clean, or merely wheeled them with pride around the district.98 One way of viewing such possessions is as small but cherished compensation for all that the trade had imposed both individually and collectively. This was most apparent for those who returned to their islands. The Sum Total When labor contracts expired, some people returned immediately to their islands and villages, some stayed in Queensland as so-called time-expired laborers for another term of indenture or indefinitely, and others returned to their islands with the intention of coming back at a later date. Many would never see their islands, villages, gardens, or relations again. While some had established lives in Queensland that they could not or would not leave, many thousands of others died as contracted laborers. Others were to return but found themselves terminally ill at the end of their contracts. On board Joseph Melvin’s Helena, for example (see photo 1), amongst the lively recruits who animated the vessel with mimicry of crew and captain and endless requests for matches was a load of returning laborers, of whom some were consumptive or otherwise ill. One of them, Oleseemar, in particular whose illness intensified daily, was deeply anxious to stay alive long enough to return to his village. The voyage, held up by lengthy recruiting negotiations, was painfully slow, and after days of distress the man died within ‘‘a dozen miles’’ of his village. Rather than returning his body to his village, he was ‘‘buried at sea sans cérémonie’’.99 Amongst those who made up the return numbers on such vessels as the Helena, some people had anxiously marked their notching sticks awaiting their date of departure, as had the overwhelming majority of those interviewed in 1885, or those in the employ of John Campbell, who were ‘‘so anxious . . . as their time drew near, to go away . . . that, once a week, they would come up to know what arrangement was made for their going’’.100 Others were barely able to decide whether to return to their islands or stay with their friends, until the very moment they disembarked. Departure scenes on Queensland’s docks were described where tears ‘‘were visible in the eyes of many. . . . [U]p to the last they could be seen hand in hand with those who were to remain behind. . . . [W]hen the moment for parting really came, some actually refused to go’’.101 For those who left the colony either at the end of their contracts or under forced deportation after 1906 (see photo 11, conclusion), most went back to their island homes cherishing their red ‘‘trade boxes’’ as the material sum total of usually three years’ labor and a meager eighteen pounds, or from the 1880s up to forty-five pounds, in wages.102 These variously contained calico, clothes, photos, musical instruments, guns and ammunition (which, from the 1880s would be secreted

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in the calico and clothes), ‘‘a bucket, a gaudy jacket, and a few Brummager trinkets’’, ‘‘muskets, powder, gaudy handkerchiefs’’, or ‘‘brand new tweed trousers, gorgeous shirts—red, blue and striped; broad-brimmed straw hats, with scarlet bands of Turkey twill and leather belts with pouches and sheath-knives’’.103 Some may have spent their wages during their period of indenture on clothes, musical instruments, extra food, alcohol, or weapons. These may have been purchased in the colony’s Kanakatowns or Chinatowns, from roadside sly-grog dealers, or from traveling traders, while others may have spent the lot on the docks the day they left.104 These boxes were a material vindication of hardships and losses suffered in Queensland. This was made most obvious during the deportation period, when people found themselves unemployable as black laborers under the industrial ramifications of the federal White Australia Policy. The situation was described by Willy Ipi in 1906 as follows: ‘‘Most of us here are now out of employment. . . . [W]e find the farmers refuse to engage us under the usual agreement, informing us if they did so they would be made liable to pay our passage home, besides our wages after the latter end of this year’’.105 As a result of unemployment and having to use accumulated wages for subsistence, many people were left with no money to fill their boxes and stated in evidence to the 1906 Royal Commission on Deportation that they ‘‘can’t go [home] with nothing’’ to show for their years in Queensland.106 They wanted their rightful trade boxes: as Tommy and Ererow from Malaita stated, ‘‘I go home if you buy a box for me’’ and ‘‘[s]uppose me get passage, money, and box and everything I want, I go home’’. In these boxes they wanted ‘‘tobacco, knives, axes, matches’’ and tools, ‘‘books and calico’’, bikes, and sewing machines, or the equivalent of between five and ten pounds, as some compensation for their time in Queensland, their legislated unemployability, and compulsory deportation.107 The importance of this material remuneration in 1906 reflected a long-held tradition within the trade of its use by European traders as compensation for immense loss. When Komyoyo and Womakada, who had absconded repeatedly from Pioneer Plantation were eventually returned to their islands in 1885, the vessel that returned them was also loaded with spare boxes or bundles of ‘‘trade’’. These were to act as compensation for the family and friends of those people who had either been killed during recruitment or had died in the intervening period. Of the nearly 6,000 pounds that was spent in connection with their return, the colony spent nearly 290 pounds on this ‘‘trade for friends of deceased Islanders’’ (and 450 pounds for the salary of Commissioner J. F. Buckland).108 H. H. Romilly’s diary entry for 22 June 1885 describes their reception on Moresby Island.

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At first it appeared as if the natives on shore and those we had landed had never seen each other before. Nothing could be more stolid and apathetic than their manner. I asked some of them why they did not greet their friends? But they only smiled and said ‘‘Bye-and-bye’’. One by one, however, they sneaked up to their friends and relations and began nose-rubbing, and after a short time it was going on in full swing. Both men and women were crying hard. When I explained to them the object of the bundles for the dead men, the women began to howl, and . . . [t]here was a great deal of genuine grief displayed when the dead men’s relations came up to claim their bundles.109

Calico, guns, bikes, and bibles, which amounted to less than remuneration for extracted labor, let alone compensation, was in the end the only return for the losses suffered by individuals and Island communities. This brings us back to our point of departure. It not only leads us to question the naming of the labor trade as labor migration, but also signifies Islanders’ experiences of colonial intrusion in the marked-out frontier areas of the western Pacific. Their material purchases, however, and the big and small adjustments they made every day on the plantations are suggestive of the kind of social and economic autonomy that Islanders wrested control of in Queensland. This independence would be the cause of much European protest and anxiety in Queensland, and, as we will see, would give rise to an atmosphere that periodically replicated frontier conditions within the settled districts and borderlands of Queensland. As such, violence would develop similar dynamics in Queensland to those operating in the western Pacific. It is to this we will now turn.

3. The Settler Colony Kanakas, Blacks, and Racial Borderlands

It should be known that whilst every effort is being made to stamp out the labor traffic in the South Seas, and whilst the murders on board the ‘‘Carl’’ excited the execrations of the whole civilized world . . . a system of native slaughter far more merciless and complete, are in daily and hourly operation in the British Colony of Queensland. . . . Public opinion in North Queensland calls for blood and yet more blood; private persons go out to kill blacks and call it ‘‘snipe-shooting’’. Awkward words are always avoided, you will notice ‘‘Shooting a snipe’’ sounds better than ‘‘murdering a man’’. But the blacks are never called men and women and children; ‘‘myalls’’, and ‘‘niggers’’, and ‘‘gins’’, and ‘‘piccaninnies’’ seem further removed from humanity. The convenient phrase (used by every sub-inspector in his report after attacking a camp) ‘‘we dispersed them in the usual manner,’’ means in plain English, ‘‘we shot and tomahawked so many men and so many women, killed all the little children, and left the lot to be eaten by native dogs’’. –Letter cited in ‘‘Alleged Outrages Committed on the Aborigines in Queensland’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1875)

DURING THE 1889 sitting of Queensland’s legislative assembly, Samuel Grimes, the member for the district of Oxley, which covered the region bordering Queensland’s capital town of Brisbane and what was then known as Bunyah Mountain, brought to the assembly the question of the ‘‘Bunyah Black’’. Deriving his name from the area, the Bunyah Black was ‘‘at large’’ in Mount Bunyah and was suspected of ‘‘committing atrocities’’ such as stealing ‘‘not only fowls, but flour, provisions, and tools for a tent’’ and other, more serious offenses like ‘‘frighten[ing] children’’. Although twenty of Queensland’s regular police had been dispatched, the Bunyah Black continued to evade capture, and ‘‘there was such a state of fear in the district on account of this blackfellow being about that people would not send their children to school.’’ A self-proclaimed ‘‘expert’’,

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Archibald Meston, had been brought in to track this man down to ‘‘deal’’ with him, and Grimes was concerned with what the outcome would be of commissioning someone with as brutal a reputation as Meston’s: ‘‘On more than one occasion he has boasted of the number of blackfellows who have fallen victim to his rifle. . . . There is no doubt that too many of the aborigines of Australia have been outlawed to be shot down somewhat in this way’’.1 We do not know from this record what happened to the Bunyah Black, for the debate soon shifted to a discussion of the levels of violence that could be sanctioned against ‘‘black’’ men within and without the law. Almost as soon as Grimes’ concerns had been expressed, confusion arose over whether the Bunyah Black was a ‘‘blackfellow’’ (indigenous) or ‘‘a kanaka’’ (an Islander). As the formal and carefully maintained distinctions between Blackfellows and Kanakas broke down and their meanings converged, the threat simply became that of a black man roaming the settled districts, uncontained and therefore outlawed. This brief debate, the violent sanctions that were discussed, and the confusion that mediated the justifications for that violence are telling. The absence of the Native Mounted Police at Mount Bunyah and the need to grant special permission for the unregulated and unsupervised Meston indicates Mount Bunyah’s status in 1889 as an ‘‘inside’’, or settled, district. A different violence was warranted against black men at large in the inside districts than was sanctioned by the wild and indiscriminate dispersals of the frontier. Violence against what were called ‘‘tame’’ blacks and Kanakas of the inside district was subject to more careful differentiation. The debate over the Bunyah Black’s racial status as a Kanaka or Blackfellow was therefore more than simply a semantic exercise. The incident and the confusion that characterized it stemmed from the convergence of broader colonial discussions of race, settlement, and labor. Here was a settler society intent on appropriating land from indigenous landowners, who were equally as intent on not being displaced and dispossessed. Islanders arrived into this as black (mostly) men who were not indigenous but whose nativeness rendered them suitable to serve the needs of colonial industry as coercible, cheap, and expendable workers. Because they were black, however, their presence did not sit easily with a settler population for whom an ongoing concern was internal defense and the racial sanctity of the borders of the inside districts. If nothing else, their presence gave emphasis to the uncomfortable paradox of white settlement in the tropics, where success was seen to be dependent on the absence (to vacate the land), as well as the presence (to work the land), of blackness, which needed in turn to be both protected and restricted and, above all, contained.2 As member of the legislative assembly Charles Mien put it in relation to legislative amendments to the Pacific Island Labourers Act, protection for Islander laborers would never include the levels of restriction and servitude that might

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be contained in legislation ‘‘dealing with the aboriginals of the country’’, but as black laborers, legislative protection would need to contain enough restriction to prevent white Queenslanders having to see Kanakas ‘‘mingle with our own fellow-countrymen, and see a hybrid race spring up amongst us’’.3 Mien’s concerns, like those expressed in relation to the Bunyah Black, indicate the kind of meaning that was invested in naming and categorizing color. But like the Bunyah Black, indigenous and Pacific Islander people continually exceeded and blurred these categories so that colonial definitions required constant renegotiation. In all this the only consistent category seemed to be that of whiteness. Whiteness was effective in smoothing over the disparate groupings within settler society (gender and class obviously, but also urban, rural, industrial, agricultural, pastoral, North Queensland, South Queensland), and the tensions between discourses on blackness and nativeness were in essence about white settlement and ownership. Whiteness, after all, helped to unify a society that would not otherwise be in solidarity without the construction of everything that white workers and their white bosses, or white women and white men, were collectively not, and therefore collectively were.4 Settlement in Queensland bred an internal defensiveness that ensured the processes of categorization we will explore below were not abstract exercises, but provided boundaries that were forcefully defended. Hence on the colonial borderlands, surveillance and categorization emerged as crucial factors in the management of racial heterogeneity. By ‘‘borderlands’’ I refer to places like the sugar towns that were neither frontier towns nor completely settled districts. They were spaces removed from Brisbane but still considered ‘‘inside districts’’, and while their residents were close enough to Brisbane to engage in such symbolic traditions of urban sophistication as horse racing, they were nevertheless closer to the coal face of colonial invasion and more aware of the precariousness of their situation. On the borderlands violence was not authorized in the way that it was on the frontiers because these were districts well within the reach of law and order. Categories were therefore crucial for the sake of regulation, and the moment people breached their categories of containment, which, as we saw in chapter 2, Islanders frequently did, the potential for violence was socially authorized as internal defense. By the turn of the century, when the frontier had receded considerably, we see the legal system appropriating the role of categorization. By this time, social categories had been codified by systems of race-based legislation, ensuring the potential to criminalize the social autonomy of Pacific Islander and Aboriginal people. At this point Islanders were deported under the White Australia Policy, but Aboriginal people and those minority of Islanders that remained would continue to live under tightly controlled, race-based legislation for another sixty years.

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This chapter proceeds in three stages that are thematically guided and loosely chronological. Because of a specific focus on the sugar industry and districts, the wider context of Queensland’s occupation of indigenous lands is set by way of a preface for each section that highlights representative moments in the developing administration of indigenous peoples. We start with the arrival of Islanders in Queensland and the initial efforts of colonial society to define a difference between Kanakas as useful imported natives and ‘‘the blacks’’, against whom a violent, semi-legal war of occupation was still being openly waged. During this period categories constantly shifted, and surveillance as legal ‘‘protection’’ emerged as the key to providing coherence. The second part, loosely focused on the mid-1880s, was a time of rupture, when letting in the so-called Aboriginal remnant and the release of time-expired Islanders from the plantations caused the neat containments of colonialism’s social map to falter. During this time Islanders’ growing independence was legislatively curbed amidst a wider emergent discussion of the internal threat of the ‘‘Aboriginal problem’’. The third section takes us to the turn of the nineteenth century, when an explicitly white nationalism had picked up pace and blackness and color became more obviously the target to be excised from the body of the Australian nation. At this time legal sanctions were more overtly used to define, regulate, and criminalize the racial breaches of simply being black in the emergent white Australia. Social Definition and Containment: The Arrival of Pacific Islanders on Queensland’s Frontiers In June 1867, the year before the introduction of the Polynesian Labourers Act and its promise to guard against the abuse and maltreatment of indentured Islanders, controversy raged in Queensland’s parliament and press over the violence of Queensland’s pastoral frontiers. The Native Mounted Police force, the common target of humanitarians and colonialism’s opponents, was once again the subject of outrage as news of the bloody aftermath of another dispersal of an Aboriginal camp, this time at the Morinish diggings near Rockhampton, emerged in the Queensland and British press. The incident was discussed and condemned by Queensland’s parliament, where it was carefully put on record that the ‘‘universal feeling [was] one of disgust and regret’’ over the massacre.5 Parliamentary debate ensued, and after some condemnation of the Native Mounted Police and their indiscriminate and fatal methods of dispersal, the colonial secretary, Arthur Palmer, lent his judgment to the debate. No doubt, some blacks had been shot. . . . It could not be said that those blacks were harmless, for the evening before the affray took place they had threatened

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a white woman with a tomahawk, and had demanded rations at several huts in a very violent manner, and had altogether behaved in a bad way.6

Such killings were similarly presented throughout the Australian colonies as reasonable reprisals for depredations committed against European property. Such justifications of violence in defense of property and its collapse into the protection of white female virtue were to become a colonial standard. Palmer’s moralizing, therefore, went largely unnoticed, except for the ignored reprimand of ‘‘[l]et the fact be admitted that the blacks . . . had robbed a hut—was that an excuse for dispersing and killing them?’’ 7 Debate continued between those maintaining that the Native Mounted Police were an unwarranted ‘‘force of extermination’’ offering overly brutal protection for settlers and those who contended that their actions were justified in light of the ‘‘atrocities of the blacks’’.8 The debate revolved on these points until its common ground was summarized and the matter laid to rest. Some mode of protection was necessary for the [European] inhabitants in the outside districts. In a country like this where an aboriginal and barbarous race had to give way to a civilised race, atrocities must occur on one side or the other at times, but efforts should be made to lessen the effect of contact between them as much as possible, and to try and prolong the existence of the aborigines as long as Providence saw fit to let them remain there.9

The Native Mounted Police were warranted by debate as a necessary evil that must be only semi-legitimized and therefore distanced from government for the sake of settlement, while their violent dispersals, though regrettable, were to be sanctioned likewise by lack of verification and inaction.10 The inquiry into the Morinish diggings massacre concluded accordingly. It found that although three bodies were discovered, an unknown number, evidenced only by sounds of the murders and the existing trails of blood, had been seriously injured or killed in the early daylight hours of 12 June. Although there were many who heard the massacre, the bodies had been removed before any (white) witnesses could attend the scene, and the legal existence of the massacre was therefore left unproven.11 The flutter of discussion caused by this massacre was one of many in Queensland, which served to rearticulate official positions on the necessities and inevitabilities of certain degrees of violence in the lawless districts or frontier. It could almost have been about the western Pacific, so common were the justifications and dynamics of the indiscriminate and ferocious violence of the two. Both, after all, were colonial frontiers. These similarities would result in representational shifts when in the following year the Queensland govern-

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Photo 9. The strong, the sick, and those too young to work. Anonymous arrivals yet to be defined outside the kitchen buildings on Foulden Plantation. Source: ‘‘Foulden Plantation, 1880’’. Photographed by Reckitt and Mills. Boag Collection—Kanakas Mackay— vol. 9, John Oxley Collection, State Library of Queensland. Negative number 172018.

ment legalized the trade in Pacific Island labor, allowing for the importation of Islanders to the other side of their frontier. When Islanders began arriving in Queensland in greater numbers after 1868, a marked and significant difference emerged between the fear they were said to inspire as marauding, cannibalistic savages on the Pacific frontiers and the confidence with which they were treated as docile, malleable ‘‘boys’’ on the sugar plantations. But as might be suggested by the layout of plantations that was considered in chapter 2, surveillance, containment, and control became the key to this confidence. Just as planters’ residences were often placed in panoptic positions where they were elevated and in direct line of sight of Islanders’ quarters, so, too, was this concern with surveillance reflected in public discussions in Queensland regarding the management of Islanders’ unwelcome presence in the colony. This began with an immediate concern to defend—by defining— Islanders’ existence in the colony. Amidst the furor that erupted after Sir Robert Towns imported the first Islanders to Queensland, he wrote a letter of explanation to the colonial secretary that was later published and widely circulated in 1864. He differed little from the governor, Sir George Bowen, and other enter-

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prising colonists in arguing that the new colony was suffering an acute labor shortage while Queensland’s colonial success was dependent on the establishment of vast agricultural industries and the labor-intensive crops of sugar and cotton in those ‘‘tropical districts . . . where the climate is unfavourable to European fieldwork’’.12 Armies of cheap, colored, but non-indigenous labor were therefore essential. Although Aboriginal peoples’ labor would be extensively used in Queensland’s pastoral and pearl-shelling industries, they remained a largely unrecognized labor force. A paid and regulated Aboriginal labor trade, after all, was an illogicality in a settler colony. Whether a mysteriously dying population or one that must be wiped clean from the path of settlement, it was inconsistent with the settler colonial project for indigenous peoples to openly and publicly supply necessary labor on the scale envisaged for the growth of cotton or sugar.13 After other avenues for obtaining colored labor failed, it was felt that western Pacific Islanders, being black, would withstand the appalling conditions of sugar labor. This was not just because, as an employer wrote in 1872, they were ‘‘splendid-looking fellows, tall, muscular and wonderfully strong’’, but also because, as American and Caribbean slavery’s legacy deemed, there was a certain naturalness to black field gangs.14 Moreover, the immediate and crucial benefit of imported indentured labor was that while cheap (black and relatively local), it was temporary and could be returned (non-indigenous). As logical and convenient as indentured Islander labor seemed to people like Towns, many regarded this as a thinly disguised revival of the slave trade or objected to the deliberate importation into a white colony of a black population. As the report of the anti-Polynesian labor meeting in Brisbane in 1871 reported, the establishment of a ‘‘class’’ of ‘‘unintelligent labor’’ of the ‘‘semicivilised races’’ was bound to ‘‘have a deteriorating influence on . . . civil, religious and political [institutions]’’.15 Towns’ reply to such objections was twofold. First, in an appeal to those who were concerned about black labor, they would ‘‘save us from the inhumanity of driving to the exposed labor of field work, the less tropically hardy European women and children’’.16 Second, and in telling contrast to the savages of the western Pacific, Islanders were Kanakas in Queensland and ‘‘an industrious, tractable, and inoffensive race’’.17 Hence to some significant extent, when western Pacific Islanders arrived in Queensland, they stepped into an existing mould. This ‘‘peculiar race of people’’ arriving on the colony’s shores in the late 1860s were black in order to be cheap, natives in order to be black and available, but from somewhere else in order to be temporary.18 All this meaning was inherently and neatly contained by their status as generic Kanakas. The process of defining the idea of Kanakas began in earnest from 1869, when levels of public discussion and curiosity led to a government-appointed

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Select Committee. Although commissioned to concentrate on the degrees to which the Polynesian Labourers Act was protecting Islanders from abuse, the committee members’ overt interest lay with defining Islanders and searching for the hallmark self-oriented traits of savages. A sample of questions asked of the immigration agent, John McDonnell is indicative. What proportion of these men you have inspected whom you may call savages? . . . Have you had any . . . who have shown any signs of being addicted to disgusting practices—either cannibalism or sodomy? . . . Have you any evidence as to their morals? Have you any reason to believe that there is any number of them running about in the bush—are wild in the bush? 19

The committee’s witnesses answered in unison: under contract Islanders were ‘‘boys’’ of a ‘‘[g]entle disposition’’ who ‘‘always seem to be very quiet—never seem to be rowdy, or conduct themselves with any violence’’.20 These were not views unique to the employers, inspectors, and campaigners who were interviewed in 1869. Charles Eden, a planter in the Cardwell District, wrote in 1872 that his laborers, apart from surpassing white labor in durability, cost effectiveness, and obedience, had mentalities more ‘‘docile, laborious, light hearted, good-tempered, and [more] faithful and affectionate’’ than white workers could ever be. [D]irectly the boys saw us riding up, they would throw down their tools and rush at us in a way that at first would discompose the strongest nerves, drag us off our horses, and hoisting us, struggling and unwilling, on the shoulders of four Tanna giants, carry us in triumph to the house. . . . I used always to be much touched at this spontaneous outburst of affection on the part of these poor savages.21

Despite the affection of such descriptions there remained the imprint of these Islanders as ‘‘poor savages’’ prone to spontaneous outbursts. Eden’s descriptions of ‘‘his’’ adoring boys, for example, was contradicted a few pages later by the same ‘‘warriors’’ ‘‘dancing and howling like so many madmen . . . jumping and shrieking in the most appalling way’’ as they returned from their private Sunday revelries, carrying ‘‘a little black boy of six or seven years old’’ who was, Eden asserted, intended for the Sunday ovens.22 While this reminder helped to affirm Eden’s self-represented colonial credentials as a white man facing and winning over to adulation a group of cannibals, it was also a literary device that served to remind readers that Kanakas were ‘‘simple as children . . . [but] rouse them . . . and you will find out that they will take their own part quick enough’’.23

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This was a common recognition that the flip side of the Kanaka’s celebrated docile suitability to cheap plantation labor was a passion and volatility that was kept in check only by colonial control. This delicate balance of confidence and caution is encapsulated in an incident that took place on Pioneer Plantation in 1872. On the morning of 5 October 1872, planter John Spiller ordered laborer Mareegee to work, ‘‘upon which he went to work apparently reluctantly’’. Spiller later went to check on the day’s progress to find ‘‘Marajee [sic] crouching under some cane with a bow and arrows in his hand’’. Spiller ordered Mareegee back to work, confiscated his weapons, and rode over to the field gang, where he ordered the foreman, Ofata, to reprimand Mareegee for idling. However, as Spiller relates, By this time Maragee [sic] had arrived and commenced yelling[;] the whole of the cutting boys, 11 in number, also commenced yelling and made a rush about with their cane hatchets. . . . [T]hey came closer in fact close enough to throw their knives and being in dread of my life I dug the spurs into my horse and rode away[;] they followed me [then] . . . turned and went towards their hut. Supposing they had gone for their Arms they being in a state of madness, I rode to the house and got my wife and people inside.

When Spiller emerged from the house there followed an armed standoff between himself and the laborers, led by Mareegee, who ‘‘[r]ushed from the hut with three spears and a tomahawk, he stuck two spears in the ground holding the third in his right hand and the tomahawk in this left. Put himself in a fighting attitude and talking wildly and I expected every moment he would throw the spears’’. Ofata diffused the situation, but none of the laborers would return to work unless allowed to carry their weapons. Shaken and exasperated, Spiller went into town to fetch the police, who arrested Mareegee and another laborer, Forea.24 In court the charge of refusal to work seemed to hopelessly understate the event and the anxiety it had tapped in the seasoned settler that Spiller was.25 Mareegee’s behavior was presented in court as being of a ‘‘wild’’ attitude and state of madness and a reflex against an offense that was beyond the rational comprehension of Spiller.26 Instead, Spiller simply stated that he believed ‘‘Mareegee was a chief in his own country’’, that ‘‘neither of the prisoners are Christians or can speak or understand English’’, and that Mareegee’s behavior, his crouching in the cane, his ‘‘warlike gesticulations’’ were part of a ‘‘state of madness’’ and wildness, or the hallmarks of native behavior. Mareegee and Forea were

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found guilty and sentenced to seven days’ imprisonment, while Mareegee’s indenture contract was canceled and details of the proceedings were forwarded to the colonial secretary for instructions as to the ‘‘disposal’’ of Mareegee upon his release from jail.27 This was evidently no ordinary refusal to work. From the evidence of the planter (Spiller) and three of his employees ( James Murphy, Arthur Wood, and John Crees), what had occurred had struck Spiller far deeper than any simple case of recalcitrance because Mareegee did not simply challenge Spiller’s authority; arguably, he also demonstrated classically native behavior and breached that construct of Islanders as Kanaka ‘‘boys’’. This case, Spiller’s nervousness, and the cancellation of Mareegee’s contract are suggestive of the wider necessity in the sugar districts for Islanders to be clearly defined and knowable, for beyond the reaches of definitions, anxiety circulated. To return to the Select Committee of 1869, it was the kind of opaque, independent, and autonomous behavior that Mareegee displayed so dangerously two years later that had inspired the committee members’ curiosity. Their questions stemmed from complaints that were being made by settlers in Brisbane that Islanders were roaming too freely off the plantations and behaving in strange ways. From Cleveland came reports ‘‘that these men were going about in crowds, and by their gestures frightening the women and children’’, and three Islanders had recently been brought up on charges of attempted murder for smoking their pipes on the verandah of a postmaster, Mr. Winship. As Louis Hope related, two of his employees and a friend ‘‘had gone down to a house at the Point, inhabited by Mr.Winship, the postmaster, to have a singing meeting’’. On their return they stopped at Mr. Winship’s house, the result of which was a charge of attempted murder. As Hope explained, Winship had said that a man’s life was not safe with a lot of those fellows around him. I asked him . . . what they had done, to justify such a charge? He said ‘‘They did nothing; they were smoking their pipes’’. What else? ‘‘they sat down on the verandah, and smoked their pipes’’. On that score, he brought a charge of attempting to murder him.28

The fears of Cleveland residents spread throughout the sugar districts to towns like Bundaberg, Maryborough, and Mackay, where it was similarly those times when Islanders were off the plantations and uncontained or out of sight that became the cause of periodic concern. As was stated by Mackay residents in 1877, ‘‘the Islanders upon Sundays . . . go about in large parties armed with guns . . . [all over] the district to the great alarm and possible danger of outlying settlers’’ on their way to ‘‘sing-sings’’, feasts, fishing, and visits to other

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plantations.29 Mackay’s police magistrate, William Goodall, therefore recommended to the colonial secretary that ‘‘a small mounted patrol should be installed in this District to visit the plantations frequently to prevent large parties of armed men [Islanders] traversing the district on Sundays’’.30 Off the plantations, Islanders were no longer docile boys. As the 1869 Select Committee was reminded, they were actually Melanesian and of the more ‘‘woolly-headed’’ races with significant ‘‘infusions of African’’.31 Melanesia therefore continued to lurk ready to erupt beneath the veneer of semi-civilization that was imposed through the legislative surveillance and control of the 1868 legislation and the Masters and Servants Act, which regulated both the treatment of Islanders and their movement and behavior. Settler anxieties and fright were by nature ill defined and resided in the potential that lay beyond the defining reach of existing legislation and surveillance. This is where Islanders found themselves in an illegal, or alegal, realm where, in ways that echoed the dynamics of the frontiers, the performance of violence helped to clarify and articulate the threat they posed. An example of this was offered to the 1869 Select Committee. From the neighborhood of Tingalpa reports had emerged of two Islanders ‘‘at large’’ committing ‘‘depredations’’ such as illegally cutting sugarcane. One of these men was guilty of the far more dangerous crime of ‘‘making his appearance here and there, and frightening’’ a farmer’s daughters. For this he was shot four or more times by the police, but not killed.32 Police sergeant Canning and property owner James Preston were charged and later acquitted of shooting with intent. The court found that Canning was justified and that he had exercised a just amount of force in his attempt to catch the prisoner, who was bound to commit more serious crimes. Cleveland residents had been expressing loud and frequent concern about the number of Islanders in the area released from their contracts who were wandering the districts, proving to be elusive and self-contained, able to feed and fend for themselves and exercising a freedom of movement that saw them making fearful and fleeting appearances ‘‘here and there’’. A serious crime was therefore only a matter of time. As Preston testified, he thought this black man was in such a wild and savage state in the bush that he did not consider his ‘‘life, or the lives of [his] family, and [his] property, safe, whilst this individual was in the neighbourhood’’. The former Kanaka had reverted to being ‘‘wild and savage, not insane—just savage’’, and while Preston described the man’s actions as those of a ‘‘rational being’’, the rationality was limited to that of a savage.33 Here the thing to fear was the lack of control, the evident autonomy of Islanders off the plantations, and the unstated potential this ushered in. In the cases related above—of Spiller’s concerns about Mareegee and his

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followers, Eden’s mad cannibals, and Mr. Winship and the Cleveland three—the apparent emergence of the native that resided just below the surface of Kanakas’ skin brought into play violent dynamics that resembled the frontiers and that was debated with regard to the 1867 Morinish diggings. That is, the call was for an ill-defined protection from an ill-defined danger with ill-defined boundaries of sanction. As with the Bunyah Black, who would haunt another white community under similar circumstances in another twenty years, when Islanders exceeded their legal status and social legitimacy, the frontier myths and images of black masculinity, violence, and sexuality reemerged. These provided imperatives for colonial violence as a preemptive punishment that would prevent the commission of those black crimes that had been previewed in Cleveland in the scaring of the daughters of a white property owner. Violence therefore played a crucial role in defining racial categories in these colonial borderlands. While it did not always occur as a result of public anxiety, when it did it confirmed and clarified indistinct fears by pinning them to a materialized outcome. As such, violence could serve as a social catharsis, momentarily easing settler fears and reestablishing social order. This was the case in the sugar districts in the late 1870s as concerns over Islanders’ freedom of movement reached one of many peaks. In Mackay, the police magistrate William Goodall requested in 1877 that he be granted the authority to disarm Islanders in the Mackay District, and a meeting of the Mackay magistrates later recommended special patrols of the district, for ‘‘of the 1400 Islanders or thereabouts employed in this District, a very large proportion are in possession of firearms and ammunition’’.34 Elsewhere, similar requests for increased controls and surveillance, such as compulsory Kanaka passes and curfews, marked a building anxiety that in Maryborough came to fruition in the hanging of two Islanders—Tommy and George—for the rape of a white woman. Amidst claims that the two were the innocent scapegoats of bubbling racial tension, their deaths helped to purge the colony-wide anxieties.35 This period of the late 1870s marked a shift in Queensland towards a more articulated expression of the dangers inherent in Islanders’ freedom from surveillance. By the late 1870s, the nebulous fears revolving in 1869 had found expression in the figure of the ‘‘Kanaka menace’’, who posed an inherent threat to white property, economy, and civility, and in particular to the potent symbol of all of this—white women. As such, colonial anxieties would find further expression in the years to come as a biological rather than expressly sexual and propertied threat.36 From the end of the 1870s, hybridity in a range of forms became of greater concern as neat colonial categories of race faltered, and blackness—that is, Islanders and indigenous people—came into closer and more unbounded

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proximity to white settlement and property. As such, attempts to contain and control would find clearer legislated expression. Legalizing Categories: Protection and Restriction on the Colonial Borderlands The question of whether Islanders should continue to be employed in the remote pastoral industry of the inland districts was one of the primary concerns of another Select Committee appointed in 1876 to inquire into the conditions of the labor trade. Employers like John Ferret maintained that ‘‘as new chums [Islanders] are the easiest broken in that I ever knew. . . . [I]n many respects they are equal to the best blackfellows we had years ago as trackers. As we cannot keep our best blacks alive, these boys are most useful to fill up their places’’.37 The remoteness of the inland pastoral properties was judged by the committee members to be too far removed from the societal and legal regulations of the coastal plantation districts where an administrative eye could maintain the respectability of the trade. Accordingly, and despite squatters’ protests, restrictions stipulating that Islanders could not be employed more than thirty miles from the coast were applied the following year in the 1877 amendments to the Polynesian Labourers Act.38 One of the arguments for keeping Islanders in the pastoral industry had been the inability of squatters to profit from the use of indigenous peoples’ labor, or as Ferret put it, to keep alive ‘‘the best blacks’’. In its fatalism the argument tapped familiar colonial doctrines of the fatal impact and in so doing directs us to the emergence in Queensland of the era of Aboriginal protection. Aboriginal protection, as it would emerge in the Australian colonies, drew its name from the interests of the Aborigines Protection Society but was too often fashioned in the interests of settlers and settler governments. In its formative stages the language of protection in Queensland was posited as a means of replacing the ferocity of violence on the receding frontiers with a mode that was more passive but continued to serve unchanged imperatives. Discussions centered around Mackay in the 1870s are exemplary. Mackay’s frontier by the 1870s had been memorialized as the stuff of legend by a cliff known as Blackman’s Leap, Black Gin’s Leap, or, as it is now called, the Leap, which was ‘‘a cliff from which a black gin leapt a thousand feet into eternity, when pursued by whites in a great round up and massacre’’.39 With this post-frontier status Mackay was the first place in Queensland to establish a reserve to deal with the so-called Aboriginal remnant, or those indigenous people who had survived the frontier. As such, when a Board of Inquiry was appointed in 1876 to inquire into the amelioration of the condition of Aboriginal groups ‘‘coming in’’ from the frontiers, Mackay’s Aboriginal reserve as a pioneer in the

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colony was specially noted. Also noted was the perceived problem of the independence of Aboriginal people off the reserves, their undertaking of seasonal employment on the plantations, and their general self-sufficiency and independence in Mackay to the extent that they were becoming ‘‘a nuisance to the inhabitants of the district’’.40 The board concluded that more stringent measures of protection were needed to keep these people dependent and reliant on reserves where they could be properly supervised. In the same year three Aboriginal men—James Diper, William Watiman Nilepi, and Charles Diper Ghepara— had demanded the attention of the Queensland government in their application for freehold title, under the Land Alienation Act (1868), of land that they and their ‘‘ancestors from time immemorial [had] possessed and used’’ in the Mackay area.41 After some deliberation and much correspondence between their bureaucratic buffer, the Rev. Duncan McNab and the office of the minister for lands, the application was turned down in its original form and finally ‘‘granted’’ to the applicants as minors.42 The condition for their use of the land was that it be held under white guardianship and that it function as a reserve. This collection of developments in Mackay spurred a debate in Queensland’s legislative assembly that expressed a rhetoric of the humanitarian rights to which (even) Aboriginal people were entitled. In the end, however, the consensus was that, as Arthur Palmer put it, the idea of ‘‘legalising of marriages and the entail of property among the aboriginals’’ was ‘‘utterly utopian’’ and ‘‘absurd’’.43 It was accepted that ‘‘nothing that [the government] might do would save these people’’ from the fatal impact of colonization; however, money should be invested in the establishment of reserves throughout the colony ‘‘to smoothe [sic] their way to the grave’’ and even to preserve a laboring ‘‘Aboriginal remnant’’.44 Queensland would not introduce its own Aboriginal protection legislation for another twenty years, but it is worth noting the conceptual basis of this language in its emergent and transparent state. Parliament’s feigned resignation to the fatal impact and the fact of Aboriginal extinction was despite having a clear indication from Diper, Nilepi, and Ghepara, and from those on Mackay’s reserve, that Aboriginal people were not dying off but threatening to adjust to colonization. Similarly, in stating that they could only smooth the way to the grave, they did not mean that the massacres of Aboriginal people on the frontier had, or would be, stopped.Violence on the frontiers continued unabated, and four years later frontier violence was still under attack when the Queenslander launched an editorial condemnation of ongoing violence on Queensland’s northern and western frontiers.45 In the debate that ensued, the advocates for benevolence shared ground with advocates of violence in arguing that the fatal impact was to remain the inevitable outcome of white settlement.46 Like the reasoning of Palmer in 1876,

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the best scenario was that in setting up a regime of protection they might prolong the inevitable in a useful way and even produce another cheap labor force that could not only be removed from the land, but also utilized to make it productive. As the member for Maryborough, John Douglas, stated, The colony was now introducing Polynesians, and he did not believe that there was any such great distinction between them and the aborigines of Northern Australia as to prevent the hope that some use might be made of the latter. . . . It would be quite possible to take the natives prisoners, instead of shooting down and killing them. . . . No doubt to shoot them was the easiest way of getting rid of them. Killing a man, it had been said, was the worst possible use to which he could be put, but it was the readiest and quickest way of disposing of him.47

In 1876 and 1880 the violent language of the frontier blended with protectionist rhetoric so that rather than the violence of settlement being alleviated, it was merely pushed deeper into a maze of euphemisms and exculpatory myths of inevitability. In the language of protection, violence was unacceptable in its raw and obvious brutality, but it was, in effect, watered down to that of powerfully operative notions of the inevitability of biological or racial incompatibility. This would provide the means by which the violence of settler-colonialism’s ‘‘logic of elimination’’ could continue under cover of the colony’s own legal sanctions and prohibitions.48 Moreover, although appearing to offer no sanctions for violence, protectionist rhetoric had embedded within its own logic the violence of remaining actively acquiescent to the engineered inevitability of extinction on the frontiers. As was the case with Palmer in 1876, the imagined good intentions of protectionist rhetoric were to remain good only within the logical limits of the totality of settler-colonialism’s founding imperative. In broad terms subject to important subtleties, Queensland’s two categories of blackness, native and nonnative, were beginning to mirror each other in colonial policy as internal, hybrid, and ambiguous threats to the colony’s borderlands. Aboriginal protection, like the protection of Islanders under the labor contract, was essentially conceived as a method of containing, defining, and eliminating this threat. Although it would not start in earnest until the late 1890s for indigenous peoples, for Islanders the 1880s was marked by an intensifying legislative, as opposed to social, definition and surveillance. m Intercourse with civilisation is producing its usual results among uneducated savages, and the kanakas in Mackay are beginning to get troublesome. The other day, at the Mackay races, a big mob of them attacked the whites, and a

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general scrimmage ensued. . . . [T]hey had armed themselves with a supply of glass bottles which they slung with infinite precision at the whites. A glass bottle is by no means a contemptible weapon in the hands of athletic savages, trained to throw clubs and stones ever since they could walk. A lot of the white men climbed their horses and charged the kanakas, armed with their stirrup-iron, with which they knocked them over like nine-pins. The fight did not last long, but there were a good many broken heads even amongst the white men, and several of the kanakas were killed before they were finally driven off the racecourse into the cane-fields. –H. Finch-Hatton, Advance Australia!

The mood of white public opinion towards Islanders in the sugar districts of Queensland ebbed and flowed throughout the nineteenth century between acceptance and a general resentment in its more peaceful stages, to more hysterical upsurges of anger and violence. Each of these moments, like the periods of the late 1860s and mid-1870s, was responsive to the changing levels of independence, freedom of movement, and visibility of Islander communities. This, too, fluctuated, for in the wake of each surge new oppressive measures were devised to limit Islanders’ adjusted freedoms. As the century wore on, the threat Islanders were seen to pose, while being more readily articulated, also became increasingly general and symbolic. Accordingly, attempts to contain Islanders also diversified from race-specific laws and regulations to generalized means of legislative control. Two periods stand out—that of the early 1880s, which was characterized by the emergence of differentiated legal categories of ‘‘timeexpired’’, ‘‘ticket holders’’, and ‘‘contracted’’ Kanakas, and that of the late 1890s, which resulted in intense statistical and social surveillance. We will start with the 1880s and the eruption of tensions in Mackay in 1883. The epigraph by H. Finch-Hatton given above describes an outbreak of violence at the Boxing Day races in Mackay in 1883 in which an unknown number of Islanders were killed.49 The spark for the violence, though popularly remembered as being alcohol, has since faded in light of what the event itself signified. Like Maryborough in1877, it was and has since been seen as a cathartic eruption of ‘‘bad blood [that had been] brewing in Mackay for some little time between certain white men and the Kanakas’’. While outbreaks of violent tension between Europeans and Islanders was something of a tradition in the sugar towns, the racecourse incident was one of the ‘‘largest’’ in terms of its ramifications, its prominence, and its toll, particularly in light of its later renditions in the dubious realms of what Moore has described as folklore.50 Regardless of whether or not folklore has exaggerated elements of this event, it is nevertheless revealing of the potential force with which boundaries could be socially asserted. It was

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also indicative of wider trends in the1880s. The Mackay District in1883 had one of the largest—if not the largest—Islander populations in Queensland, with an ‘‘adult male’’ population that either outnumbered or matched the white equivalent. Although exact figures are not available for 1883, census data in 1881 and 1886 show that in 1881 Islanders made up nearly half (47 percent) of the total male population in Mackay, while the total white male population was only 14 percent.51 By 1886, the latter had increased to 39 percent, while Islanders made up less than a quarter of the male population (23 percent).52 More significant than the actual numbers themselves is the perceived need for statistical comparison, for it reflects the dominant concerns of the time that the white community was at grave risk from the swelling population of black men milling on its borders and encroaching on white society. Islanders’ encroachment on white society was as obvious as attending the races and as nebulous as the increasing rates of illness amongst Islanders, their ballooning rates of death, and the emergent question of where they could be buried. Although Islanders’ death rates had always been high (see chap. 2, fig.1), they were climbing in 1883 at the same time that the sick were becoming more visible as they were brought off the plantations and taken to Mackay’s Pacific Islander Hospital. This hospital was exceedingly unpopular and had been built only out of legal obligation. It faced intense public opposition upon its opening and was threatened by the municipal inspector of nuisances with being declared a ‘‘public nuisance’’. This had less to do with its appalling conditions and more with fears that it would contaminate Mackay’s water or that its wandering, confused, and delirious inmates were unsightly.53 This opposition, and a growing indignation and resentment over the burial of Islanders’ bodies, exemplified the increasingly abstracted threats of Mackay’s Kanaka menace.54 But while these anxieties were abstract and intangible, their tension and volatility were very real on Boxing Day and the days following, when a scare was got up that the kanakas were going to storm the town of Mackay. No one knows who started the report, and nobody cared; but it was quite sufficient to terrify the inhabitants. The peaceful town of Mackay presented a most ludicrous appearance; everyone having armed himself with some sort of weapon, a musket, a pistol, or a butcher’s knife, with which he paraded the streets, giving all the corners a wide berth as he turned them, for fear of falling prey to some bloodthirsty kanaka.55

The sales of revolvers and ammunition increased, police reinforcements were requested from Townsville, and vigilante groups and so-called ‘‘Kanaka squads’’ were formed. The concern was not just local; in the rest of the colony atten-

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tion intensified and discussion grew as statistics were gathered, petitions sent to Parliament, and amendments made to the 1880 Pacific Island Labourers Act.56 In all these discussions it was the small percentage of Islanders that had completed their periods of indenture and were free agents with a little economic independence that came to personify the Kanaka menace.57 Not only did these so-called time-expired Islanders represent a rupture in the safety clause of introducing western Pacific natives to Queensland in that they did not go home, but also, by being outside a work contract, they fell outside the legislated restrictions of the relevant indentured labor legislation. As in the 1860s and early 1870s, the dangerous native qualities of the idea of the Kanaka menace resided in those aspects that exceeded the category of labor, escaped control, and confounded legislative containment. All of these qualities were embodied in the observed cultural autonomy and economic independence of free Islanders. Queensland’s legislative grip accordingly tightened. The Pacific Island Labourers Act of 1880 defined legal status groups for Islanders that corresponded with varying levels of containment and restriction. These groups were first contract, time expired, and exemptions or ticket holders (the 835 Islanders resident in the colony since 1879). Protective regulations continued to be applied to firstcontract and indentured Islanders. But having defined a legal identity status for time-expired Islanders, labor restrictions designed to translate into social containment were applied ever more intensively until the turn of the century. The only legal employment in which time-expired Islanders were able to engage was unskilled labor in the sugar industry, and for indenture periods of no less than one month and no more than three years. As their numbers grew, so the restrictions tightened. In 1892, on the resumption of the trade after a brief suspension, a third of the Islander population was time expired, and in this year they were excluded from employment in the sugar mills. By 1896 over half the Islander population was time expired. Accordingly, the minimum term of employment was increased to six months, while any Islander unemployed for more than one month was to be forcibly deported.58 Unable legally to engage as free labor, social freedoms that could flow from economic independence were curbed, and the restriction to certain industries helped to keep Islanders geographically bound to within thirty miles from the coast. These legislative changes were underpinned very obviously by fears in settler society that found public expression in themes of miscegenation, invasion, takeover, plague, and being socially and biologically swamped. The common complaint was that time-expired and ‘‘walkabout’’ Kanakas were coming into towns where they ‘‘were allowed to compete with the white populations’’.59 Black men were taking white jobs; worse, they were taking white women’s jobs and working as ‘‘washerwomen, housemaids, laundresses, and nursemaids’’.60

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While the express concern was to minimize time-expired Islanders’ competition with white labor, this was underpinned by more sinister implications. They were ‘‘more dangerous than ever after they had served the three years. When they had a little religion and civilization about them they would be positively dangerous . . . if they were not kept under control’’. The evidence of this positive danger could be seen in ‘‘Brisbane, Maryborough and Mackay, and in every large town near which sugar-planting was carried on’’ where ‘‘large numbers of these black men would be found strolling about’’ no matter ‘‘which way one went . . . [in] any of the suburbs’’ of the towns.61 They were not the ‘‘boys’’ on the plantations, but were black ‘‘men, not children. Men with fierce passions, who came from lands where savage murders and cannibalism were freely practised. They acquired only too readily the white man’s vices. Drinking, gambling, swearing and fighting were almost universal’’.62 The American south was frequently evoked as evidence for the sinister potential of not controlling this free-roaming and masculine blackness. There, ‘‘the country was swamped by the black slaves, who since their liberation had mixed with the white race. . . . [T]he half-castes had been a very serious evil’’. The expiration of indenture contracts without the removal or re-indenture of black men who had exceeded their expiry date could threaten or destabilize the entire colonial project: ‘‘they could never hope for success in this colony if they kept increasing their black population at the present ratio’’.63 Indeed, like the idea of ‘‘half-castes’’, the danger posed by timeexpired Islanders was the hybridity they represented and the dangerous and infectious space they occupied between contained black laborers and free whites. Journalist E. J. Brady’s caricature of Bundaberg’s Kanakatown in the early 1890s is exemplary. Although lengthy, it is worth quoting extensively. I did what I was told was little short of an act of madness by walking through the Kanaka quarter in Bundaberg at night, with the editor of the Patriot, neither of us armed. . . . The Kanaka quarter was an edification. A labyrinth of rookeries on the outskirts of Bundaberg, where black and yellow make their lairs, it remains yet to me as a nightmare memory of evil sights, and smells and sounds. We left the reputable districts of White Bundaberg and went down to the place of Tommy Tanna [Kanakas]. As we dived into a back lane, our escort declined to go further. One hardly blamed him. A constable had been murderously chopped with a cane-knife earlier in the evening, and the ebony quarter was seething with anger and excitement. . . . We were met with sullen toleration, at most with mutterings or threats. Tanna was in a bad humour. Race-hatred gleaned in his bloodshot eyes. Murder stalked upon the hot, quiet Northern night. . . . It was an evening stroll through a village of darkest Papua, where dusky gloom was balefully lightened by a sprinkling of degraded white faces.64

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Flavored with a memory of Melanesia, the imagery that invested Kanakas with such menace in this passage was not simply the resuscitation of their native characters; it was also their interaction, intimate or conflictual, with reputable whiteness and the shadows that darkest Papua’s black labyrinths and rookeries cast over white towns.65 The shadows, however, were made visible only by the ‘‘sprinkling of degraded white faces’’, and it took the presence of white visitors and police to extract the murderous race-hatred that gleamed behind sullen black, bloodshot eyes. E. J. Brady’s evocative imagery also illustrates the underlying horrors of the so-called ‘‘white man’s vices’’. For this was a discursive concept that ran deeper than simply lampooning imagined incompatibilities between primitivity and civility. The doctrine of the white man’s vices was of the same thematic strain of contamination and hybridity as notions of degraded whites and miscegenation. As such, the Kanaka menace signified a deeper threat to the colonial project—the bastardization or dilution of white settlement. The defensiveness of racial anxiety brings us back to violence. As in Mackay and Maryborough in1877, district bylaws and local disarmament plans, curfews, passes, and measures for increased surveillance and control, such as making it compulsory for all time-expired Islanders to ‘‘wear a conspicuous badge’’, were called on by residents and police magistrates in the sugar towns throughout the 1880s and 1890s to deal with the supposed threat of the Kanaka menace.66 In addition to ‘‘special’’ police powers, special police were often requested (the Native Mounted Police and ‘‘special constables’’), and special squadrons and volunteer groups were recommended throughout the districts, while in Bundaberg, ‘‘special service boys’’, or informants, were used by the police in the early 1890s, and special civil ‘‘disturbed’’ status was requested and rejected for the Mackay District under the Peace Preservation Act in 1895.67 All of this was coupled with an intensified scrutiny from the 1890s, when extensive statistical information on Islanders’ population was collected. Government gauged and monitored Islanders’ literary skills, marriages, employment, family, community, and cohabitation. The statistical surveillance intensified towards the turn of the century as the government gathered figures on the ‘‘Coloured Population in Queensland’’ in 1897; a census of the ‘‘Alien Population’’ in 1898; returns showing the number of ‘‘charges of murder, rape, indecent assault, and common assault that have been laid against kanakas’’ between 1892 and 1899; and the number of ‘‘classified half-castes’’ in Queensland in 1901.68 From 1883, returns had intermittently been requested in Parliament showing the population and criminal propensity of Islanders in the colony, including the numbers and categories of their convictions. The collected figures were to show that Islanders’ criminal presence in the colony had become disproportionate since the mid-1880s, with criminalization increasing and intensifying as the Islanders’ proportion of the

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Figure 2. Comparison of South Sea Islander population for general and prison populations in the colony of Queensland, 1877–1906. Source: Registrar General’s Annual Reports (1878–1907), Police Commissioner’s Annual Report (1878–1895), Comptroller General’s Report (1895–1907), Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1878–1900), Queensland Parliamentary Papers (1901–1907). Figures not returned for 1878.

population in the colony steadily dropped. This is illustrated in figure 2, where the Islanders’ proportion of the general population has been compared to their proportion of the jail population and shows a rate of decline that mirrors the rate of increase in the jails.69 On the defensive, these various methods of surveillance and control were frequently presented as white Queensland’s reasonable response to a slow and persistent internal invasion.Walkabout and time-expired Kanakas posed a similar threat to that of indigenous peoples on the frontiers, for both were outside the legal norms and moral sanctions of the inside districts through physical and legal exclusion. In addition, the sanctions for force that could be unleashed against time-expired and walkabout Kanakas resembled in its ‘‘special’’ nature, rather than intensity, that of colonial frontiers. Such was the case with the Islander shot in Cleveland in1869 and the Bunyah Black in1889, and such was the undertone of requests for special sanctions during times of heightened tension in the sugar districts. Such sanctions were implied in the language of public outcries and guided such social rituals as racial brawls and the chasing of Islanders out of town at nightfall. In Maryborough it was a weekly tradition for Islanders

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and whites to fight in the streets, and in Bundaberg’s Bourbon Street, chasing Islanders out of town with offal and meat was recorded into the twentieth century.70 These social rituals were backed up by local regulations, bylaws, racial curfews, and other mundane and everyday forms of locally imposed controls. An anecdote related by Brady exemplifies both this state and the final direction of this chapter. While in Mackay Brady spent some time with the Mackay police and mentioned in passing their ‘‘two intelligent dogs that always accompanied [Constable Brookes] on his visits to the native quarter, and heeled recalcitrant kanakas on occasion’’.71 In the remainder of this chapter we will go on to consider the monopolization of the kind of social violence we have considered so far. Here we see differences in constructions of race coming together as a convergent threat to white Queensland. With the federation of Australian colonies in 1901 and legal categories of race carefully and legislatively delineated, violence was appropriated as a state affair and performed through legal sanction and criminalization. Criminalizing Autonomy: White Australia and the Expulsion of Race What was being done in Queensland was being done in every country; let them blink the matter as they liked, the black man had to go—he had to move out. The colonists had come there as white men and were going to put the black man out. Some people might attempt to foster or keep alive this wretched race who now inhabited the Australian continent, but the white man had come there, and the blacks had got to go further. . . . [T]he blackfellows had to go, and go they must. –Boyd Morehead, Queensland Parliamentary Debates (1880)

In 1897 Queensland introduced the Aboriginal Protection and the Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act (APRSOA), which would form the framework for colonial settlement in the twentieth century. After twenty years the language of Aboriginal protection differed little in essence from that which peppered public discourse in the late 1870s. But it had become in these final years of the nineteenth century a necessity that was linked to the imperatives that accompanied federation in 1901. Looking forward to a future of British-inspired nationhood and civilization, one of the emerging state’s concerns was with the residue of its colonizing past that contradicted the constructed state image of high civilization and humanity. Even the criminal code would be modernized to replace what was described as ‘‘th[o]se brutal and barbaric relics of an age of darkness’’ with a code that reflected the ‘‘tremendous advance we have made’’.72 It is from this context of modernity, progress, and civilization emerging from a dark colo-

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nial past that the necessity for Aboriginal protection arose. For as Archibald Meston put it in his report to the Queensland government in preparation for the introduction of protection legislation in 1897, Even acceptance of the ‘‘doomed race’’ theory can in no way absolve a humane and Christian nation from the obligations they owe to this helpless people, or our solemn duty to guide them kindly across the period which spans the abyss between the present and the unknown point of final departure.73

In the years since his commission to deal with the Bunyah Black, Meston had established himself as something of an Aboriginal expert, an admirer and exhibitor of the cultures, lifestyles, and physiques of those Aboriginal people he considered to be unsullied by contact with colonial society, an Aborigines Protection Society member, and staunch defender of his idea of real Aboriginal people beyond the frontiers. All of these positions were not altogether inconsistent with his earlier fearsome reputation.74 Concerned as he was with the preservation of a ‘‘pure’’ Aboriginality uncontaminated by contact with the colony’s ‘‘coloured aliens’’ and ‘‘whites more degraded than any savage’’, his report gently rejected the doomed-race theory and centered instead around the desirability of total surveillance in isolation and the protective control and regulation of particularly Aboriginal women and children.75 His legislative recommendations were to establish reserves and settlements for those ‘‘aboriginals scattered among the settled districts and wandering about the towns’’, while those that ‘‘occupy country not required for settlement’’ should be contacted but otherwise strictly protected from any sustained interaction with settled Queensland.76 This isolation was to be secured through the weaving of a net of bureaucracy designed both to contain and exclude, with the only points of contact with settler society being through white Aboriginal protectors. Meston’s report and recommendations promoted isolation and implied what could have been interpreted as radical proposals to impose limits on dispossession and settlement, show some respect for the cultural autonomy of indigenous groups, and deliver some reparation for, and alleviation of, the destructive impact of occupation for and in consultation with indigenous people in the settled districts. The government’s intentions, however, differed from Meston’s literal understanding of protection. While the APRSOA that was introduced in the following year closely resembled his recommendations, it differed almost imperceptibly in vision. The Aborigines Bill, introduced this session, deals with the question of the improvement of the aboriginals, and aboriginal half-castes, and their future protec-

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tion, in an effective and comprehensive manner. It not only aims at effectually preventing a continuation of the errors of the past, but contemplates preserving the aboriginal race from extinction.77

The APRSOA legitimated settlement and provided for a legalized and regulated ‘‘systematic effort’’ to complete what had been started. In the ‘‘more unsettled parts of the North’’, the appointed protectors, often the police, were given the added role of ‘‘improvers’’, while the reserves of the inside districts were, to paraphrase, a contemplation of preservation from racial extinction.78 The added dimension of the APRSOA that differed from Meston’s recommendations was the prominence of improvement with its assimilationist rather than isolationist overtones. As the emergent bureaucratic obsession with Aboriginal women and so-called half-castes would demonstrate, improvement was envisaged as both a biological and cultural exercise, and those children deemed to be halfcastes, in being, as George Kerr put it, ‘‘as intelligent and as cleanly as any white man’’, provided the key.79 The surveillance of Aboriginal women therefore, and the illegal and unregulated practices of child abduction that so concerned Meston, logically became the sole prerogative and role of the state.80 As such, the strong biological dimension of this emergent assimilationist language meant that blackness surfaced as a key organizing principle of the sustained bureaucratic violence of Queensland’s protective colonialism. The APRSOA was never a product of misguided good intentions. The debates and concerns in the years surrounding the law’s passage clearly indicate less noble preoccupations with such things as clearing land, maximizing the bonus of a cheap labor force provided by the reserves, and eradicating the socalled Aboriginal problem by expulsion and exclusion where extinction failed. The APRSOA gave to the government absolute powers of definition, removal, relocation, incarceration, and surveillance of Aboriginal people on reserves and missions, the power to force or prevent marriage, and the power to take Aboriginal children into state custody. As such, it sustained the violence of colonialism in Queensland within a twentieth-century model of administered occupation. With the Native Mounted Police officially disbanded in 1896 and the APRSOA on the statute books, Queensland could therefore complete the settlement march towards a federated white Australia within the loose boundaries of a benevolent and civilized rhetoric that was ‘‘in accordance with the humanitarian spirit of the age . . . [where] we have societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, and the man who illtreats a horse or tortures a cat is as likely to go to prison as the man who commits manslaughter’’.81 The APRSOA was therefore an essential part of the wider nation-building context when the language of civilized benevolence was billed to replace the open harshness of the frontier

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as the language of the settler-colonial project. In the wider context of federation and the Australian colonies’ emergence into national modernity, Queensland’s Aboriginal problem became tied to those other vestiges of the past. The speech in 1899 of the new home secretary, Justin Fox Greenlaw Foxton, is telling. I am quite sure that any legislation at all which has a tendency to ameliorate the condition of the unfortunate people who we as a race have displaced on this continent must meet with the hearty approval of every member of this House [to which the rest of the assembly shouted ‘‘Hear, hear’’]. . . . In the past, I am sorry to say—in the far distant past—we have, I think failed to a very great extent to do our duty by those people; latterly—and I refer to the last few years only— I believe it is a fact that Queensland at all events has risen to the occasion, and has endeavoured to grapple with the question of how best the aboriginals of this colony may be dealt with, and if it be that they are to be extinguished altogether as a race, that their disappearance may be made as light to them as possible.82

Entering what was implied as the final and total phase of the settler-colonial project, the violence that was so obvious in its intensity and potency in frontier districts in 1867 had been diluted, in its application through legislation, to more generalized and administratively sustainable modes. To this extent the discourses that defined and contained indigenous peoples in Queensland began to resemble, in form rather than intensity, that which had previously defined and contained Islanders who were also being cleared from the selective history that was being constructed. The last section of this chapter considers the consolidated establishment of colonial order and the convergence of racial discourses at the turn of the century. At this time, and in terms of a new statehood, Queensland and white Australia set about sealing off access to its nonwhite and far distant past through legislation, criminalization, expulsion, and exclusion. m

In Queensland, both indigenous and Pacific Islander people were subjected to legislative attempts to remove them from the emergent white Australia, within which both were constructed as being socially incompatible. The crucial difference, of course, was that Islanders could be deported—they were natives somewhere else. By this time, Aboriginal and Islander people had been carefully articulated in legal categories of blackness as Kanakas, time expireds, ticket holders, walkabouts, half-castes, wild blacks, tame blacks, native blacks, and, simply, blacks. All were terms that denoted exclusion, and as they became increasingly legislated categories, the potential for the autonomy and independence of Islanders and Aboriginal people to be criminalized accordingly in-

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creased. In order to draw this chapter full circle we will briefly return to 1889, the year the Bunyah Black caused so much anxiety, and will begin with a tragedy that occurred on the outskirts of Bundaberg that same year. On 26 August 1889, Kitty Eureka, her husband Charlie, and his father were camped on Kitty’s country, between Bundaberg’s brewery and Walla Street. They were joined later by friends Peter Lifu, who, as Kitty stated, ‘‘no belong to this country’’ and was a Lifu Islander; Captain Cook; ‘‘Dick a kanaka’’; ‘‘Dick Halfcaste’’; and later still by Davy (‘‘a Singalese’’) and Rosie Silva.83 The party was afterward joined by two Aboriginal women, another Kitty and Caroline. They all ate and drank together, during which time Peter Lifu drank too much. As was apparently typical of Lifu’s behavior when drinking, he became ‘‘playful’’ and challenged the men to fights. When no one would fight him he turned his aggression to Rosie, Caroline, and Kitty Bundaberg, and finally to Kitty Eureka. Coming to his wife’s defense, Charlie Eureka attempted to pacify Lifu, telling him he was too big to fight. This served only to aggravate Lifu, who lost his temper and turned on Eureka with a tomahawk. Eureka fended off the first two blows, but the third opened a deep gash in his stomach. On seeing Eureka’s injuries, Lifu threw his tomahawk on the ground and ran crying into the local scrub, where he stayed until he was found by the police constable Charles Brooks an hour and a half later; Brooks then took Lifu to the Bundaberg lockup.84 Eureka had sustained serious wounds and was attended by a local doctor, Thomas May, who arrived on the scene after Brooks. Eureka had a significant abdominal wound, which May cleaned and sewed up. He then left Eureka in the camp, tending to him ‘‘once or twice’’ over the next week.85 Constable Brooks, on the other hand, visited Eureka after the incident ‘‘everyday twice or three times’’ for reasons upon which he did not elaborate. On the following Monday, Brooks arrived early in the morning to find that Charlie Eureka had died during the night. A postmortem established ‘‘that he died of peritonitus [sic] which . . . was caused by the injury’’.86 Lifu, who was still in custody, was informed of Eureka’s death and told he would be charged with murder. On 28 September 1889, Peter Lifu, or Big Peter, stood trial in Bundaberg on the charge of murder; he was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to six months’ hard labor, which he served in Brisbane Gaol.87 This case offers a few insights into the everyday functioning of wider structural aspects of colonial society. It provides a detailed view of life on the fringes of the colony’s towns from the limited but close to direct testimonies of those who lived it. It also offers snapshots of everyday relations between black and white residents and Aboriginal, Islander, and Asian residents. The case also gives insight due to the questions it raises. In 1889, when another Aboriginal man died in a camp on Bundaberg’s fringe from wounds received in a minor

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earlier argument, why did the case go to court, and having done so, why did Peter Lifu receive the relatively light sentence of six months’ hard labor? Seen in comparison to other cases in Bundaberg for the year 1889, the sentence is revealing. While there was the usual range of convictions of Islanders for assault and vagrancy, the courts in Bundaberg that year had handed down convictions for the gang rape of an Islander woman against four Islanders, Genny, Salliegaw, Toorey, and Cassie, who received a sentence of death commuted to three years’ penal servitude.88 In addition, the day after Lifu was sentenced, Islanders Bollo, Lombo, and Pollyogomea received a death sentence commuted to five years’ penal servitude for the murder of Tabbie Coolie from Pentecost Island in what was presented to the courts as a ‘‘tribal fight’’.89 In all these cases differentiated notions of race played an organizing role. To state the crudely obvious, had Genny, Salligaw, Toorey, and Cassie gang raped a white woman, the sentence—like every other conviction bar one of Islander men for the rape of white women—might have been death.90 Similarly, perhaps the five-year sentence for the murder of Tabbie Coolie would have been greater had Tabbie been white. With regard to Lifu’s case, it could be argued that justice for the murder of an Aboriginal man was pursued in Bundaberg, due at least partially to the assailant not being white, at the same time that Lifu received a relatively light sentence because of the perceived moral weight of his crime in killing an Aboriginal man.91 This is, however, simplistic without further analysis. Racial characterization appears to have played a defining role in Lifu’s trial and appears to have been central to the finding of manslaughter rather than murder. Judging from the testimonial answers to questions in the court, it does not seem that the decision for manslaughter was based on the fact that Eureka had died from the secondary infection of peritonitis. Conceivably, this could have been the result of inadequate medical care, since Eureka was not, as a black patient, admitted to the local hospital, and because of similar thinking that saw two Islanders die in Rockhampton in 1886 from accidental poisoning after the doctor had refused to attend, stating that he ‘‘would not come over in the dark at the risk of his neck to save all the Kanakas in Queensland’’.92 Thomas May’s medical care and lack of interest in Eureka’s progress was normal enough not to be considered an issue in court. The questions answered by witnesses also give no indication that the court was interested in establishing whether the blows that injured Eureka were the cause of his death. Rather, the solicited testimonies focused on the amount of alcohol that had been consumed in the camp, where it had been purchased, the racial category of every person present, their marriage/sexual affiliations, the lack of provocation in Lifu’s attack, and the violence of his alcohol-induced passions. If the questions are any indication, the conviction for manslaughter was based on the finding that Lifu’s fatal blows consti-

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tuted the less premeditated crime not simply of drunkenness, but of passion, violence, adoption of white vices, or unregulated black behavior. Lifu’s trial reflected its context, for the court’s clear interest was in the fact that Peter Lifu was a Pacific Islander and that the incident occurred in a racially mixed so-called ‘‘black’s camp’’. The court sought more information about life in these camps than about Lifu’s crime and Eureka’s death. These camps, after all, were, like the Kanakatowns, considered the repositories of the colony’s social vices and, increasingly beyond the 1880s, the sites of a dangerous mingling of races.93 This reflected wider anxieties about miscegenation and can be gauged by the increasing interest in statistically measuring the populations of ‘‘half-castes’’, Kanakas, Chinese, Aborigines, and ‘‘Other Coloured Aliens’’ and the criminal behavior of Kanaka, black, and half-caste prisoners.94 Blackness in general was increasingly identified with opium, violent crime, property crime, prostitution, alcohol, disease, and threats to the civil order of inside districts. Fringe camps were regularly torn down, white women were afraid to go out after dark, and in Bundaberg means were regularly devised for keeping the town permanently white with curfews, passes, and patrols. This context was reflected in Lifu’s trial. The ever-increasing familiarity that the police, courts, jails, and lockups had with black men was a point of convergence. This, too, is evident in Lifu’s case.95 While Thomas May visited Charlie Eureka only twice before he died, the police constable Charles Brooks visited him at least twice a day. Regardless of Brooks’ personal or official reasons for this attention, and regardless of the level of care such visitations might suggest, his actions indicate precisely the special relationship that would be formalized through protection legislation in 1897. Indeed, in many Queensland towns, the police mediated government regulation and local bylaws to Aboriginal and Pacific Islander people, and often in the capacity not just of police, but also as appointed protectors. In Bundaberg, the police were thoroughly familiar with the Islander and Aboriginal communities—so much so that, as would come to light in 1892, something of a tradition had developed where the lockup had the unofficial designation of shelter (meals and a bed) for some of Bundaberg’s Aboriginal and Pacific Islander residents.96 As a partial result and cause of the close relations between police and black Queenslanders, incarceration became one of the more tangible ways in which the ill-defined European anxieties concerning blackness found expression. Disproportionate and highly visible representation in the jails, the traumas of incarceration, and the over-regulation, surveillance, and policing of communities by police and government bureaucracies was an experience shared by both Aboriginal and Pacific Islander communities on the fringes of settled districts. These parallel lines lasted at least until the provisions of the 1897 APRSOA began to take effect. In addition, execution rates for the period show

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Figure 3. Offense trends, including offenses against the body, offenses against property, drunkenness, and other offenses, for Aboriginal and Pacific Islander prisoners as categorized by the comptroller general, 1898–1906. Source: Report of the Comptroller-General of Prisons for the Years 1899–1907, Queensland Votes and Proceedings.

that black prisoners were not only highly represented in the prison populations, but were also over-represented amongst executed prisoners. Rates of execution in Queensland not only suggest a heightened willingness to execute black prisoners, but were also arguably an extension of the increased likelihood that Islanders and indigenous people would receive harsher sentences. Figures subsequent to 1887 (when extensive figures began to be collected), for example, show that large proportions of the black prison population were housed in the penal establishments and prisons, which were the home of more serious convictions and higher security.97

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Incarceration rates were a measurable manifestation of the specificities of definition, surveillance, and control under discussion in this chapter. While black men and women and Aboriginal children were a prominent feature of the colony’s jails, the trends that are apparent in figure 3 suggest that the crimes for which people were convicted manifested circulating discourses.98 Crimes that fell under civil disorder, such as assault, vagrancy, disorderly conduct, obscene language, resisting arrest, drunk and disorderly, and unsound mind were in high proportions amongst both Aboriginal and Islander prisoners and arguably reflect colonial tropes of tribalism, savagery, and cannibalism. Even more instructive, however, is that while Islanders were frequently charged and convicted of labor-related crimes such as absconding and refusal of orders, they were rarely arrested or convicted of crimes against property. With Aboriginal prisoners, however, the opposite was true. Crimes against property featured prominently amongst offenders from ten to fifty years of age. Convictions of Aboriginal and

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Islander prisoners therefore at least reflected, if they were not the product of, their constructed status in relation to settler-colonial land and labor needs. Both were seen to be subject to the violent volatility of their blackness. Similarly, both were considered a civil disorder if they encroached on white settlements. But it is particularly significant that Islanders were rarely associated with crimes against property. They, unlike indigenous people, committed crimes against bonded labor and did not challenge or represent alternative claims to white Queensland’s possession of the land. It may be said in relation to crime statistics that Aboriginal and Islander people simply committed proportionately more crime and usually of a particular type. But in the wider social context we have considered, it is possible to view these trends as the product of crimes being color coded and of race, blackness in particular, becoming increasingly criminally coded by laws of protection and restriction. The combined function and effect of race-specific legislation such as the Pacific Island Laborers Act and the APRSOA was the legal containment of Pacific Islander and Aboriginal people and the implied potential to criminalize their independence and autonomy within the inside and borderland districts. The creation of legal categories whose freedom of movement and employment were limited also heightened the glaring visibility of Aboriginal and Pacific Islander people, enabling a more subtle coding of race with inherent criminal qualities and enhancing the potential to detect offenses and criminalize any encroachment on white society.99 As such, the violence that we have observed in this chapter, which operated with unofficial, semi-official, and ‘‘special’’ sanctions against excluded categories of people, was increasingly incorporated into the legislative and administrative framework of the colony. Through this continuity we might view colonialism’s violence as something other than simply a reactive force and rather as something of a substructure that spanned the outside, borderland, and inside districts. This will be taken up in detail in the pages to come. But there is one final observation to highlight that has not yet received the attention it deserves. The ebbs and flows of colonial anxieties and the periodic interest in defining Aboriginal and Islander people that we have observed were responsive. The camp in which Charlie Eureka was killed and the interactions within that camp that made it the subject of detailed questioning in court was established against the grain of colonial desires for racial order. In other words, settler anxieties were reactions to the changes and adaptations that Islanders and Aboriginal people initiated. As we will see in the next chapter, new identities, communities, connections, and divisions were constantly being forged on the horizontal plane of Pacific Islanders’ worlds, an understanding of which settlers, planters, and administrators struggled to master.

4. South Sea Islanders Resisting Kanakas Identity, Consciousness, and Community to 1906

The ‘‘boys’’ have told me to say that . . . we want to be free labourers, and do any work we can get. We don’t want contract. We say that we do the same work that Hindoos and white men do, we should get the same wages as them. –Ackar from Vanua Lava, in ‘‘Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire into and Report . . . Pacific Islanders to be Deported from Queensland’’, Queensland Parliamentary Papers (1906)

WHEN THE ANTI-ISLANDER sentiments that predominated in Queensland culminated at the turn of the nineteenth century in abolition and the compulsory deportation of Islanders, it was widely assumed that this simply meant a disconnected and temporary population would be returned to their homes. But for the bulk of the Islander population, deportation meant uprooting settled communities that had had a presence in Queensland for upwards of twenty years. From 1901 these communities protested hard and emphasized, in doing so, their distinct identities as neither Pacific Islanders nor Australians, but as Queensland South Sea Islanders. Their protest occurred amidst a wider heated debate within settler society between outraged planters threatening civil war in defense of cheap black labor and those who opposed deportation, citing forecasts of inevitable cannibal massacres of returned Kanakas. The depth of argument was characterized in 1902 when Captain Rason, holding the office of the British resident in the New Hebrides, was reported as saying in a London Daily Mail article titled ‘‘Cannibalism Made Easy’’ that ‘‘deported Kanakas . . . will drift into the native villages, with the result that those who are in anything like good condition will be promptly killed and eaten’’.1 Its published rebuttal put forward what was argued as the more likely scenario, that in fact it would simply be ‘‘a cruelty besides an economical mistake’’ to ‘‘send back such people who have been years in the State’’ who were ‘‘quiet, docile, industrious people under proper direction’’ and who ‘‘would not anywhere be gladly received back’’.2 101

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Amidst the abundance of opinions as to whether or not deportation was in accordance with sound principles of humanity and economics, Islanders’ attempts to contribute to the debate were readily dismissed with the argument that, as Alfred Deakin stated in 1902, due to their assumed tribal natures Islanders were ‘‘entirely without organization’’. They had ‘‘come from many different islands in the South Seas where differences of language, customs, and even of race, contribute to the absence of bonds of sympathy between them’’, and any protest they made against deportation, he argued, must be seen as simply the ‘‘bidding of their employers’’.3 Deakin was not alone amidst popular assumptions that Kanakas were incapable of any autonomous community or ideological cohesion. As the Reverend Frodsham, bishop of North Queensland, put it in 1906, [Y]ou can make a kanaka say almost anything you like if you put sufficient pressure on him. . . . [T]hey are rather like children in the matter. We have got to think for them a great deal, and act for them, and we must not make the mistake of attaching very much importance to an expression of opinion from them.4

Deakin and Frodsham were not unique, merely reflecting a wider colonial conviction that intertribal conflict and rivalry retained from Melanesia, rather than temporariness, were the underlying reasons that Islanders could not unite. Such convictions caricatured social complexity, reducing unity to simplicity and diversity to such essentializing and dismissive concepts as intertribal feudalism. The idea that, as natives, Islanders were tribal has been so fundamental to colonial understandings of Melanesian social organization that it has been imported rather unquestioningly into the histories of the present as the ubiquitously labeled intertribal rivalry. Tribalism has thus dominated histories and obscured signs of collective resistance and consciousness within Islander communities, for as Kay Saunders put it, ‘‘the enmities existing between different tribes of Melanesians in Queensland remained unabated over relatively short periods of indenture and prevented their combination for any sort of revolt like the Nat Turner rebellion’’.5 While it would be historically inaccurate to disagree with Saunders’ point that the transitory nature of sections of Islander communities militated against the longer-term requirements of organized rebellion, the inclusion of tribalism as a further explanation says volumes more than this. Tribes, tribalism, and intertribal rivalry are terms that metonymically reference that body of knowledge of Melanesia considered in previous chapters. This is problematic because by too readily labeling an apparent lack of resistance as a Melanesian thing, as intertribal, interisland, or simply tribal feuding, historical circumstances, and in particular the colonial presence, are marginalized. Thus,

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bled of historical and political content, Islanders’ collective resistance has often been framed as characteristically cultural and retentive. In the context of the campaign of the 1970s for formal recognition of Australian South Sea Islanders as a distinct social and cultural group, historians working with South Sea Islander communities placed special emphasis on the retention of indigenous cultural practices.6 Those practices that were emphasized, however, were those with recognizably ‘‘indigenous’’ or Melanesian appeal: magic, sorcery, and tribalism. While successful in stressing the autonomous historical and cultural heritage of Australian South Sea Islanders, the emphasis on cultural retention is in need of refurbishment and a semantic but nevertheless meaningful shift in emphasis. In the context of powerful systems of knowledge such as those discursive practices that identified Islanders as Melanesian savages and Kanakas, the notion of cultural retention has the potential to recapitulate this knowledge. Retention implies the existence of something precolonial and authentic to retain and as such rests on an acculturation process that is depoliticized, passive, unconscious, and grounded in the stasis of savagery. While cultural autonomy has been a significant source of identity and pride in Queensland as what Clive Moore has termed a ‘‘counterculture of survival’’, and without wishing to take away from that, peoples’ cultural mobilization and resistance during the nineteenth century was arguably more active and formed part of a wider political expression than is catered to by the descriptive term of ‘‘retention’’. As is explored in this chapter, Islander communities were politically active throughout the nineteenth century, and this materialized in the twentieth century in such political organizations as the Mackay Pacific Islanders’ Association or the Nambour South Sea Island Cane Growers.7 These organizations were an expressive culmination of the ways in which Islanders had begun, by the late nineteenth century, to articulate ‘‘an identity of interests as between themselves, and as against their rulers and employers’’.8 In lobbying state and federal governments for a reversal of the deportation provisions of 1901, they and others very clearly expressed community identities that were politically, historically, and culturally specific. This chapter maps some of the ways a sense of unity or connection was being expressed and facilitated by emergent Islander communities through processes of movement and settlement, or in terms that have currency in Oceanic studies—routes and roots.9 Our interpretive emphasis shifts from retention to maintenance and, through that, to articulation. Semantic though this may be, it is significant. It does not necessarily disagree with existing histories, but instead places greater interpretive emphasis on cultural maintenance and articulation over retention. The intent is to allow historical space for the inclusion of social and economic shaping forces, while recognizing the conscious main-

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tenance of various imported practices and cosmologies from the Islands. The idea of articulation, or of articulated identities, is borrowed for these purposes from Stuart Hall and James Clifford as a term that encompasses cultural adjustment, reinvention, and change in the context of the violent disruptions and discontinuities of colonial contexts.10 The story that unfolds below emerges from disparate information to offer a glimpse into the worlds Islanders built in the fissures and gaps between areas of colonial surveillance. It explores the selfconsciousness that emerged of their place in relation to their own communities, white Queensland, the sugar industry, and the colonial project at large. As such, it is a story that charts peoples’ strategies of not just survival, but also of resistance through the maintenance of self-sufficiency and independence. Over the forty years of the indentured labor trade, as we have seen, Islanders shaped a material world whose relative independence from the plantations reflected a growing community, which resisted becoming just the expendable and cheap units of labor imposed by that identity category of Kanakas. As we will see, peoples’ islands remained crucial frames of reference in Queensland, as cultural, political, and economic points of origin. But the islands took on added meaning in the context of Queensland, and although traditionally viewed as intertribal feudalism, the intense connections that people developed with islands and island groups was arguably as much the result of displacement and fragmentation as it was of imported feuds. Having considered these processes of identity building, we will end with a consideration of the permanent communities that emerged in Queensland, in defense of which Islanders successfully protested in the twentieth century. m

The following memory leaves a poignant and lasting image that serves as an appropriate introduction to the following discussion. This man . . . I met him when I was a boy, and he died in this town about nine, ten years ago, in ah, after year 1960 . . . and he was a man who used to be able to climb trees with boots on and go and sit up maybe twenty, thirty feet in the air on these great big paperbark trees and whistle and sing and talk. And nobody knew what he was talking about, but he done this in his loneliness, ’cos he said he was talking to his people and our custom, it doesn’t matter—if I get emotional, can’t help it—and in his custom, he couldn’t ah, he used to say that we believe that the wind and the sky and the clouds carry the sounds, you know, of people from one place to another. And nowhere in this world is far away.11

As we have seen in previous chapters, Islanders arrived in Queensland under a range of conditions, from a range of Islands, and with a range of experiences of

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colonialism, from those who were fluent in Pacific trade languages and practices to those whose first real interaction with Europe had come with the labor trade. With these variable origins, and in the context of an invasive colonial society and the racially stratified world of the cane fields, peoples’ island homes took on a new significance. If islands of origin had figured prominently as a source of identity before people arrived, in Queensland they developed further significance that was rooted in a colonial context. This connection to island homes appears to have been intense. A persistent theme in colonial records, Islanders’ testimonies, the archival records they left in colonial deposits, and in recorded memories is the prominent status that the islands and villages of origin held in the minds and memories of the first generation of Islander laborers. Those people interviewed by Matthew Peacock, Clive Moore, and Patricia Mercer in the 1970s spoke frequently of that generation’s continued connection to their island homes. One interviewee’s parents’ ‘‘whole heart’s desire was to go back’’, and her father talked about his village so much that when she finally ‘‘went there [she] knew exactly what the village looked like’’.12 Another interviewee recalled his father as a sick, aged man, drawing him a map of his land and village: ‘‘He told me ‘This is your land here’, and he drew a diagram on a piece of paper. But I never kept it. . . . [H]e always wanted me to go back, and some of the old boys around where we lived wanted to go back; at different times they all asked me to take them home’’.13 Interviewees in the 1970s also told of their parents’ and grandparents’ concerted efforts to continue to transmit ‘‘the customs and the stories of disobedience . . . the stories of parenthood . . . the custom of respect . . . the ways to grow our food’’ to the ‘‘young people in the community’’. They would ‘‘take the young fellows down to the sea coast and even though we were bushmen, they felt it better for us to sit by ourselves around fires and look out to sea . . . and the sound of the surf and the wind, they would tell us then, and expound to us the customs of our people’’.14 Stories were told of those who maintained traditions well into this century. Of one Lifu Islander in Mackay they said, You could hear him in the night time, you know, and he, he just kept his island custom. He used to sit down around the fire on, and sit down on the box and he’d be [indicates by drumming] you know, and you could hear him for hour after hour; and when you put your head in through the door, there was ah, that [laughter] heavy smoke that you’d just about die of suffocation you know.15

These memories reflect what can be gleaned from the record of the nineteenth century, when people had maintained links with home often against great odds and, when in large enough numbers from the same island or language groups, they adjusted, revived, and nurtured their social protocols, practices,

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and traditions. That people maintained connections with their home islands and villages is hardly surprising in the context of the circumstances of Islanders’ arrival, and what they arrived into, in Queensland. Hence without wishing to detract from the depth of connection with land, sea, and people that might have driven some like the old man in the paperbark tree mentioned above, there were also historically located reasons why the islands remained so critical to peoples’ identity. Were it not for the resilience of colonial notions of Islanders’ tribalism it would be embarrassingly obvious to point out that island-based connections were essential to surviving the range of physical and emotional traumas associated with displacement in Queensland. This was observed in the 1870s, when, as William Canny pointed out, planters did not necessarily get to select every one of their laborers, for ‘‘the boys do not like being separated from each other when they come from the same island. . . . [They] would not be separated, and [the employer] would have to take the weak ones as well’’.16 Many observers considered this connection to be merely due to the natures of tribal people, who were irrationally dependent. As employers Claudius Whish and Charles Eden pointed out, just as ‘‘boys’’ had a curiously passionate love for their island homes, ‘‘the poor fellows are like love-birds, so gregarious that, if separated from their companions, they pine and die’’. With direct reference to the question of whether they should be employed on stations as shepherds, each agreed: ‘‘employ them . . . [but] the invariable result of isolating a boy is that he mopes and finally dies’’.17 Whish concurred, stating that Islanders’ habits and dispositions were such that certainly ‘‘they could be employed singly, provided that they live together and meet of an evening to interchange ideas and so on’’.18 At risk of being too obvious, what Eden and Whish spoke of was more than an unconscious dependency. On the plantations, island homes were the basis for emotional and functional survival, particularly for those most alienated in Queensland. Collecting in island groups allowed for exchanges from which would flow more than could come from the pidgin exchanges of the cane fields. Gaining news from home islands, districts, and villages and sharing and maintaining memories, language, and social norms could relieve the alien context of Queensland’s cane fields—at least for new arrivals. Tom Lamon from Epi Island, for example, recalled in an interview in 1964 that his arrival in Queensland was a time of confusion. With no English or Pidgin, work orders, instructions, and the plantation routine initially made no sense. He gradually learned to speak a common language and understand orders through both trial and error and through going ‘‘to where everyone could talk’’ and could assist him in these initial stages.19 Likewise Peerahboy, an Aoba Islander, spoke no English or Pidgin upon arrival on Fairymead in September 1891 but found on the plantation and in the Bundaberg District a large and strong Aoba Island community within

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which he was able, like others, to find friends or relatives from his village, his island, or his language group.20 This coming together of island groups continued to be an attraction for those who stayed in Queensland after the expiry of their first contract. As William Canny explained in 1876, ‘‘[T]he boys very often have either been on one plantation, or are friends, and ask to go to certain places’’, and as interviewees recalled in 1977, their parents or grandparents always gravitated towards centers like Mackay, Ayr, and Bundaberg because ‘‘you always went where your countrymen were’’.21 Inevitably islands and village groups were split across plantations, but the treasured weekly day off allowed people to reconnect. Community-forging traditions such as the much condemned ‘‘sing-sings’’ of chapter 2 emerged from the midst of this gravitational pull of island groups. A large Saturday night gathering at Fairymead in March 1892 is a good example. Islanders from all over the district gathered on this night and was described by Peerahboy as follows. Man of Aoba been have him dance that night. . . . Malayta boy he been have him sing sing too that night. He have him close up belong Aoba man. Sandwich boy he been have him sing sing and dance too[;] also Malacoola boy he been have him sing sing. Four fellow dance that night along four fellow place.22

Such events were part of a wider tradition in areas like Mackay and Bundaberg, where large plantations were relatively close together. As discussed in the context of white Queensland’s fears, Islanders were regularly seen on Saturday nights ‘‘wandering all over the country visiting their friends at the neighbouring plantations; and sometimes while riding late at night, I have seen little knots of two and three all holding each other’s hands, as is their fashion starting out on some expedition’’.23 In Mackay, people would ‘‘walk from the Meadowlands in Racecourse over to Sunnyside’’, and ‘‘the next week they would then walk across here to ah, Habana, Nindaroo’’. These gatherings were replaced later by churchrun tea meetings in Mackay and were recalled by interviewees in the 1970s as celebrations when ‘‘every South Sea Islander’’ in the area would ‘‘come together’’, having come more than twenty miles, to feast, tell stories, sing, and dance.24 In these examples it is clear that the islands were the frames of reference for any identity building in Queensland. They were therefore the basis for the cohesion that would bring together a permanent sense of community in Queensland out of the transitory and fluid movement of the Islander population. But this occurred in a colonial context and amidst very powerful convictions amongst settlers and planters that Kanakas were tribally oriented. This, along with the physical conditions of the colony, had a tribalizing impact. The weekly events, the sing-sings, feasts, and fights that Islanders orga-

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nized throughout the sugar districts were, as we have seen in previous chapters, a source of fascination for settler society. But through the imagery that attended the idea of the Kanaka menace these tended to be recorded in ways that shaped them as examples of tribalism. Whether condemned as the product of Islanders’ natural tendency towards violence and disorder or quietly enjoyed as fascinating displays of authentic savagery, there is a clear sense in the colonial record that the basis for Islanders’ identity and community remained a guess for colonial society. From police and court records and from various government inquiries into the trade, Islanders’ community gatherings were predicted, watched, and surveilled by police and settler society. The station duty diaries of the Bundaberg police are exemplary of this ongoing struggle to fully understand the autonomous practices of the Islander community. On 26 December 1890, the sub-inspector at Bundaberg Police Station disarmed and dispersed a congregated group under the expectation of an organized fight; on 2 January 1899 the ‘‘Rambie Special Service boy reported at 9 am that a tribal fight was likely to take place at Duncraggin between the Santo and Solomon Island boys. Const. O’Brian was sent . . . and apparently prevented a fight’’; and on Boxing Day of the same year another ‘‘tribal fight’’ was expected amidst a group of congregated Islanders, and ‘‘some Constables went amongst them [and] kept them apart and under subjection and had two drunks . . . locked up’’.25 With such familiarity, the lack of ‘‘Kanaka trouble’’ also rated a mention. In the weeks ending 5 June 1897, everything was ‘‘exceedingly quiet and orderly during the week. SS Islanders particularly so’’; and on 21 August of the same year, everything was ‘‘particularly quiet during the week—Kanakas have been no trouble whatever’’.26 While the entries to the Bundaberg station records are indicative of some confusion about Islanders’ collective behavior, they also demonstrate a conviction that was shared by the wider settler society. The mock and actual fights that the Bundaberg police were expecting were described by others as something of a spectacle. Will Lawson, for example, wrote a semi-fictional account of planters, the mounted police, and locals standing watch as ‘‘tribes’’ of Kanakas at a feast flung ‘‘taunts and challenges to rivals’’ that escalated to a violent pitch. Prepared to stand and watch, the police quelled the fighting only when an anti-labor trade campaigner expressed his disgust.27 Although semi-fictional, the account was reminiscent and elaborative of practices that Cairns local J. W. Collinson described. On 7 July 1890, for example, ‘‘considerable excitement was caused in the district when the kanakas at Pyramid and Hambledon met in fight, the tribal enmity of the Tanna and Malicolo boys being the cause. Spears and arrows were used, one boy subsequently died of his wounds’’.28 Likewise in April 1887, Bundaberg locals, including the police, enjoyed the sight of a ‘‘row’’ between up

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to seven hundred Islanders, and in 1894, Willie and David Gibson were amongst the casual spectators who witnessed a stylized fight between Malaita and Aoba Islanders on the Gibson’s plantation, Bingera.29 We will consider the violence that occurred at these events more carefully in following chapters; the emphasis here, however, is on the interest that was taken in them by settler society and the potential tribalizing impact this could have. To some extent the colonial conviction that Islanders were tribal played a historical part in producing divisive island identities. As one interviewee pointed out to Clive Moore in 1977, people from Vanuatu were sent to work on the south side and Solomon Islanders on the north side of the Pioneer River in Mackay. Over time, ‘‘the one that stayed there is New Hebrides [Vanuatu], the one that stay here is Malaita [Solomons]. That’s how they separated . . . the mill make ’em that, you know the plantation, the mill boss’’.30 Tribalism was not only an entertaining spectacle, but its divisions were also good for the sugar industry. As James Hope stated incidentally during an affectionate description of the docility and relative patience and philosophy of Islander workers, pitting one island against another ‘‘gets an immense deal of work out of them’’.31 Intertribal division was also good for colonial society at large. As Edward Martin, the sub-inspector of police in Mackay stated in 1906, Islanders were ‘‘the most peaceful subjects we have under proper control’’, and this control stemmed from the use of labor contracts to keep Islanders ‘‘divided into three or four camps’’ by deploying them to various plantations. Martin felt there was only a ‘‘sense of considerable danger’’ to the colony when the borders between these divided camps were removed at the end of labor contracts, ‘‘allowing them to collect’’, as unemployed, timeexpired Islanders, and to live and mingle undivided in places like Chinatown and Kanakatown.32 The exacerbation and encouragement of island-based feuds therefore discouraged of the emergence of a unified spirit that might challenge or threaten colonial social order. The continued importance of islands of origin in the ways Islander communities identified each other in the nineteenth century was an articulation of varied influences that accompanied the colonial experience of recruitment, labor, and survival. While animosity between islands may well have been imported, this was also encouraged and at times implanted or generated in Queensland’s colonial context. But antagonism was coupled with allegiance and affinities, and islands of origin clearly provided a source of allegiance between groups. But while the islands were an emotional and practical basis for identity, throughout the nineteenth century the conditions of labor, the increasing insularity, hostility, and sullen prejudice of white towns, and the simmering public violence of this context all served as an additional galvanizing force. This, too, began in the islands where communities, particularly coastal communities,

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were politicized by their experience and increasing awareness of their value to visiting traders. In the most experienced locations, such as those in the Solomons and Vanuatu, Islanders were managing to extract higher prices and more expensive trade gifts by the 1880s.33 Recruiters such as Douglas Rannie found after 1883 that reports of the Mackay Racecourse incident of that year had circulated throughout their recruiting grounds before his arrival. During his 1884 voyage, Rannie stated he ‘‘did not experience a very friendly reception when [his crew] went ashore,’’ and they ‘‘were very curtly told that nobody wanted to go to Queensland especially Mackay . . . and [made] very uncomplimentary remarks about Queensland in general’’.34 Throughout his voyages, recruiting proved difficult and expensive as news of incidents like that on the Mackay Racecourse compounded the impact that the labor trade was having on Island communities. Recruits everywhere, he wrote, were demanding high wages and forcing recruiters, as Rannie had had to do at Guadalcanal, to compete with each other in offering increasingly expensive trade gifts, wages, and bonuses.35 As we have seen previously, this resistance was limited, and traders on the whole had the weight and wealth of the Empire behind them. They could and did deal with this rising expense by moving to less-experienced recruiting grounds, where more violent, coercive, and deceptive methods of recruiting could be effectively utilized. But the instructive point here is the existence of lines or routes of contact and exchange between Queensland and the islands from which people were being recruited. Just as people in the islands periodically exercised higher levels of agency in their dealings with colonial trades, this increased level of political and economic negotiation was mirrored in Queensland amongst free or time-expired laborers. As with the islands, peoples’ skill and experience put a premium on their labor, occasionally allowing them limited control over the most exploitative labor contracts. As was revealed by the 1889 Sugar Industry Royal Commission, in Bundaberg there were ‘‘at least 300 South Sea islanders walking about, engaging for short periods’’ according to seasonal demand and withholding their labor at the commencement of harvesting until planters’ urgency drove up their wages.36 As illegally free labor, these people drove their wages to anywhere between five and thirty shillings a week for men between 1884 and 1892. By the 1890s, then, a small number of people had begun to overcome some of the limitations of legal restrictions by collectively working on improving wages and conditions of indenture from outside the contracts.37 Ralph Shlomowitz has statistically demonstrated the increasing popularity by the 1880s and 1890s of remaining in Queensland upon the expiration of indenture periods to seek better contracts with better conditions. Tactics included trading legal allowances for higher wages, boycotting bad employers, driving up wages, and col-

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lectively establishing minimum standards and wages, to which planters were sometimes forced to comply.38 By the 1890s planters were complaining bitterly of the way in which [t]he kanakas are quite alive to their value, and in my opinion understand the art of keeping up wages far better than white men. They never undersell one another. They have a kind of unionism among them which works wonderfully smoothly. Any advance in wages is at once circulated among them, and every kanaka re-engaging demands the increased rate. If it is not given he does not stop to argue the matter. He simply says, ‘‘Oh, very well, me walk about for a month’’, or something to that effect. In the end he gets what he asks.39

By 1901 the problem for planters intensified. The report on the sugar industry commissioned by federal Parliament that year stated indignantly that the ‘‘incipient habit of the experienced Islander’’ of ‘‘holding back and idling in the local towns, in view of making higher rates of wage for the crushing season’’ was a dangerous trend, for they were ‘‘showing some aptitude along lines common to the European labourer’’ and narrowing the profit margin between black and white labor.40 By 1906, so little was the economic difference between some Islander and white labor that affected planters came to see no benefit in keeping black labor in the colony. Richard Donnelly, a cane farmer from Mossman who was in support of deportation, complained bitterly that the price of black labor was excessive and that ‘‘the boys’’ demanded fifteen shillings a week.When asked why this was so, his curt reply was merely ‘‘[b]ecause you taught them to be trade unionists’’.41 The rising costs and falling profits of Queensland’s sugar industry from the late 1880s, as Adrian Graves and Ralph Shlomowitz have recorded in detail, were thus partially caused and exacerbated by this increasing though limited loss of absolute control. The impact that Islanders had on the sugar industry and the nature of their economic consciousness is significant in and of itself. In addition, however, it points us to other changes. In campaigning for better conditions, people were also campaigning for a future—a future in Queensland and on their terms. This is significant in this context because of the regulated and expected temporary status of Islanders investigated in the previous chapter. For their own reasons people were staying in Queensland, and the time-expired laborers at the heart of the emergent economic identity discussed above were therefore forming more permanent communities who defied their merely functional and transitory role to become part of the wider fabric of Queensland’s permanent social makeup. The overwhelming majority of people who stayed in Queensland beyond their first term of indenture found employment by reengaging and traveling ex-

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tensively between plantations and districts seeking seasonal and daily employment. Unlike those under their first contract, who were paid biannually, these laborers, who could often avoid long-term contracts, were paid at the end of a week, or season, creating a community core with access to a small but readily disposable income. This in turn could support those whose savings were depleted during periods of unemployment.42 This element of autonomy gave rise to a mobility that, as we have seen, attracted anxious attention in white society. The administrative agents charged with the surveillance of Islanders expressed increasing frustration at the difficulties they had in tracking the shifting population outside their contractual containments. As the police magistrate in Cairns, Peter Grant, stated in 1906, ‘‘I should say there are 200 [out of contract], if not more. . . . [Y]ou can never tell, because sometimes ‘boys’ clear out of the district without saying anything about it, and others come overland into the district without my knowledge’’.43 Although local inspectors and police maintained that there were difficulties keeping these noncontract Islanders under surveillance, their scrutiny was constant and their record of demographic detail extensive. This is a valuable resource, for it allows us a glimpse of the material indicators of the kind of communities that were growing up off the plantations. From the 1889 Sugar Industry Royal Commission, for example, we know that in Rockhampton in 1899 the two hundred Islanders employed at Yeppoon had chosen not to reengage in contracts elsewhere after the closing of the plantation and had formed ‘‘quite a colony . . . in North Rockhampton, some of whom have married white women, have drays and carts of their own, and are competing with Europeans in the cutting and sale of firewood’’.44 Elsewhere in Queensland the commissioners wrote that despite the ‘‘safeguards already established by the Legislature’’ Islanders were engaging in employment outside the unskilled labor of the sugar industry.45 This trend stabilized by 1892, when of the ninety-five hundred Islanders in the colony, just over 20 percent of the men and nearly 30 percent of the women, were engaged outside the industry.46 The employment they sought ranged from agricultural laborers, (undefined) laborers, and ‘‘general servants’’ for both men and women to that of ‘‘farmer’’, ‘‘market gardener’’, ‘‘fisherman’’, ‘‘woodman, axeman, timbergetter’’, and other manual labor for the men.47 In addition to those who had found employment off the plantations, by the end of the nineteenth century a few had settled in Queensland for a long time, either in the employment of others, on their own leasehold, or, in a few instances, on their freehold properties.48 There were those like Cesar, a Santo Islander who had spent nineteen years engaged in the Pacific labor trade, spending five years on British and Australian plantations in Fiji and twelve years in Queensland before going to Bundaberg in the 1890s to engage at Fairymead.49

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Alternatively, there were those like Leva Wagga and Arali, both from Oba Island. Leva Wagga had been in Queensland for ‘‘more than 12 years’’ working for a ‘‘Mr. Scott of Electra’’, and Arali had been working on Bingera for ten years.50 Others, like Marsali in Mackay, left the plantations to work in the towns, and in 1891 Marsali had been living and working in a fruit shop for two years.51 Finally there were those like Jimmy Murray from Lifu Island, who acquired 160 acres at Bailey’s Creek; Cairns, who left his property to other Lifu Islanders; and Harry Lifu and Willy Ipi, who grew cane on leasehold land at Saltwater Creek.52 These individuals were what the federal government after 1901 would call ‘‘domiciled’’ Islanders, meaning they had settled with families born in Queensland. As individuals they were representative of broader trends exemplified in a 1901 petition signed by three thousand Islanders protesting against forced deportation. It stated that amongst the petitioners, Many of us have learnt to read and write, and have long since ceased to work in service, and have acquired leasehold land which we have improved and built upon, and are now engaged in gardening, fruit growing, fishing, boat building, rough carpentry, net making or mending, shop-keeping, hawking and such like occupations.53

These petitioners represented a growing number of Islanders who were leaseholding cane farmers, gardeners, grocers, tobacconists, boardinghouse keepers, and farmers in districts from as far south as Beenleigh and north to Port Douglas.54 They reported savings of as much as one thousand pounds in the Government Savings Bank, while others held property worth up to six hundred pounds, accumulated from between twelve and forty years’ labor in the colony.55 Along with other ‘‘non-domiciled’’ but nevertheless settled Islanders, they had spent their accumulated wages on ‘‘ground, and houses, and horses, and drays and ploughs and plenty of other things. . . . [T]hey have spent all their money and a lot they have borrowed from their mates in buying these things, and building houses and fences and doing work’’.56 So it was that in 1905, the Islanders growing cane in the Nambour District petitioned the federal government, expressing sentiments that were shared by others leasing land in the Mackay area that ‘‘in the event of their being returned to their own country as proposed, they [should] be paid £100 for every year that was unexpired in their lease, as compensation for losses suffered through such return’’.57 The material details of places and styles of residence, type of employment, and economic solvency indicates the ways in which Islanders were investing in the permanence of their own communities. While people on leasehold or free-

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hold land only ever constituted a small minority of the Islander population, they represented the center of a wider more mobile and transitory community.58 In the Brisbane, Mackay, Rockhampton, and Cairns areas, those who leased land did not do so alone, but as part of cohesive communities.59 The sentiment of a Lifu Islander, Sigges, who was interviewed by the Deportation Royal Commission, was typical. Having been in Queensland since 1871, he had traveled ‘‘all over Queensland’’ since his three-year contract in Brisbane had expired, and in 1906 he had been living for twelve years on rented land at Homebush, Mackay, with his wife and children. He stated in evidence when arguing his desire to stay in Queensland that rather than be deported he wanted to stay where he had established a life, but if ‘‘they send the other ‘boys’, I will go too’’.60 Like many individuals who gave evidence throughout the sugar districts, Sigges wanted to stay, but not alone, and his argument was collectively rather than individually oriented and articulated in terms of collective principles and rights. The ‘‘other boys’’ Sigges referred to in 1906 were the ‘‘non-domiciled’’ majority whose permanent presence was mobile and fluid in their search for employment. The permanent mobility of this fluid population is indicated by some of the lingering material traditions described in the oral histories of the 1970s by interviewees who recalled how the old men would ‘‘cart their stuff around in their own bag, everybody, every one of those island men carried a bag on their shoulders so whatever they had was in that bag, that was their worldly possessions’’.61 Despite the constant movement, Islanders established a significant physical presence in and on the outskirts of sugar towns. For although they only ever constituted a single-figure percentage of the population in Queensland, in the sugar towns their numbers were concentrated in relatively large communities. On plantations alone their numbers could be as large as 300, as on Victoria/Fairford in Ingham in 1884, with a wider district population of nearly 1,000.62 In Bundaberg in the 1880s the Islander population fluctuated between 2,000 and 3,000 in a radius of about thirty miles.63 Between June 1884 and June 1885 the Maryborough District averaged an Islander population of 1,299; Bundaberg averaged 2,124; Mackay averaged 3,808; Townsville averaged 875; and Ingham averaged1,796.64 When not living on the plantations or other places of employment, the majority of Islanders settled in temporary settlements on the fringes of all the major sugar centers where Islander and indigenous communities lived and supported each other through more difficult periods of unemployment.65 While the location and population of these settlements frequently moved around, we have seen in the previous chapter, through the snapshot of a camp in 1889 in which Charlie Eureka was killed, the close and ongoing relationships that pulled these settlements together. The testimonies showed that beyond their physically temporary nature, there was a permanence in the rela-

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tionships between the people who made up the camps.66 There were similar socalled fringe communities in all the sugar districts: in Cairns, on a ridge above Alligator Creek in North Rockhampton, and on the north and south banks of the Pioneer River in Mackay.67 Having established a core of permanently settled communities in Queensland, by the turn of the nineteenth century Islanders had also begun to establish familial links and ties to Queensland. As we saw in the last chapter, by the 1890s the nature and makeup of Islanders’ families was a source of great anxiety, such that extensive and now valuable information was collected. In1901, figures were collected showing that over three hundred men and two hundred women had married in the colony and nearly six hundred children had been born, many of whom were attending state schools.68 Despite the fact that these official figures represented only a minority of the number of Islanders who came to Queensland, they remained the focus of colonial fixation in the years leading up to compulsory deportation.69 Key amongst white concerns was that of miscegenation and ‘‘the extent to which Pacific Islanders are reproducing their own race in Queensland’’ or attempting to ‘‘breed piebalds’’.70 In 1903 a return was requested by the federal government showing the number of so-called ‘‘domiciled’’ Islanders in Queensland married to Europeans, Aborigines, and Islanders and their number of children. The concern with collecting these figures stemmed from fears like those of Alfred Deakin, who said of the findings of related statistical returns that settled Islanders, if allowed to remain in Queensland, would irreparably impair the principle of a ‘‘White Australia’’. If these people were allowed to settle permanently without restriction of any kind as to their occupation or supervision, they might become a source of real danger. The marked disparity between the number of men and women suggests that alliances with persons of other races . . . will be continued and multiplied to the danger of that purity of race, the preservation of which is one of the objects of [deportation] legislation.71

It was not simply unions with white women that so threatened the country’s bloodlines, but the increasing number of unions between Islander men and indigenous women. From 1897 the registrar general annually listed, as he had for Islanders since the 1870s, the number of Aboriginal women married during the year, and the Aboriginal protector diligently listed, in individual detail, the number of Aboriginal women whose applications and requests to marry Islander men he had approved or declined.72 In 1906 it was finally established that at least forty white women and sixty Aboriginal women statewide were married to Islander men.

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Deep-seated colonial anxieties regarding miscegenation, although not captured by the dryness of the statistical data listing the familial connections of Islanders, are nevertheless implied in the initial curiosity that requested the collection of information. We can see that while it was of some concern to many to keep Aboriginal and Pacific Islander people apart, fears of Pacific Island men with white women ran far deeper. This was manifested in rumors of such moral depravities as the forced prostitution or sex slavery of these white women. In the Nambour District in 1901, for example, the marriage of an Islander man and a European woman resulted in claims in the Patriot newspaper that ‘‘a white woman not only cohabits with kanakas near Nambour, but has sold her daughter, a girl not more than fourteen years of age, to them’’.73 The rumors were quelled by the home secretary. [T]he woman in question is legally married to a Pacific Islander, who is and has a comfortable home. No other Islanders live with them. Her daughter, whose father was a European, went to stay with her about a month ago under somewhat distressing circumstances . . . [and she] has been residing in Brisbane, with relatives.74

The significance, for our purposes, of the families Islanders established in Queensland is twofold. First, rather than being significant for the fact of who Islanders were establishing families with, it is of significance that they were establishing families at all in a context that actively discouraged permanence of settlement. Second, white anxiety over both the physical and genetic permanence of Islanders would culminate in intensified pressure to remove them from the sugar industry and the white Australia of the post-federation period. The implications of deportation for Australia’s South Sea Island communities threatened to be a devastating blow for those such as Sigges, Cesa, Leva Wagga, and Arali, who had made new homes for themselves in Queensland. By this time parts of Islander communities were integral to Queensland’s social landscape. Based as they were on the foundations of families, landedness, and histories, these communities would not easily be uprooted. In the political struggle that resisted deportation, the clearest picture yet emerges of a unique Australian South Sea Island community already accustomed, through limited industrial protest, to unified struggle. In the deportation period this community would come together as a self-identified political and social entity and in their protests would express the conditions under which Queensland-based communities had been forged. As the previously considered 1901 petition put it,

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Many of us have been continuously resident in Queensland for upwards of twenty years, and during these years our parents and brothers in the islands have died and we are forgotten there; villages have disappeared, and some of our tribes have been exterminated; we love the land in which we live, and all our friends are here. In some instances the Islands from which we were brought have passed under foreign protectorates, and tribal lands have been appropriated, or sold by our Chiefs.75

Such campaigns and protest culminated in the establishment of a Royal Commission on Deportation, to which a wide-ranging and varied collection of evidence was presented. Some that testified wished to return to their islands, such as Maluini from Malaita, who had been in the colony for twenty years. When asked whether he wanted to go home and whether he was ‘‘frightened to go home’’, he simply answered: ‘‘Yes, I want to go home. . . . No; I am not frightened’’.76 Others preferred to stay, but like Andrew Toysin, who had been in Queensland for twenty-one years, this was on the proviso that ‘‘any time I like to go I go’’.77 Others like Noah Sabbo, who was born in Queensland, stated, when asked if he wanted to return to his father’s Island of Api, ‘‘I would like to go and come back again’’, as did his father, who ‘‘would like to go and see the country, and then come back to Queensland again’’.78 There were those like Goliern Narto, who had been brought to Queensland so long ago that ‘‘if we go home, we belong to nobody’’. Her father, mother, brother and sister, and closest relatives, she had been told, were all dead.79 Others like Sam Keree wanted to stay, not out of any great love of Queensland, but simply because ‘‘I have been twenty years in Queensland altogether . . . do not want to go home; too old; think more better stop where I work all my life . . . used to food all the same in Queensland’’.80 Whole communities, like the Nambour planters, the cane farmers in Mackay, and those settled in North Rockhampton, Ayr, and the Proserpine also presented evidence. These communities had children born in Queensland, some of whom were attending state and Sunday schools, and in wishing to stay, they were willing to negotiate conditions of residence, stating that having been in Queensland ‘‘so long, we are different now to the Polynesians on the Islands, and if we are forced to go home, we will find it difficult to live there’’.81 Initially suggesting that the government grant an area of land in the far west or north— a suggestion that in the hands of commissioners and police became a plan for Islander missions ‘‘on the lines of the aboriginal reserves’’—some communities were willing, if necessary, to ‘‘be put on one big settlement’’ with enough land to farm.82 Others were not willing to be shut up on reserves, arguing that

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it was a solution that defeated the original request. Although initially interested in the offer from commissioners to ‘‘set apart a big reserve where all the ‘boys’ who have been many years in Queensland could live with their wives and families and farm on their own account’’, the farmers whom Noah Sabbo represented from Mackay changed their minds, stating that they were not willing to be ‘‘shifted about’’ again and simply wanted to remain on the land they were already leasing.83 George Yassari, too, who represented ‘‘all the coloured labour on the Proserpine’’, suggested that instead of having a ‘‘big tract of land set apart for them as a reserve’’, they could take possession of land at Seaforth near Ayr so that ‘‘we could then work for ourselves, and we would not be any trouble to the white labour’’.84 People who presented evidence to the 1906 Deportation Royal Commission also took the opportunity not just to present their case for remaining in Queensland, but also to protest the principle. As Peter Wien, a Lifu Islander from North Rockhampton, stated, We are very sorry, and we have plenty feeling. We know white people don’t like black men in this country, and hate the sight of us; . . . these ‘‘boys’’ no come from their islands by their own will. Ship come to islands and make fool of them, and fetch them to this country. . . . I am ashamed to think you drive away people like that. That is a thing I would not do.85

Henry Tongoa was more blunt: ‘‘what about the white men in the country belong to the ‘boys’? If the ‘boys’ go back what about the white men in the Islands? If the ‘boys’ have to leave Queensland then the white man will have to leave the islands’’.86 The protests against forced deportation were marginally successful. Those people considered most ‘‘domiciled’’ were allowed to stay, but only in a society that afforded them no rights of legal employability, freedom of movement, or citizenship. But underlying this success was that of having effectively expressed a collective identity forged on the cane fields and beyond, which underpinned the internal divisions and rivalries between Island or plantation groups. As the principled protests against deportation and the collective bargaining for higher wages might suggest, a common interest had been forged in Queensland. But it was not all autonomous. A revealing aspect of the protests against deportation is that at the heart of many requests to be allowed to remain in Queensland were statements regarding the lack of anything to go home to and the loss of gardens, land, kinship, and even affinity. The communities that had formed by the turn of the nineteenth century, therefore, were ones forged not just in defiance of the violence of the colonial context, but by it.

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Deakin’s idea in 1902 that the Islander population was so fractured by ‘‘differences of language, customs, and even of race’’ that there was a total ‘‘absence of bonds of sympathy between them’’ was clearly misplaced. While it is certain that the community was at times divided, and often on the basis of islands of origin, it is nevertheless clear that the islands remained an important and active bond between individuals. This recognition differs slightly, but in important ways, from existing historical accounts of the retention of indigenous cultural practices and tribalized island rivalry. The difference is one of emphasis, semantically exemplified by the passive and active and contractive and expansive implications of the two terms ‘‘retention’’ and ‘‘maintenance’’. The development of island-based identities in Queensland was not a contraction into a remembered world of narrow social networks, exclusivity, and petty squabbles. They were social adjustments of existing networks of relationships that had existed in home villages and islands, but were transformed in the context of Queensland. In other words, Islanders expressed in the nineteenth century strong and proud community identities based on their islands, as Man Aoba, Man Malaita, or Man Solomon: ‘‘they used to say ‘Old Man Tanna’, or ‘Old Man Ambrym’, you know they were sort of proud that way’’.87 People identified with whole islands and entire island groups that had colonially specific boundaries and names, and irrespective of genealogies or of being from coastal or inland villages. These were, therefore, identities articulated by people who were brought into situations requiring change and adaptation as part of a continuity of the colonial period in the Pacific. This occurred within the much wider context of the labor contract and the galvanizing circumstances of being black in a white colony. In the end, through the harshness of the colonial context and the contact and interactions with indigenous communities, European settlers, and Chinese and other Southeast Asian communities, Islander communities of Australian South Sea Islanders were formed. Although of diverse language and island groups, they came together by the end of the nineteenth century as a seed community, such that some in 1906 would state there was a marked difference between Pacific Islanders in the islands and themselves as South Sea Islanders in Queensland. The maintenance of this community’s cultural identities happened in the lapses of control in the labor contract. The Lifu Islander had drummed at night after a day’s work, and the children in Mackay were educated on weekends, at the end of their parents’ working week and the children’s school week.88 Likewise during the nineteenth century, the sing-sings, feasts, and fights were planned in advance and occurred at night or on the weekends away from the towns when no arrests for absconding would be made. Islanders actively maintained their medical, spiritual, and agricultural knowledges, spoke their languages, and identified with their islands as part of an affirming, unifying, and

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supportive process in Queensland as a response to the pressures of the colonial world. They banded together towards the end of the century in farming and mobile communities off the plantations, financially assisting each other during periods of unemployment and collectively working towards marginal improvements in their conditions of labor. The community cohesion that developed in the nineteenth century was therefore colonially specific, and Islanders’ maintenance of their indigenous practices was done in as active a way as their formation of laboring unions. In turning our attention to individual and intra-group violence, we are able with this background to focus more clearly on its social specificity and what it can tell us about the impact of the colonial world. Before doing that, however, we will turn once again to the colonial context—this time to the heart of the colonial project and the ubiquitous potential for force that resided in the very structures of colonialism’s civilizing mission.

5. The State Inside Colonial Violence, Law, and Order

In fact, it was only possible to rule a savage race, and the Australian aboriginals in particular, by brute force, by showing him that you are his master. . . . [T]he only way to keep him down was by using a firm hand, and the only way to ensure a firm hand was to show them that the whites were superior animals and could beat them down. –Arthur Palmer, Colonial Secretary, Queensland Parliamentary Debates (1880)

IF WE PAUSE at the outset of this chapter to take stock of the image that has

emerged so far of Queensland’s sugar districts during the nineteenth century, we see a world where Islanders were increasingly exercising a level of autonomy and developing honed skills in manipulating their situation to their advantage. We have also seen the responding efforts of planters, colonial administrators, and the settler-public to define and categorize in order to control any sign of independence on the part of Islanders. This ordering played a crucial role in the deployment of violence. On the frontiers and the borderlands of settlement in Queensland we have observed violence in its extra-legal, unauthorized, or semilegal modes. In the actions of recruiters, planters, semi-legitimized forces like the Native Mounted Police, and the individual actions of colonial administrators, we have seen violence serving as a cathartic outlet for welling anxieties, fears, and resentment. In all cases it carried an official sanction that operated passively and authorized force by doing little more than nothing. The legitimacy of violence, in other words, was often inherent in the various categories of race through which colonized peoples were defined. But this inherentness, assumed to be natural, was surely as constructed as were the categories of race to which they were attached. It is to this careful, considered, and weighted process that we turn in this chapter. We move from the outer rims of the colonial project to the administrative and legal heart from which all else radiated. Here, as we will see, violence against colonized peoples was being actively defined and pro-

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duced with a dynamic that is reminiscent of those we have considered on the frontiers and on Queensland’s borderlands. The difference with the violence we consider in this chapter is that here we view its incorporation into the very legal and moral structures of colonial society and rule. While we considered violence in chapter 3 under the theme of control and containment, in this chapter we focus on that of discipline. We will begin at the level of the intimate and very individualized actions of a white overseer and trace in concentric circles the discussions of violence that mediated relations at this very local level. In day-to-day interactions between planters, overseers, and Islander laborers, violence was authorized as discipline, but not in an unthinking way. This was done through as careful a process as that which defined categories of race. Violence was investigated, evaluated, condemned, and defended through commissions of inquiry and court cases that defined excessive and unauthorized violence on the one hand and acceptable and legal violence on the other. While this process was certainly mediated by notions of race, it gained its moral imperative, like colonialism at large, from the idea of the civilizing mission. As we have seen with the logic of force on the frontiers in chapter 1, violence was considered a legitimate form of discipline, particularly for savages, and to discipline was to civilize. Violence, in other words, was a civilizing force. To this extent it was rendered invisible as it became consistent and blended with colonialism’s moral authority. In tracing all of this we roam widely from the confines of the plantations to the industrial upheavals in Queensland’s western districts during the 1890s and back again to the watery frontiers of the western Pacific. In doing so we gain a feel for the breadth of purchase these ideas held and the resulting structural continuity of violence. Administering Violence: Discipline and ‘‘Kanaka Standards’’ In the 1970s Kay Saunders recovered a litany of cases of violence by European employers, overseers, or field managers against Islander laborers within coerced labor agreements. Layering incidents of violence, Saunders painted a picture aimed primarily at rejecting the orthodoxy current at the time, which maintained that ‘‘there was no deliberate cruelty, no floggings or other harsh treatment such as the Negro slaves in America had undergone’’. As Saunders showed, this was clearly untrue. The records of Queensland’s courts, inquests, and inquiries into death and injuries reveal case upon case of violence against Islanders, the brutality of which stands alone and needs not be substantiated through comparisons to U.S. slavery. In addition, the passed-on memories of those who suffered the chain gangs, regular floggings, and other, less obvious

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forms of punishment and violent treatment have been recorded by the oral history projects of the 1970s.1 Such historical recoveries have adequately established that the relationship between planters or overseers and indentured laborers could be and often was one of brutality. From this foundation we can go on to consider how such individual cases of violence were linked and legitimized by their wider context. We will begin with the suicide in 1897 of a white overseer in Bundaberg. The tragedy of his death revealed wider pressures and trends, and an inquiry that was set up in the aftermath brought to the surface clear exclamations from planters and overseers of their rights to use violence and the perceived obligation of the state, through Polynesian inspectors and police, to protect that right. While these were partially the expressions of local protocols, they point to the background presence of more formalized standards from which planters and overseers saw themselves as drawing their sanction. In March 1897, before an inquiry of the Public Service Board into the conduct of the Polynesian inspector for the Bundaberg District, Henry St. George Caulfield, planters aired their grievances over the interference of the inspector in the daily running of their plantations. The inquiry was in response to a petition raised by local planters after the suicide of Harry Wessel, the son and overseer of long-time employer of Pacific Islanders Martin Wessel of Belle View. The lead-up to Harry’s suicide involved a gradual souring of relations between Caulfield and the Wessel family. In 1896 Caulfield had cautioned Martin Wessel for engaging in such practices as confining and locking up Islanders and the forcible removal from an Islander woman, Rantookie, of her child, whose father Caulfield believed was one of Martin Wessels’ sons. Those sons, John and Harry, were also the subjects of various claims of assault from Islanders, and after being fined for two assaults in 1895 and 1896, Harry found himself for a third time under investigation in late 1896. The day after the third complaint of assault was brought against him, Harry Wessel shot himself. Martin Wessel argued that the inspector’s involvement in the private affairs at Belle View caused a shift in the balance of authority and power in what he stated was a notoriously tenuous relationship between overseers and Islander laborers on the plantations. Following Caulfield’s first intrusion, he stated, My son never had proper control over the laborers after that as overseer. Prior to my sons [sic] death he told me—‘‘It is no good I can’t work these Kanakas Mr. Caulfield wont [sic] give me justice—he wont listen to me and says he would believe the Kanakas before he would believe me’’. . . . I remember the day of my sons [sic] death—the boys would not obey him; he told me and he told his wife. . . . My son shot himself: through trouble with kanakas.2

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Harry had complained two or three times to Caulfield of ‘‘the insubordination of the boys under him’’, but felt he had been summarily ignored.3 Worse, instead of having his complaints dealt with, Harry had been charged and fined for his use of violence. This was an act that Martin Wessel felt had precipitated the spiraling lack of control that ended abruptly with Harry’s suicide. For with each reprimand, laborers’ insolence and disobedience had intensified to further disempower Harry as an overseer who had been robbed of his ability to use violence as a corrective force. At issue at the Caulfield inquiry was the extent to which the protector role of the inspector of Polynesians was tempered by employers’ rights and needs in controlling labor under the conventions of the master/servant relationship and the legalities of the labor contract. Harry Wessel’s suicide stood for petitioning planters as the ultimate and tragic result of protection exceeding reasonable boundaries. Other ramifications were described in the inquiry’s testimonies. Angus Gibson of Bingera Plantation complained of the insolence of one Islander whose rights to medical care had recently been defended by Caulfield.4 The overseer at Sunnyside Plantation, Henry Cattermull, also complained that Caulfield had told laborers that Cattermull would be punished if they were given short rations. That evening, he stated, ‘‘several guns were fired off and a house was burned down and the next day a quantity of cane was burned. . . . [T]he day after . . . some twenty boys cleared out’’ and did not return to work for three days.5 These examples were proof of the point that Caulfield gave ‘‘too much credence to the boys and too much protection to them’’.6 As the experienced overseer Robert Shepherd stated, Caulfield did not understand that ‘‘it is a common thing for boys to turn on one and then they have to be hammered [and] the best way to deal with the Kanaka is to use a certain amount of force with them’’.7 Caulfield’s ‘‘pampering’’ of Islanders was presented to the inquiry as a corrosive intrusion that was potentially life threatening in its support of Islanders’ disobedience and amounted to a conspiratorial attack on planters, their system of production, and, therefore, the sugar industry. For Caulfield’s part, he dismissed the accusations, stating that he never privileged Islanders’ needs over planters, actively avoided legal action against planters and overseers, and in ten years had not taken more than two overseers to court.8 The inquiry believed Caulfield, took his part, and found him to be ‘‘eminently fitted for the position he holds’’. The issue was laid to rest.9 Harry Wessell’s suicide and the inquiry it sparked reveal an underlying tension within the indentured labor system. The average plantation consisted of a handful of white managers, overseers, administrators, and skilled laborers who were significantly outnumbered by two or three hundred Islander laborers characterized as Kanaka boys on the one hand and intractably savage Melanesians,

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or Pacific cannibals, on the other.10 Even as the old plantations gave way to the central milling system, with its smaller farms and work gangs, planters and farm owners were still outnumbered by their laborers, and, as was frequently pointed out, the ‘‘Black and inferior races’’ were of such numbers that ‘‘the white employer or overseer is more or less at their mercy should they take it into their heads to resort to violence’’.11 The use of too much and too little violence by overseers was considered dangerous in equal measure, and power dynamics were therefore such that planters’ and overseers’ domination was a delicate balance of supreme confidence plagued by self-defensive doubts and anxieties. Under such conditions any sign of recalcitrance amongst Islanders was considered dangerous, and violence was widely and variously sanctioned as a way of restoring and maintaining absolute obedience. Martin Wessel’s defense of his son, for example, was that he was very ‘‘sensitive . . . [and] never assaulted the Kanakas unless he was insulted’’, a defense that Harry had used himself in the initial case of assault.12 As Caulfield testified, ‘‘The case was a very gross one, the Islander complained that he had been taken to a spot alone and beaten. . . . [A]s far as I can remember [Wessel] stated the boy was insolent and he declined orders’’.13 Wessel’s violent reactions to insolence, if hypersensitive, were not unique. A number of incidents testify to the wider disciplinary logic of reactions such as Wessel’s. In 1879, Corah, who was employed in Bundaberg, described to the Court of Petty Sessions his treatment by an overseer intent on making him work harder. Mr Chaff fellow . . . call me come out—he hit me on side with fist, me go outside me catch hoe me start work—he go along house—he get gun he shoot me— he fired gun at me. . . . In morning he said boys go out grass—look after bullock—he said you come out—me come out he hit me—me no lift hoe no try to hit him.14

In 1884 in Mackay, a laborer, Tucaro, was hospitalized for over a month by his overseer because, as Tucaro put it, ‘‘I did not do right. . . . I did not fill the barrel with water’’.15 Finally, in the following year Morlay, who was employed in Bundaberg, was beaten by his overseer for talking back in defense of a new arrival. Overseer say long Caro what name you no work quick. When he hit him Caro me say what for you hit him Caro me no stop nothing. Caro no savey talk he new chum. When me talk overseer leave him Caro come hit him me. He hit me first time long face . . . me fall down stop long ground, me no get up then he hit me find bye and bye two fellow bone belong me broke. He hit me long hard finish

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then he hit me long leg and me hold him boot when me stop long ground. . . . Bye and bye me close up die and me call him two fellow Tom and Tetumin.16

Wessel’s behavior, his father’s assertion that his being insulted by Kanakas was life threatening, and the shared hypersensitivity for insubordination of other overseers tells us at the very least that within the indentured labor contract perceptions of control were volatile, expectations of obedience were total, and insubordination, ‘‘turning on one’’, or challenging authority could be as simple as pausing too long after a given order, not doing work properly, or speaking out of turn. Obedience, or ‘‘good behavior’’, constituted highly tuned notions that were communicated, refined, and redefined through, and in relation to, the operation of force. So it was that when a case came before the Polynesian inspector for the Johnstone River District of ‘‘a boy refusing to carry logs and sleepers [who] . . . used some very rude language to the white man, and the white man lost his temper and hit the boy hard’’, the judgment he and the court made was that there ‘‘was something to be said on both sides’’.17 The boy should have followed orders and should not have sworn at his overseer, and the overseer should not have hit him so hard. These cases may be explained simply by saying that overseers were brutal people and the prevalence of brutality amongst them was due simply to the kind of personality that the work might attract. But this would be too dismissive. While the 1897 inquiry shows that the worst overseers were administratively regulated by protective labor regulations, at the same time this regulation helped to normalize and articulate sanctions for force in the name of discipline. That is to say, overseers, thugs or not, operated within a regulated context that served as a robust supportive structure for their actions. The Bundaberg planters’ feigned or actual inability to comprehend Harry Wessel’s crime of assault in the context of insubordination from Islanders was founded in the sanctions granted by the Pacific Island Labourers Act, whose own sanctions were descended from the conventions of generations of masters and servants legislation and race-based labor relations. As such, insubordination was a legally punishable offense, and the use of force in the management of insulting or insubordinate laborers was a customary or traditional right.18 As Governor George Arthur had written in1835 with regard to European convict labor under the master/servant contract in Tasmania, the legislated relationship provided for certain conventions of force, and ‘‘the master may draw from his knowledge of their crimes a sanction, quite as satisfactory as that arising from difference of colour for any severity he would practice against them’’.19 Within the master/servant relationship, color did not only sanction force, but did so in the service of defining and managing power and social order. As

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Photo 10. Social order in the cane fields. Source: ‘‘Kanakas—Cairns District, 1890s’’. Photographer unknown. ‘‘Kanaka’’ Box, John Oxley Collection, State Library of Queensland. Negative number 63220.

we have seen in a number of cases, the legal provision for this was inherently ill defined and flexible such that judicial discretion was crucial in testing disciplinary conventions. In 1881, for example, Masserach, an Islander who took his employer, G. Greathead, to court for assault, testified in the Bundaberg Court of Petty Sessions that ‘‘O’Hagen told me I put the corn wrong and called me a devil—master came up angry and hit me—O’Hagen was saucy first time and then I was saucy—Greathead took a stick and hit me along of head and held me tight by the throat’’.20 In evidence, Masserach was cross-examined by his employer, to whom he said, ‘‘You hit me along of head with stick—I was cross and get an axe you hit me like a dog—suppose you no hit me I no touch you’’.21 In the circumstances of Masserach threatening to defend himself against being beaten, the court found in favor of Greathead. The case was dismissed, and Greathead succeeded in bringing a conviction against Masserach for threatening language.22 Greathead’s authority was thus restored and the reach of disciplinary sanctions redefined. As the involvement of the courts in helping to define the limits of discipline indicates, the role of violence as a corrective tool within the labor contract was not simply defined by employers. It was instead understood and defined in

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wider legal and administrative circles, and often, as Arthur’s 1835 comment on convict labor might indicate, these legal sanctions were validated in direct relationship to race. This was an obvious concern of the previously discussed 1869 and 1876 Select Committees, which investigated the operation of the trade. In response to the accusations of widespread abuse leveled by the colony’s immigration agent Richard Sheridan, the growing group of Kanaka experts, planters, police magistrates, and Polynesian inspectors articulated for the commissioners a standardized management guideline of firm but fair (‘‘fairly and at the same time firmly’’ 23). Some indication of what was fair is given in the fact that those considered good employers ‘‘allowed the same rations [for Islanders] as white men . . . except that the allowance of beef was reduced’’.24 Thomas Sadlier, the police magistrate and inspector of Polynesians at Tambo, offered some idea of what was considered fairly firm when asked what would encourage him to prosecute a European overseer. His reply was that in contrast to the treatment of white laborers, whipping Islanders was not necessarily maltreatment, as long as it remained within the boundaries of necessary ‘‘correction’’ and did not reach ‘‘undue’’ levels of violence.25 Like the Caulfield inquiry of 1897, these Select Committees and other government inquiries and investigative court cases shared a role in testing and defining the validity of violence in the employer to bonded-laborer relationship. This process, moreover, cultivated a banality that embedded racialized violence by rendering its performance nonvisible. Whipping, for example, disappeared as long as it was within the boundaries of necessary correction. We can observe this banality more closely in two exemplary inquests into the deaths and presumed suicides of Islander laborers. m

On 28 September 1874, the naked body of Hammangi from San Cristobal Island, who had absconded from Branscombe Plantation one week earlier, was found on the road about seventeen miles from Mackay. Hammangi was emaciated, had sustained serious head injuries, and his arms were bound behind his back above the elbows. The inquest ruled that his cause of death was ‘‘starvation’’ under no suspicious circumstances.26 The ruling made no reference to the involvement of a local field manager, James Muggleton, who testified to having been with Hammangi the day before he died. He had tried to take Hammangi into Mackay on his dray, but ‘‘the Deceased had assaulted and wounded a black boy of Muggleton’s’’, during which struggle Hammangi had received his head injuries.27 In deciding to return home, Muggleton had bound Hammangi’s hands and tied him to a tree by the road. When he returned two hours later he said that Hammangi had freed himself from the tree, and rather than searching for him, Muggleton

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continued into Mackay, not returning to search until the following evening. At this time Hammangi was found dead on the road.28 Robert McBurney, who conducted the post mortem, estimated Hammangi’s time of death to have been ‘‘forty eight hours previous’’ to his viewing the body the night Hammangi was found. According to this official narrative, therefore, Hammangi potentially died from starvation a few hours after Muggleton left him tied to the tree.29 Both McBurney and John Stuart, the inspector of Native Police stationed at Nebo, stated that although Hammangi’s bound arms were ‘‘so tied that it would have been impossible for him to get food’’, they were not ‘‘tied more tightly than was necessary to prevent a desperate man from escaping’’.30 It is possible that Muggleton was implicated in Hammangi’s death, whether through malice or indifference, but little weight was given to the fact that Hammangi was apparently in the last stages of death by starvation when Muggleton tied him naked to a tree. Instead, McBurney’s mention of Hammangi being ‘‘a desperate man’’ was a hint as to why Muggleton so confidently described his own involvement. As he stated in his testimony, Hammangi was an absconder, he had attacked Muggleton’s servant Anewah minutes before being bound, and Muggleton’s reason for not taking him home was that his ‘‘wife and family were on the place’’ and he had ‘‘no place . . . in which he could have secured’’ Hammangi.31 He had, under the circumstances, taken reasonable measures. Binding, solitary confinement, and other treatment associated with captivity were reasonable and standard as mere extensions of the rights of employers under the indentured labor contract. Hence in 1884, when news under the headline of ‘‘only a blasted nigger!’’ reported the discovery of a ‘‘half dingoeaten corpse of a Kanaka, whose hands were tied behind his back with a rope’’, James Murray, the justice of the peace who viewed the body, stated that he could ‘‘find no traces of violence or anything that would indicate the cause of death’’.32 The requested investigation did not linger on the issue of the bound hands, for it was established that this was the result of a routine response to what was mad or ‘‘cranky’’ behavior. As his employer, John Macdonald, had explained, Locy became suddenly ill and was extremely violent in his manner so much so that he got hold of an axe . . . and commenced flourishing it about amongst his fellow Islanders trying to cut them down. . . . I . . . caught him and took him back to the hut myself. I got some spun yarn and made fast round his wrists the spun yarn. . . . He was then made fast to a post in the Hut to the end of a long rope, these measures were necessary for the safety of his fellow Islanders.33

Locy escaped, his corpse was found one month later, and the implied cause of death, by default, was ‘‘natural causes’’.

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In each of these cases, the potential for violence against the deceased was overshadowed by references to their own violence or instability. I make mention of them here not to point to any suspension of normal standards of coronial investigation, nor do I necessarily question the findings. I would, however, leave open the role that localized ‘‘conspiracies of silence’’ might have played in the two inquests.34 Certainly in the case of Hammangi, the justice of the peace was a local planter, Alfred Hewitt of Pleystowe Plantation, and allowance could be made for the fact that regulatory figures such as justices of the peace, police magistrates, and inspectors of Polynesians were locals and subject to local political and interpersonal pressures, tensions, and personal investments.35 This was particularly so when the implication of a European in the death of an Islander was involved. As Caulfield would discover in 1897, social discomfort in the small communities they administered could be too high a price to pay by some inspectors for their defense of Islanders’ interests. That said, if we are to assume that the narrative events in each case above represent exactly what happened, we can still observe a certain administrative blindness to the treatment of Locy and Hammangi. What is significant for our purposes about these inquests is that the attorney general, police commissioner, immigration agent, and colonial secretary, or those distanced levels of the colonial administration to whom deaths were reported, were less subject to local pressures and conspiracies of silence. When copies of inquests into the deaths such as those of Hammangi and Locy were forwarded to the attorney general and police commissioner, their oversights and contradictions reflect more than local understandings.36 As official inquest narratives these cases offer a glimpse of more generalized sanctions and conventions for force. An outcome in the cases above, however individualized and particular, was a further standardization under the broad sanction of the employment contract, of the practices used on Hammangi and Locy to prevent their escape. It is neither adequate nor fair simply to state that there was no real official concern within regulatory bodies about the harsh treatment or abuse of Islanders. It is clear, simply in the correspondence to the colonial secretary’s office from local inspectors and police that there was concern. But perhaps, as Richard Sheridan explained in 1876, legal and local contexts limited individual responses. When asked during the Select Committee of that year why he did not take action ‘‘when [he] saw the marks of the blows cut through the skin’’ of laborers he inspected, Sheridan merely replied, ‘‘I could not procure a conviction. . . . [T]he evidence of a Polynesian is not accepted in a court of law, and I was not going to appear in a Police court and fail’’.37 Similarly, on two separate occasions in Mackay in 1872 and 1877, when the police received reports of laborers having been beaten to death, swift action was taken to attempt some legal punishment of the accused overseers, and immediate orders were given

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to exhume the bodies for inspection.38 In both cases the concern of those who received reports was palpable in their later communications. But in both cases their investigative attention focused on the fact that the bodies had been illegally buried without notification. In their immediate response, although concern for apprehending possible murderers of Islanders was expressed, the illegality of and the possibilities of punishment for their deaths lay with these illegitimate burials. Like indifference, concern for the welfare of Islanders and for the punishment of whites who committed crimes against them is a signal. While brutality against Islanders under the sanction of employment contracts was often a local or individualized understanding, these were catered to by broader colonial structures such as the limitations of legal processes. Individual concerns and efforts, such as those of Sheridan in the 1870s and Caulfield in the 1890s, were therefore largely ineffective even when they had the in-principle support, as Caulfield would have, of their governing departments. In the end, legal spaces were carved into the colonial structure by the labor contract and the regulations governing it. These spaces generated what were widely understood as Kanaka standards that constituted the overall structure buttressing the notions of discipline we have considered. Within legal spaces of the colonial social structure, normal white standards of violence were suspended and distinct Kanaka ones evolved. These Kanaka standards were systemic and are most visible in the painful manifestation of perpetually high and perpetually tolerated mortality and illness rates. Queensland’s registrar general estimated in 1889 that from 1868 an average of at least two out of every ten people that arrived from the Islands died.39 Figure 1 (see chap. 2) indicates that between 1868 and 1906 the official annual mortality rate for Islanders rarely dropped below 6 percent, compared to the colony-wide rate of between 1 to 2 percent.40 Such figures were considered regrettable but ultimately not preventable and as such were maintained at a standard of five times the white rate. During the 1882–1885 period, for example, widespread concern regarding the alarming increases in Islanders’ rates of mortality, which had reached as high as15 percent, evaporated when the1885 Royal Commission and consequent government bans on particular recruiting grounds forced a return to the pre-1882 standard of 6 percent. The Royal Commission of 1885, through its focus on the exceptional role played by recruiting atrocities in the rising rates of death, confirmed planter and government suspicions. The rates of death in Queensland were simply the result of the illegal importation of an ‘‘inferior’’ quality of laborer. As John Drysdale of Pioneer Plantation put it, ‘‘A great many boys are of very poor physique and under age; the consequence is that a great many of them die. Out of one lot of seventy-eight boys that we got last year, twenty-three were dead within ten months after they came’’.41 The Royal Commission’s conclusion focused only on irregularities as the

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source of high mortality and did not scrutinize the failure of the Polynesian Labourers Act to require compulsory medical attention for Islanders or to regulate better labor conditions. Neither did it scrutinize the official, legislated Kanaka standards of food and shelter, planters’ strict adherence to which never brought down the average mortality rates.42 These were sustained at five times the European rate, therefore, not through illegal abuse, but through planters’ banal conformity to legal standards. A similar conclusion was reached in an inquiry into excessive mortality rates in Maryborough in 1880. The investigating doctors Wray and Thompson damned the Maryborough plantations of Cran & Co., blaming their work regime, food, accommodation, contaminated water, medical care, and violent treatment for the plantations’ excessive rates of death.43 The immigration agent, Charles Horrocks, concurred with Wray and Thompson, adding his own suggestion that the lack of warm and clean clothing and blankets during the cool seasons, which were not required by the Polynesian Labourers Act, could have been related to the pulmonary diseases that were proving so fatal to Islanders.44 Outraged at the implications of the report, Robert Cran wrote a number of times to the colonial secretary’s office, stating that all conditions on the plantations were in accordance with the law and that their conditions were ‘‘in quality equal to the best supplied for Islanders in the district’’.45 As Wray, Thomson, and Horrocks had written, the standards of accommodation, in their adherence to legislated standards, revealed the inadequacy of the standards themselves. As Horrocks stated with regard to food rations, they were ‘‘always good and weighed according to scale and no more’’, but on ‘‘the small farms where the Islanders obtain much the same food as their Masters and where they are not kept to scale, they always appeared in better condition and spirits than on the large plantations where they are fed by contract’’.46 What was most significant about the outrage expressed by Cran & Co. was that in maintaining the legal standards set by the Polynesian Labourers Act, they argued that the company had done nothing to warrant their condemnation. By way of reparations, and being ‘‘unwilling to be held up to the contempt of the public through the accusations brought against’’ them, they requested that another inquiry be held, for which they wished ‘‘to ask that the persons intrusted [sic] with the inquiry should . . . have fair Colonial experience and not altogether ignorant of the character, prejudices, and habits of the Polynesian Islander’’.47 Such a reference to ‘‘Colonial experience’’ foreshadowed the complaints against Caulfield in 1897 in its call for an experienced ‘‘understanding’’ of the ‘‘character, prejudices and habits’’ of Islanders—an understanding, that is, of the nature of Kanaka standards. Kanaka standards pervaded all aspects of accommodation, including medi-

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cal care. In concluding his 1880 report into the Cran & Co. plantations, Horrocks revived a suggestion he had made in 1877 regarding the centralization of medical treatment for Islanders, who were not allowed entry to the colony’s white hospitals. The Pacific Island Labourers Act of 1880 accordingly required planters for the first time to provide Islanders with medical attention and made provisions for the compulsory establishment of centralized Pacific Islander hospitals.48 The requirements were met with controversy. Calling on the ‘‘habits’’ of Kanakas, planters questioned the necessity and validity of the hospitals and complained bitterly about the cost entailed in their establishment and maintenance. The hospitals were eventually built, but as noted in previous chapters, when the Mackay Pacific Islander hospital opened prematurely, sanitary conditions were scandalously poor and widely condemned. Inquiries were conducted and the hospital temporarily closed on the basis that it met neither white nor Kanaka standards of hygiene. In his letter of resignation, the hospital’s second resident surgeon, Dr. J. Ashburton Thompson, who had lasted in the position for less than a week, complained bitterly of his impossible task to the colonial secretary, Robert Gray. Though a relatively simple case of looking after the sick, he stated, his duties were ‘‘to be performed in the interests of savages, and involve the conciliation of an uninitated [sic] and dissatisfied community’’.49 What he was unable to reconcile were the standards of care in the hospital. I venture to remind you that although it may be true that healthy kanakas can be lodged and fed in much simpler style than white men . . . the institution is intended for the cure of disease; and . . . the conditions under which disease is curable are known not to vary with the race attacked, but to be essentially the same with all men.50

The defensiveness of Thompson’s obvious claim regarding the inability of disease to distinguish between races, whether feigned for impact or not, condemned the governing principles of Kanaka standards that permeated the labor contract from discipline to labor and from accommodation to medical care. As he most concisely pointed out, the Mackay Pacific Islander hospital, like the examples of government scrutiny of the trade and labor regime pointed to above, was the product of a government concern over conditions in the trade that resulted in investigations, inquiries, and occasionally minimal action. But it remained as always in accordance with Kanaka standards. The most common rationale and justification for Kanaka standards was an economic one, tempered with race. It is a rationale that can be readily recited. The sugar industry was economically dependent on cheap labor. As the prece-

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dent of slavery in the United States and Caribbean had so thoroughly established, only a black laborer could be bought so cheaply, and only a black laborer could legally be compelled to work in conditions that kept their mortality rates permanently inflated.51 The apparent physiological necessity of colored labor in the tropics, though commonly attributed to the mysteries of race, was related by planters to the wider colonial economy that necessitated racially prescribed cheap standards. The Nindaroo Planters Association, for example, explicitly preferred colored, especially Islander, labor, because the ‘‘total amount paid to Europeans in 1888 . . . for wages and supplies [was] at the rate of £9 for every £1 paid direct to kanakas’’.52 Even this, as Flora Lugard Shaw pointed out in the 1890s, was not enough. Even the fifteen shillings a week spent on Islander recruitment, accommodation, and wages, though cheap compared to the twenty-six shillings a week paid to white labor, was barely competitive with Cuban planters, who in the immediate aftermath of slavery paid locals four to six pence a day.53 It was therefore not the nature of colored labor so much as their expendability and the cheap conditions under which they could be kept that made Islanders essential to the economic mobility of the sugar industry. When white labor eventually replaced Islanders in the cane fields from 1904, for example, the new conditions of accommodation for these workers and the resented extra cost of transforming the labor from Kanaka work to white employment was bitterly debated. The words of the Legislative Assembly member Peter Airey capture the nature of debate with his reminder that ‘‘we do not want to demoralise’’ the white worker by giving ‘‘him’’ Kanaka work and Kanaka pay, for ‘‘if we treat them [white workers] like kanakas they will probably drop to the level of kanakas, and in the long run society will have to pay for the degradation’’.54 The economic imperatives of colonial industries, of minimizing costs of production and maximizing product and profits, are not enough to explain the dull violence of the Kanaka standards of indentured labor. It is true that on the one hand it would be ludicrous to argue that the economic imperative did not constitute an important principle guiding the embedded violence of labor relationships between employer and indentured employees. Nowhere is this more obvious than during times of economic depression or recession, when planters could employ such cost-cutting measures as reducing food and clothing rations, providing the cheapest sanitation, water supplies, and housing, refusing adequate and expensive medical care, and refusing to pay wages at the termination of contracts under the guise of economic survival and not as procedures that jeopardized the lives of their indentured workforce.55 Kanaka standards were therefore cheap standards, and they enabled the sugar industry to survive a global context that still in part used slave labor. But this offers only a con-

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text for the violence of individuals within such a system and the fluidity of the sanctions under which they operated. The economic imperative fails to explain Muggleton’s actions or similar forms of banal violence and its nonvisibility in circumstances where violence carried a disciplinary or moral dimension. Indeed, rather than the economic imperative explaining violence within the trade and the blunt systemic violence of Kanaka standards, the relationship, I would suggest, was the other way. The economic imperative and that notion of race-reliant profit was the product of a violence that was already assumed and already operated on its own logic. This is made most obvious in the Rev. Oscar Michelson’s eloquent summary in the 1890s. As he put it, ‘‘the margin of profit for the planters lies between what the Kanakas are able to bear, and what they are not able to bear, but are made to do’’, and profit was directly ‘‘proportionate to the number of Kanakas worked to death’’.56 In his brevity Michelson articulated the economic imperative in a way that highlights its dependency on a context where violence was already assumed. There was a logic of force that preceded the idea that black labor was cheap and expendable, and it was the basis on which planters asserted their rights to exercise levels of force; it was also the basis of wider unwritten protocols of disciplinary force agreed upon between planters and their regulators throughout the sugar districts. As the abolition of slavery might indicate about British colonialism’s susceptibility to public dissent, economic usefulness and functionality were not enough to make violence invisible, standard, and acceptable. It also had to be morally comprehensible as a civilizing force. Hence the economic imperative was simply an element of that which enabled the spread of the colonial civilizing mission. It was the part, not the whole, and it is to that which we will now turn. Civilizing Violence: Colonialism and the Moral Imperative The wonderful advance of this portion of the Colony during the last ten years is . . . derived wholly from the blessing of Providence on the skill and energy of its inhabitants in subduing and replenishing the earth. Assuredly I have observed during the past week very remarkable illustrations of the proverbial genius of the Anglo-Saxon race for the noble and truly Imperial art of colonisation. –George Ferguson Bowen, Thirty Years of Colonial Government

From the local interactions of planters, overseers, and courts to the larger-scale government-initiated inquiries and Royal Commissions, the extent and reach of violence as a civilizing force in Queensland was in a state of constant reappraisal

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throughout the nineteenth century. The logic upon which this defining process was based was a powerful one, and as is argued in the following section it stretched far beyond the limits of the sugar districts. Colonialism’s moral authority in general, that burden of the civilizing mission with its deification of the rule of law as the healing balm for frontier outrages, was the means by which the extra-legal violence of individuals was incorporated, if not appropriated, by the colonial state.57 This is illustrated below through snapshot moments that bring these dynamics to the surface. In the process we range widely from the shearers’ strike of 1891, when the Queensland government was faced with introducing a suspension of law resembling that which was traditionally deployed against colonized peoples, to the balancing of certain crimes with the status of victims and debates over corporal punishment. The commonality linking this apparently eclectic range is telling, for they are threaded together by the structural assumption of violence in the assertion of the civilizing influences of colonial discipline and order. As such, the discussion will bring us eventually back to the violence of the frontiers of the Pacific and the integrated ways in which the logic of force, considered in chapter 1, operated in concert with the more staid and considered legal exercise of colonial jurisdiction. This wide-angle view provides a prime perspective from which to observe the embeddedness of violence in the most benign of colonial activities. It was particularly obvious that violence was of central importance to the conceptual apparatus of colonization in the colony of Queensland. In 1859 the minister for the colonies instructed the first governor of Queensland to consider policing and internal defense or invasion to be as central to the colonial project in Queensland as the extension of ownership over, and the extraction of wealth from, the land: ‘‘You will as soon as possible exert all energy and persuasion to induce the colonists to see to their self-defence internally. Try to establish a good police; and if you can then get the superior class of colonists to assist in forming a militia or volunteer corps, spare no pains to do so’’.58 Accordingly, the coupled concerns of the first sitting of the Legislative Assembly in 1860 were land alienation and the systematization of an effective police force and cheap means of ‘‘internal defence’’ against indigenous land owners (‘‘Mounted Rifles’’ or the Native Mounted Police).59 By 1866, the Select Committee on the Defense of the Colony proudly announced that Queensland was ‘‘probably the only Colony which has been founded and organised without cost to the defence of the settlers against the aborigines, by a local force, maintained entirely at the expense of the Colonial Treasury’’.60 Colonization, internal defense, and policing conceptually and financially converged in Queensland on the concept of extending law and ownership across expansive indigenous lands with frontiers defended by semi-official divisions of

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the police force. Throughout the colonial period, amidst claims that the Queensland police were overfunded and the colony overpoliced, the added expenditure on policing was defended by police commissioners on the basis that Queensland, after all, had special circumstances. Being ‘‘a sparsely populated country of such an extensive area’’, it was stated in 1878 that ‘‘it would be unreasonable to compare the proportion of its police expenditure to its population with that of any other country’’. For the added expenditure came from the maintenance of the colony’s Mounted Rifles and Native Mounted Police force, upon whom too much dependence was placed and to whom the role of invasion was too often relegated by prospectors and settlers.61 Given the historical conflation of dispossession and policing in Queensland, force very openly played a pivotal role in the conception, creation, and defense of colonial civilization and order in the inside districts. The civilized limits of the colony’s legitimate use of force was constantly debated, but rarely with such clarity as during the state of emergency that erupted in the west of the colony from 1891 to 1895. During this time Queensland faced crippling industrial turmoil amidst the ravages of a recurring drought and a depressed economy. When the shearer’s strike erupted in 1891 it was the largest industrial action amongst white workers that the Australian colonies had seen to date, and upon which the Queensland government unleashed the might of the ordinary police, the military, and the Riot Act. These were armed strikers, it was argued, who were considered brainwashed by ‘‘Karl Marx unionism’’ and who had reduced law and order to anarchy and brought the colony to the brink of revolution.62 In an attempt to contain the continued disruptions, the Peace Preservation Bill, with the power to suspend civil law in districts declared ‘‘disturbed’’, was introduced into the Legislative Assembly in 1894. The bitter debate that ensued crystallized deeper arguments regarding violence and civilization. The Peace Preservation Act came into power only through the ejection from the Legislative Assembly of all members of the newly established Labor party for their rowdy behavior. The debate was understandably heated, for the bill proposed extending the rights of the police, military, and local magistrates to arrest and detain without trial ‘‘any person who may be reasonably suspected’’ of not preserving the peace. In the absence of opposing Labor members, the bill was passed by the conservatives of the Legislative Assembly and introduced to the even more conservative Legislative Council as one that would provide a ‘‘martial law’’ that was ‘‘more convenient, and more in harmony with our general views of constitutional government’’. This white martial law was essential, it was argued, for allowing authorities to ‘‘disperse’’ those gangs of ‘‘armed men who have intimidated workmen, set fire to woolsheds, and actually fired upon women and children’’.63

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Although clearly in favor of the bill and although the Legislative Council passed it without amendment, some reservation that it was not becoming of a civilized country was expressed. It is proposed that ‘‘any person who may be reasonably suspected’’ may be arrested and detained. Is that British? Is it English? It would be a disgrace to the colony if such a clause was allowed to pass. ‘‘Reasonably suspected’’, indeed! What a jesuitical provision! Why, you may get up a reasonable suspicion on anything.64

During the debates in both houses of Parliament expressions of both support for and objection to the bill rested heavily upon notions of ‘‘Britishness’’ and, more precisely, ‘‘civilization’’. The premier Horace Tozer, when introducing the bill for its second reading, evoked the ‘‘outrage upon civilisation’’ that was being committed by strikers and their continued disturbances in the western districts. Parts of the colony, he stated, were ‘‘in a desperate condition, suffering from a desperate disease, and we have to apply a desperate remedy’’.65 In such a polarized debate as this would become, those who sided with Tozer differed little in their support. All evoked the specter of Empire and its supreme civil state, in whose defense civil law had to be suspended for the sake of resettling these ‘‘unsettled districts . . . to such a state that civilised beings could get a living with some reasonable degree of comfort’’. As David Dalrymple warned, ‘‘if law and order did not prevail the sun of this colony would soon set’’.66 Those Labor members who opposed the bill used arguments founded on the same notions of civilization, stating that such repressive legislation was a disgrace to civilized government. They maintained that the Peace Preservation Bill proposed a preservation of ‘‘peace’’ that would ‘‘run peace in, yard it, cut it in pieces, and then start preserving it’’.67 Not only did the bill constitute ‘‘the most coercive measures ever introduced into an Australian Parliament’’, but it also represented the ‘‘most drastic measure ever introduced into any Parliament. . . . [There was] no Coercion Act amongst all the Coercion Acts of Ireland so coercive as this Bill’’.68 The response to claims that the Peace Preservation Bill misused law for the sake of coercion was merely that ‘‘coercion formed part of all law’’; the word itself merely meant ‘‘to restrain by force—particularly by moral force—or by law, to redress, to compel compliance, to constrain. There was nothing very dreadful about that’’.69 As Dalrymple stated, the monopolization of coercion by government was the definition of being civilized: ‘‘The Government in all civilised countries had a monopoly on defence. A citizen had no right to defend himself; he must go to the law courts, and the Government, claiming the monopoly, must defend him’’.70 Blatant disregard of the law by unionists therefore necessitated

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blatant coercion and ‘‘moral suasion’’ on the part of the government. In response to this, Charles Macdonald, the member for the Flinders District, which was to be declared ‘‘disturbed’’ by the act, produced a pair of leg irons, announcing that a number of these had been sent out west and that these were the sum total of the government’s idea of civilized ‘‘moral force’’.71 The symbolism of Macdonald’s chains pointed to what underpinned the theatrics of the whole debate. Linking its polar opposites was a collective attempt to articulate the extent of the state’s monopoly of violence, to define what the boundaries of centralized, civilized force were, and, most important, to articulate what violence was to be sanctioned by the state and against whom. The fact that Parliament was proposing a coercion that resembled that which was practiced nonlegally against indigenous peoples on the outer fringes of colonial society added an unspoken tension and emotive force to the debate. Whiteness, in other words, was the unspoken hallmark of the civilized function of state violence as well as the symbol whose unity and sanctity must justify desperate measures. The irony of the ‘‘disturbed districts’’ being in the western ‘‘back country’’ and outside districts, where the term ‘‘dispersal’’ was the conventional euphemism for violent acts not provided for by law against indigenous peoples, was not lost on Parliament. In fact, it underpinned the emotive force of the debate. Deliberate references to dispersal and unsettlement helped to evoke the extraordinary and desperate conditions of these outside districts while at the same time emphasizing the urgency of the need to restore order, or maintain civil standards, and either way to prevent the sun from setting on white Queensland. As was implied constantly during debate, the colony had to tread carefully and keep an eye on its peripheries, where ‘‘in the remote districts there were hundreds of blacks in an almost savage state’’ rendering a threat from the outside, while the ‘‘savages’’ of Mackay, the Kanakas, were posing a similar threat on the inside.72 Debate was therefore about the preservation of civilized/white unity with civilized/white force, and Parliament’s focal concern was with whether such repression was civilized and white enough. When Mackay’s request for disturbed status under the act was summarily turned down as being wholly inappropriate for the suppression of ‘‘1000 armed kanakas’’, we gain some idea of the white specificity not just of the act, but of the opposition it faced.73 m

The Peace Preservation Bill debate was subtly coded so that the extent to which state force could be exercised against white subjects was implicitly articulated through the unspoken norms of violence against savages. Similar to the outrage in 1905 over the (black) treatment of white sugar workers, condemnation of any abuse of white men’s rights as British subjects assumed a benchmark of

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acceptable treatment beyond which only people of color were legitimately subject. This was not due to easily assumed double standards. Riddled with contradiction and illogicality, the moral justification and regulation of such double standards was carefully articulated and constructed and often most powerfully through the cool traditions of logical debate and the rational argument of colonial legal processes. Here, the civilized exercise of law and order was constantly cultivated and defined while it was celebrated in opposition to notions of savagery. This was the basis of those legal spaces in which resided the sanction for colonial violence. Given the conscious monopolization of violence inherent to the notion of the rule of law, the imposition of jurisdiction over colonized people was inextricably violent and foundational to any understanding of the administered dimensions of colonial force.74 To explore this, we will begin with the 1871 court case that heard the trial of John Coath, the captain of the recruiting vessel Jason. In this case the defense that was raised illustrates the way in which sovereignty and colonial control, while articulated and argued in often abstract and removed terms, would resonate throughout the vertical reach of colonial relations. During the cruise of the Jason from December 1870 to March 1871 the crew kidnapped nine men, and another was assaulted, shot at, and kidnapped again when he tried to escape. Coath was convicted of kidnapping the nine Islanders and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment.75 The case had been brought to light by a scandal surrounding the Jason’s next voyage in April 1871, when the vessel’s government agent, John Meiklejohn, was found handcuffed below decks, where he was chained in conditions normally reserved for the recruits. His feet had been gnawed by rats and he was in an acute state of agitation.76 An inquiry was conducted by William Walsh, the minister for works, who settled on the explanation given by Coath and the crew that Meiklejohn had gone mad in the islands, was an alcoholic, and had posed a serious threat to the crew and captain.77 Although inquiries went no further, the scandal it created, and Meiklejohn’s links to William Brookes, who took the case up as part of his fight against the labor trade, resulted in the uncovering of Coath’s past voyages. In this context, the case was almost guaranteed a conviction. Coath was an identifiable villain, having been taught the trade by one of its traditional scoundrels, Ross Lewin, and his trial was heard amidst the furor surrounding the Carl massacre and the resulting pressure from abolitionists and the Aborigines Protection Society to ban the trade. All of this would eventually compound in 1872 to force the introduction of the imperial Pacific Islanders Protection Act, but in 1871, this context helped to secure a conviction against Coath.78 Coath appealed his conviction. In his defense, his counsel, Charles Lilley, QC, argued that while Coath may have taken the nine men against their will, he

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had not actually committed a crime. Lilley wanted to know whether the ‘‘case disclose[d] any offence known to English law’’, as he doubted the crime of kidnapping could ‘‘be committed on a savage or barbarous people captured and brought within the protection of British law and landed free at Maryborough’’. He maintained that outside the Slave Acts, it ‘‘is no offence to go to islands inhabited by a savage and barbarous people, and to bring these people within the protection of the English law’’, and as there was ‘‘no case in the books to show that [this] . . . is an offence against the law’’, and just as before ‘‘the Slave Acts, inferior races could be enslaved’’ legally, this case of kidnapping savages outside the protection of English law was not yet illegal. As a final twist, the argument continued that kidnapped Islanders were actually freed under British sovereignty the moment they boarded the Jason (as a British vessel carrying that sovereignty). As such, the crime of kidnapping could have taken place only had Coath taken them to the Fiji Islands, which was not (yet) in the British dominions and carried no British sovereignty. On being unloaded from the vessel, ‘‘they would then be removed from the protection of the law which they were entitled to by virtue of being on board an English vessel’’.79 John Bramston’s reply for the Crown did not engage with these arguments. He merely buried the argument for the defense beneath reference to the violence that the crime of kidnapping attempted to address and punish. His reply was simple. The ‘‘illegality of man-stealing’’, he argued, was ‘‘in the violation of that personal liberty which the law of England recognizes in every man’’ and that ‘‘it can never be held to be the law of England that the protection of the law is meted in proportion to the civilisation of the people. The savage has as much right to protection under this law as the most highly educated’’.80 Bramston ended with reference to the public climate in Queensland and Britain, advising the court that more than anything it needed to ‘‘remember that it was not the offence committed against these people alone that it has to consider. . . . It is the public peace that has been injured, and the public has a right to demand punishment even in a greater degree than the persons directly injured’’.81 Justices James Cockle and Alfred Lutwyche recognized the legal correctness of the defense but upheld the original conviction in the interests of the basics of right and wrong (for as Cockle stated, he could not ‘‘help thinking that some disregard for the lives of these [Islanders] was shown’’), and more importantly in the interests of protecting Britain’s moral authority and credibility in the savage world.82 Coath served three years of his five-year sentence and was quietly released and pardoned in 1874. By this time, seven of the nine men he had kidnapped had died in Queensland.83 Although the British Pacific Islanders Protection Act was passed in 1872 to guard against such cases as that of the Jason, a similar defense was taken

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in the last recruiting scandal of the century, which involved the William Manson in 1895 and was complicated by the crime of kidnapping being commissioned through a Malaitan recruiting agent named Kwaisulia.84 The defense of Joseph Vos and members of the William Manson crew hinged, as did the defense of Coath, on a point of legal jurisdiction and the question of whether or not Malaita was ‘‘within Her Majesty’s dominions, or within the jurisdiction of any civilized power’’.85 If not, the Queensland Supreme Court had jurisdiction over the British crew under the Pacific Islanders Protection Act.86 Although it was eventually ruled that the court did have jurisdiction because Malaita was only a British protectorate, the prisoners were acquitted due to the involvement of the Malaitan agent Kwaisulia and the fact that the prosecution relied too heavily on the ‘‘evidence of blacks, who call themselves sufferers, [and] may be so discredited by their savagedom and moral deficiencies, as to fail for the most part against whites’’.87 Although it was clear that forced recruiting and vicious assaults had taken place, the boundaries of the legal prohibition of kidnapping had been blurred enough to allow for reasonable doubt. In addition, as the Brisbane Courier pointed out, the Queensland public in 1895, unlike in 1871, was not open to, and was unlikely to accept, the conviction of a white man for a crime against Islanders.88 In both the Jason and William Manson cases, the semantics of civilization and savagery played a significant role in defining the limits of colonial jurisdiction and sovereignty and its implied monopoly on violence. The pivotal point for each case was not whether violence had taken place, but whether Islanders could, as savages, be the victims of crimes codified by civilized laws. Had they been sufficiently subjected to colonialism’s intrusion to warrant, in this case, its protection from violence? And was this violence in fact violence when committed against savages? The cases demonstrate again the direct corporeal impact that dichotomous constructs of savagery and civilization could have. This is also particularly visible in the extension of legal force, such as in the punishment of Islanders for colonial crimes. The applicability and severity of colonial jurisdiction over colonized people was not just formulated in such high profile cases as those relating to massacres and kidnapping. Rather, this was a constant process of reformulation that took place every day in Queensland’s lower courts. To recall the contents of previous chapters, physicality essentialized colonial images of Melanesians, and in Queensland this assumed physicality was readily translated into criminality. Just as the logic of force was considered the primary logic of Islanders, so, too, violence in legal punishment was considered the prime educational tool. The underlying consistency of these trends would be the assumed colonial right of force, which intensified in response not to varying crimes, but to the constructed natures of the subject of punishment.

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As discussed in chapter 3, rates of incarceration in Queensland in the late nineteenth century expressed continuities between discourses of savagery on the frontiers and categories of exclusion in the inside districts. Islanders’ physicality and supposed tribalism found expression in criminalization, and we saw trends for Islander arrest rates being heavily weighted towards crimes of civil disorder, crimes against the body, and labor-related offenses. We know this because from 1878, under varying conditions, the colony’s criminal statistics were organized in accordance with race. They show, as Finnane and Moore have explored, that some of the most common offenses for which Islanders were jailed were labor related, and in the 1890s convictions for these increased markedly as the courts more frequently utilized the Masters and Servants Act as a disciplinary mechanism.89 At the same time, however, the increase in labor crimes, for which there were 78 convictions between 1885 and 1895, was matched and far outweighed by assault (249) and drunk and disorderly (96) convictions.90 On their own all these statistics tell us is that the vast majority of crimes that Islanders were arrested, convicted, and jailed for were civil disorder offenses and crimes of violence. In the discursive context of the time we can also assume that these charges related to the arrest of Islander independence. This has been discussed previously, and while it may well be enough to recall the Bunyah Black or the three men accused of attempted murder in Cleveland, there is no shortage of examples where petty criminal categories were used to contain Islanders’ independence as a preemption of their inevitable commission of more serious crimes. Jemmy Bob from Roma in the late 1880s is another example. On 20 July 1892 the Brisbane Courier reported that ‘‘the public here [at Roma] is greatly incensed against the Government for allowing the above madman to repeatedly return to this neighbourhood to strike terror into the hearts of the whole female community. His name has become a dread to all’’.91 Between 1889 and 1892, Jemmy Bob had been arrested and jailed four times for separate charges of lunacy, vagrancy, assault, and larceny.92 He faded from the records after his last release date, but his experience is suggestive. The public pressure in Roma to get rid of Jemmy and the relatively petty nature of his convictions was consistent with his social superfluity as an independent black man in a small colonial settlement. While it may well be the case that Jemmy Bob was a mad, homeless, violent thief, in the context we have explored his arrest patterns add to wider trends where the courts were being used as a disciplinary mechanism and as a way of teaching civil order, good behavior, and obedience to intractable savages. With this criminalization of course came the necessary sanction for violence as punishment. As was the case with the suspension of law through the Peace Preservation Act, the use of violence in punishment was mediated by circulating discourses of civilization and savagery. Race, once again, was crucial.

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The use of corporal punishment in Queensland was tempered by periodic debates that were fought out in ways similar to those of the Peace Preservation Act in the 1890s. Brought up in Parliament in 1877, it was maintained that the flogging of white prisoners, although ‘‘inherited from the dark times of convictism in some old Act of New South Wales’’, was nevertheless a punishment that the state must retain to serve against ‘‘hardened offenders who had been convicted of infamous and degrading offences’’.93 As with the Peace Preservation Act, it was argued that the sanction for corporal punishment lay with the defense of civilization, where ‘‘desperate diseases require a desperate cure’’ and when ‘‘ordinary imprisonment fails to effect the punishment of the criminal—when a criminal cares nothing for imprisonment or the restriction of his liberty—it is necessary to administer sharp punishment’’.94 This statement was made in 1885 amidst debates that resulted, by 1887, in a government-appointed Board of Inquiry into the colony’s jails and lockups. Concern did not simply lie with the use of flogging, but extended to the use of leg irons, gagging with a rod of metal or wood, and hog tying (tying legs to arms behind the back). Gagging and other forms of corporal punishment were considered unacceptable in the humiliation they meted out, and beyond the sanctions of reasonable, justifiable, and civilized ‘‘desperate measures’’.95 Premised on their knowledge of contemporary theories of penology, which maintained that ‘‘violence breeds violence, harshness engenders hatred, and hardness excites to revolt’’, the board in 1887 recommended that gagging be abolished and flogging and the use of solitary confinement, conducive as it was to insanity, be strictly monitored. By 1899 the mood had changed considerably, and during the debates concerning the new and modernized Criminal Code Bill, flogging was more universally condemned as ‘‘barbaric’’ and ‘‘savage’’ and ‘‘no matter what may be the deterrent effects . . . is most intensely degrading and debasing’’.96 Not surprisingly, when mediated by race, corporal punishment took on a completely different guise. In relation to Islanders’ assumed criminal natures, violence was widely and almost ubiquitously seen as essential rather than humiliating. As we saw in chapter 3, when anti-Islander sentiments were peaking in1877 in Maryborough, Mackay, and Bundaberg, two Islanders, Tommy and George, were convicted of the rape of a white woman in Maryborough after a controversy over their actual guilt and whether or not they should be hanged in public from the Maryborough Bridge. The logic of calls for a public hanging was that it would ‘‘strike terror into the minds’’ of Islanders and be a memorable and lasting lesson.97 Fears that a public execution could have a devastating effect on the ‘‘fires of bad feeling between the races’’ prevailed however, and amidst warnings that ‘‘the presence of a crowd of Polynesians at the Execution will cause the sympathy and Excitement of the race and scenes may follow of a most objectionable if not dan-

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gerous character with such Excitable [sic] people’’, Tommy and George were hanged in private.98 The staid debate in the Legislative Assembly did not focus on the need to avenge the public against Maryborough’s Islander community, as did the sensationalized Brisbane Press. Rather, they focused on the need to teach Kanakas a lesson in civilization through the logic that ‘‘to hang a black criminal near the scene of the offence of which he had been found guilty’’ while ‘‘witnessed by some of the Polynesians in the district’’ would have the required deterrent effect.99 This attitude differed little with time. As was stated in the Brisbane Courier during the mid-1890s, only through violent punishment, preferably fatal, would Islanders learn ‘‘that the consequences [of their crimes] are not dubious but a fatal certainty. . . . [H]ow much more necessary is it that capital punishment should stamp out such savage instincts and protect society?’’ 100 This logic of force in varying intensities filtered through many levels of interaction between Islanders and Europeans, as we have seen, and it was frequently discussed in relation to corporal punishment. Violence in the form of corporal punishment was widely accepted as appropriate and effective for Islanders. So it was that the jails Board of Inquiry in 1887, while condemning the use of corporal punishment for white prisoners as barbaric, promoted its use for Islander and Aboriginal offenders. This was due both to its imagined deterrent value as well as the understanding that prolonged legal processes and incarceration were a ‘‘death sentence’’ for black prisoners: ‘‘what would be a simple punishment to a white man would be the death of a blackfellow or a South Sea Islander’’, due, they stated, to ‘‘their physical nature [where] placed in close confinement for any length of time they dwindle and die’’.101 Although reluctant to sanction flogging as a replacement for imprisonment, as did many of the police and jailors who provided evidence, the board suggested that Aboriginal and Pacific Islander prisoners who committed crimes against whites or against ‘‘blacks within the pale of the white settlement’’ should receive punishment ‘‘immediately after the commission of the offence [and it should] be sharp in its nature, and administered in presence of the tribe’’.102 For crimes that did not impinge on the white community, it was suggested by some that ‘‘instead of treating aboriginal and kanaka offenders according to English law, kanakas should be shipped back to their islands, and aboriginals left to be dealt with according to their tribal laws’’.103 As close as this came to acknowledging indigenous sovereignties, however, the board dismissed such a solution. As they stated with regard to Islanders, sending them back would not only exact a huge cost on the sugar industry, but would also undermine the legitimacy of colonial control, for when ‘‘we import kanakas here we must either confess that our law is inferior to theirs, or compel them to observe our law’’.104 Where this left indigenous Queenslanders was not discussed.

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The reference that the jails inquiry made to the need to assert legal jurisdiction over Islanders in order to prove the legitimacy of the laws that had brought Islanders under the jurisdiction of the colony in the first place was a convoluted but not incidental conflation. The labor trade had always been sold to its opponents and humanitarians as being more than the mere procurement of labor for an industry that continued to use slave labor until late in the nineteenth century. It had also been sold as a crucial part of colonialism’s civilizing mission in the savage world. Violence therefore carried the moral sanction of law. This was eloquently expressed by H. H. Romilly in a letter from 1885 regarding the return of those people kidnapped by the Hopeful. As noted in chapter 2, the return vessel carried boxes of cloth and trade goods for the families of people who had died in Queensland as the ultimate result of their kidnappings. Romilly wrote that, along with the strong retribution from men-of-war against Islanders who had retaliated against labor traders, these gifts in exchange for the lives of family members would show the ‘‘natives that there is justice among white men’’. At the same time, he argued, it would show them that ‘‘we have the power to punish them should they deserve it [or] . . . take the law into their own hands’’. Continuing, he wrote, ‘‘It takes a long time to establish a new idea in a native’s mind, but when they once recognise the fact that the Government will protect their lives and property from their neighbours, as well as from whites, they will welcome the new regime with pleasure and obedience’’.105 Romilly summed it up. A combination of gunboat diplomacy and summary justice, hard labor discipline, and handouts in exchange for taken lives would be the process by which Islanders would be forcibly persuaded to relinquish existing legal sovereignties and submit to colonialism’s greater and exclusive power to punish. This was the common thread that linked the violence of mad James Murray to that of Markham, Harry Wessel, and the outraged Brothers Cran in Maryborough. In turn this overarching assumption of violence as an act of civilization is what linked these individuals to the dull violence and indifference of the courts and other administrative centers of colonial power. For as individuals they operated in accordance with the structurally linked imperatives of colonialism. Violence as Structural Continuity Although violence was not ever present on a day-to-day level in Queensland and the western Pacific, it was structurally inbuilt as the ever-ready and defining mechanism of the act of colonization. In the frontier realms of the western Pacific and Queensland, the violence we have seen appeared to have operated in ways that resembled Taussig’s space of death, where the knowability of savages was produced and perpetuated by violent preemptions of Europe’s worst

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fears. Here regulation of violence was minimal, or nonexistent, in a space that in colonial mythologies lacked order and substance. Violence on the unknown side of the frontier occasionally exceeded its sanction, as was the case with the massacre on the Carl. But on these occasions this violence was incorporated into the discourses that disconnected the frontiers as examples of the psychological hazards faced by colonial pioneers. Accordingly, this type of unapproved violence appeared before the public as an aberration that occurred under the decivilized and unregulated chaos of areas beyond the reach of colonial order. Disowned and disavowed, frontier violence was nevertheless a constant topic of conversation amongst settlers and traders, and in some sense it justified its own existence. For it was from the need to regulate, order, and control the wild frontiers that the moral imperative to extend colonial influence to the savage realms emerged. The extension of the rule of law, civilization, and colonial order, rather than being the progress through which violence would be expunged, instead only represented different modalities of force. In the so-called settled inside districts of Queensland, the dynamics of the frontiers remained to the extent that spaces of alterity were crucial to the administrative and social sanctioning of violence. As we saw in chapter 3, protective legislation for both Islanders and indigenous peoples functioned as a tool to exclude through the construction of identity categories. Islanders were classified and stratified to be dealt with, and their autonomy in white Queensland, like that of indigenous peoples, became increasingly vulnerable to criminalization. As such, the sanctions for violence we saw present on the frontier continued in the inside districts within these inner frontiers of exclusion and exemption. So, too, at the heart of colonialism, embedded in its jurisdiction, economy, and social order, on its plantations and in its courts, the potential for violence was administratively legitimated and monopolized. Legal spaces like those that operated in relation to Kanaka standards were defined and refined in Queensland with reference to civilization and in accordance with imported imagery from Melanesia. This has been most readily observable in cases where colonial jurisdiction was argued upon assumptions of the centrality of violence in the imposition of sovereignty. This sketch of the structural presence of violence in the colonial project in both Queensland and the western Pacific provides an overview that is not an end in itself, but is a way of beginning to comprehend the nuances of relations between individuals within colonial sites. My suggestion of the structural ubiquity of violence in the colonial project is by no means meant to imply that all colonial relations were irredeemably violent and that it was universally approved. Many examples have appeared in the stories above of individual attempts to circumvent these norms. As such, this structural overview is not an excuse for

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the brutality of individuals who committed atrocities. Rather, recognizing the structural embeddedness of colonial violence acknowledges the backdrop that is essential in approaching historical understandings of the imploding violence that broke out in otherwise cohesive communities of colonized peoples who bore the weight of this structural form.

6. Bulimen, Hardwork, and Muscular Tension

The settler keeps alive in the native an anger which he deprives of outlet; the native is trapped in the tight links of the chains of colonialism. But we have seen that inwardly the settler can only achieve a pseudo-petrification. The native’s muscular tension finds outlet regularly in bloodthirsty explosions—in tribal warfare, in feuds between septs [sic] and in quarrels between individuals. . . . All these patterns of conduct are those of the death reflex when faced with danger, a suicidal behavior which proves to the settler (whose existence and domination is by them all the more justified) that these men are not reasonable human beings. –Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth FROM THE COLLECTION of stories in preceding chapters, many of which were

fleeting registers in the colonial record with no ending or conclusion, we have seen communities of Islanders emerging on the plantations and in surrounding sugar districts of Queensland. These were communities fractured by displacement but galvanized by their context. Our concentration to date has been on developing the material signs of survival, adjustment, and growth amongst these communities. So, too, we have observed the less tangible political, linguistic, and historical lines of affinity that threaded together a sense of unity amongst the constantly moving and dynamic population of Islanders. Despite the transient and temporary status of the majority of people who made up Islander communities, the planting of trees, gardens, and herbs; the establishment of housing and of collective traditions of music, church, school, and singing; the generation of a private common language; and the raising of children born in Queensland and educated in the knowledge systems of both the colony and the islands were all means by which a sense of permanence and community was established that transcended the individuals who came and went throughout the nineteenth century. This is an image that would be unremarkable in a history of voluntary and autonomous migration, but the historical reality was

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that these communities were set within the overarching structure of a colonial world and were established with and against its architectural flow. In the world outside their own communities Islanders went from being themselves to being generically black, unwelcome, excluded, and prohibited or valued as temporarily functional but ultimately expendable. As such, their physical and social autonomy was made vulnerable to an atmosphere where violence against them carried its own sanction. We have seen the strain of this context show in the violence, social fracturing, and despair of individuals like Kelah, and it is this strain, and violence in particular, that we explore in this chapter. As has been well established by now, violence, division, and volatility have been the dominant themes of the recorded and written histories of Islanders in both the islands and in Queensland. In the archival record of Queensland, one of the few places Islanders left verbal documentation was through their recorded and translated testimonies in the courts, and as we have seen, Islanders appeared in courts most frequently as the defendants and plaintiffs in cases of violence. As such, their voices, limited as they are, come to us marked by the history that produced them. Their testimonies are shaped by the questions they were asked and are therefore dominated by the racial tags discussed in previous chapters. Thus in cases of violence, tribalism, emotional volatility, and unpredictability tended frequently to step in for motive and cause in a context where their savagery was the basis for the jurisdiction and authority of colonial courts. This context must be present in our minds as we evaluate the represented prevalence of violence in the recorded landscape of Islanders’ everyday lives. For violence and volatility was what warranted special mention in the colonial record. As will be developed below, incidents of violence amongst Islanders make historical sense only when we remain alert to the unspoken stories they record and when we step away from that leveling and ‘‘deadly weapon of cause and effect’’.1 For in their discursive context, Islanders’ recorded violence provides potential insights into the unseen horizontal world as potential registrations of the sum experience of being indentured, infantilized, and racialized. The following example is instructive. On the morning of 7 June 1883, the doors of Victoria Plantation’s hospital were unlocked to a scene of ‘‘[b]ricks and billets of wood . . . strewn about the floor’’, marks on the walls where the bricks and billets had ‘‘struck with violence’’, ‘‘blood on the floor and walls’’, and ‘‘two boys . . . lying insensible on the floor’’.2 Of the injured, Loduckduk, who had recently arrived in the colony from New Britain, died from his injuries. The only indication that any of the plantation’s staff had of what had occurred during the night came from the hospital superintendent, who stated that the application of ‘‘a sulphur linament’’ for a ‘‘skin complaint’’ the day before had seemed to cause Loduckduk some ‘‘indignity’’. He had ‘‘noticed the deceased to be in an

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excited state’’ before he and ‘‘ten of these New Britain boys were locked up in the hospital’’ for the night.3 Loduckduk’s death attracted some attention in the immigration and colonial secretary’s offices, and an inquiry was established to find the ‘‘responsible agents’’ in the affair.4 The resulting investigation, during which the white staff on the plantation were interviewed, concluded that ‘‘those responsible at Victoria are very much to blame in having locked up these boys, fresh from their Islands . . . especially as the excited state of one of the boys had been noticed’’.5 Here the explanation stopped, and as a result we cannot know what happened behind those locked doors, or why. At the time, the incident was readily explained with brief reference to Loduckduk’s indignity, and the real question had been who was responsible. Supervising staff at Victoria, it had been concluded, should have known that amongst unsupervised and excited ‘‘boys fresh from their Islands’’ violence of the kind that occurred in Victoria’s hospital would be inevitable. This explanation drew its logic from a wider colonial narrative where violence was self-explanatory as the natural explosions, irrationality, and reflexes to which savages were known to be prone. In Queensland few topics received more attention than Islanders’ innate tendency towards so-called ‘‘crankiness’’, insanity, or unsoundness of mind and inexplicable explosions of violence, tribal mentalities and warfare. As we have seen in previous chapters, by the turn of the century this found confirmation in the colony’s crime statistics. As E. J. Brady stated in 1911, Islanders’ definitive love of ‘‘vicious amusements’’ was to be borne out by ‘‘the criminal records of the North [which] . . . show a large percentage of brutal murders and outrages by Islanders’’.6 Statistics compiled by government in the 1890s indeed proved the long-held knowledge that ‘‘with regard to crime’’ Kanakas ‘‘were two and a-half times as bad as the despised white man’’, and their ‘‘offences were not against property, but were mostly offences of temper’’ or ‘‘tribal disputes amongst themselves’’.7 Kanaka violence, like the Melanesian violence from which it stemmed, was seen to be located deep within Islanders’ racial programming, and in inquiries into the most serious of violent incidents, motive was frequently subsumed by reference to innate characteristics. As Percy Clarke authoritatively stated, on the plantations the ‘‘childlike disposition’’ of Kanakas meant that they were known to be ‘‘quick at taking offence, and revengeful, though their anger cools down again rapidly’’.8 Relating examples of this, Clarke described coming across an Islander making ‘‘a species of knuckle-duster . . . whose object was to spoil the complexion of a fellow labourer’’; he confiscated it, arousing ‘‘the black’s wrath to such a degree that [he] had to retire to the immediate vicinity of the forge’’, where on facing the foe with ‘‘a great glowing bar of iron . . . he smiled, ran off, and soon recovered his normal equanimity’’.9 This example, with its absence

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of motive, was typically recorded as an ahistorical act of spontaneity that was abstracted from its material and social context. Clarke’s foe, as a Kanaka caricature, displayed no individually reasoned motive beyond an instinctual violence that was out of all reasoned proportion to the trivialized insult to which he responded. Moreover, this characterization was contrasted by the responses of Clarke, the European whose cool-headed reasonableness showed in negative how Kanaka violence lacked the chivalrous, strategic, and controlled rationale of European violence. Clarke’s description, with its obscured social context and caricaturing registered violent incidents in terms of the most powerful of colonialism’s explanatory narratives: the varied and interrelated doctrines of might is right, the civilizing mission, and the fatal impact. In other words, the expectedness of Kanaka violence came from that wider narrative regarding the natural inclination of colonized peoples towards self-destruction. This is a narrative that materialized in such tropes as cannibalism, tribalism, the white mans vices, and fatalism that overwrote people’s actions in the archives. The assumption of an inclination towards self-destruction, for example, lay at the heart of varied colonial discussions of Islanders’ apparent inclination towards suicide and their fatalism when ill so that they ‘‘very often [die] for no reason at all except pure funk and lack of wish to get well’’.10 Self-destruction effectively excised the destructive strain of colonial pressures from the records. If we inquire a little further, fatalism begins to make historical sense. As those Islanders interviewed in the 1885 Royal Commission explained in relation to why they repeatedly absconded, death surrounded them on the plantations and immigration depots, and they were certain that in Queensland illness was equated with death. Such an equation made sense amidst health provisions such as the Mackay Pacific Islander Hospital, or the standardized medical treatment for Kanakas on plantations of ‘‘crude castor oil or Epsom salts . . . often the only components of the planters’ pharmacopoeia’’.11 Resignation to death in this historical context takes on new dimensions as a response conditioned by immediate surroundings, rather than an innate racial tendency. The significance of the manner in which Islanders’ violence appeared in colonial records as harnessed to various patterns of representation is that it thus became bound to a dominant prose that presented Islanders within the conceptual requirements of colonial power. More precisely, the represented ahistorical and asocial quality of violence helped to explain and excuse the colonial project. As Ann Stoler has written of the politics of violence in Sumatra’s plantation belt, ‘‘man-child’’ representations of estate workers’ predictably unpredictable eruptions into violence was periodically essential. Stripped of validity or rationality, this image supported and justified the intense surveillance and social repression

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of workers through measures similar to those that were intermittently adopted in Queensland.12 It was a flexible discourse that served the changing needs of an at times fragile colonial hegemony. The situation was similar in Queensland where the idea of Kanaka violence justified special police squadrons, curfews, and other surveillance measures, and did so in ways that were more complex than they would at first seem. Such representations served to depoliticize and dehistoricize Islanders’ acts of violence and to therefore place them within a wider logic of what Ranajit Guha might term a prose of counterinsurgency.13 In the courts in particular, Islanders’ violence was defended and prosecuted as instinct rather than strategy, reflex rather than reason, revenge rather than protest, and cultural or ethnic rather than sociological. As isolated but potentially ubiquitous outbreaks, repression and punishment without reason was the logical, indeed often courageous, colonial response to restoring order.14 Further analogies can be drawn here with another population of plantation workers. John Kelly argues that strikingly similar court portrayals of violence within Indian communities on Fiji’s plantations were the product of a colonial gaze and a grasping for control.15 Here, as was also the case in Queensland, when violence was constructed as the cultural or racial nature of a colonized people, it obscured any interrelationships with the colonial context. As discussed in previous chapters, this prose, or discourse, has been repeated at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels of historiography, and violence thus continues to have a rather unquestioned prominence in histories of Islander communities in Queensland as nothing more intriguing than being a Melanesian thing.16 In the following rereading of accounts of violence, there is no attempt to ‘‘correct’’ these narratives as such. Rather, the intent is to explore the extent to which we can talk about the violence in Islander communities during the nineteenth century in ways that do not replicate the colonial era. To return to Victoria Plantation in 1883, Loduckduk and the ten other New Britain Islanders in the hospital on that night had been brought to Queensland during a period in which recruiters were searching for cheaper and fresher grounds and using techniques whose traumatic impact culminated in the bloated mortality and illness rates that eventually resulted in the 1885 Royal Commission. If the sulfur liniment was indeed the cause of the violence, what was the reason for the violence? And might it have simply been the last straw? In other words, if we were to reframe such two-dimensional incidents as historical registers of the colonial impact, and in terms that are historically consistent rather than discursively assumed, they have the potential to speak in suggestive nuances of peoples’ experiences. In relation to Islanders’ violence I would suggest that there are three ways in which we might read accounts in the record: first by restoring reason through historical context, second by acknowledging acts of violence as

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extreme rather than normal, and finally by stepping away from the urge to insist that we can provide an all-seeing explanation that contains incidents in a cause-and-effect sequence. The restoration of reason to incidents of violence has the potential to provide more direct reference to their political and historical, rather than racial or anthropological, contexts. This is considered below in relation to such manchild explosions of petulant violence as that which Percy Clarke wrote about. These accounts are explosive only when they have no context. While placing these incidents as primarily relative to the context of colonial relations may indeed run the risk of centering Europe as, to use Bronwen Douglas’ term, the allpowerful ‘‘touchstone’’ of Islanders’ behavior in Queensland, this is a risk I am prepared to take.17 Despite the relative levels of autonomy that many Islanders exercised in Queensland, colonial police, courts, overseers, employers, economies, diseases, and violence still formed the immediate context of Islanders’ worlds. Rather than discounting the potential for ethnohistorical explanations for this violence, then, I focus below on those ethnological or cultural circumstances that were colonial rather than ‘‘Melanesian’’. The historical questions I ask include, what were the external pressures that might cause people to act in the ways that they did? This is not, as Kelly cautions in his analysis of violence amongst Indian laborers in Fiji, an attempt to excuse this violence. Instead, in seeking more than an ‘‘antidote depiction’’ for it, I ask for what reason a person might act in ways so immediately and deliberately contrary to their interests.18 Doing all this epistemologically links the violent structures of colonialism to the violence that occurred so obliquely amongst those against whom the structures were erected. The second consideration explored below arises from the limits of rationality. This is discussed particularly in relation to accounts of group or so-called intertribal violence. Because violence injures and kills, because it is extreme, the search for the reason for violence has the potential to act as a refusal to acknowledge its reflexive nature. I speak here of a physical rather than racial or cultural reflex where we might read violence as a physical register of a social context. Of obvious use here are Frantz Fanon’s attempts to talk through presumptions that the brutality of decolonization movements represented the resurfacing of that native essence that had originally justified the violence of colonialism. His analytical scrutiny is on violence as the dead center and logic-producing force of the colonial project and as the informative context that penetrates the reciprocating force of the colonized. His notion of ‘‘muscular tension’’ is a useful metaphor that articulates an ambiguous internalizing process. While Fanon was talking of specific and actual cases of lockjaw and physical rigidity, ‘‘muscular tension’’ nevertheless offers a useful framework and language for the ‘‘state of perma-

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nent tension’’ and alertness of colonized people,19 or that survival mechanism in the often brutally guarded and segmented colonial world where those excluded were ‘‘never sure whether or not [they had] crossed the frontier’’ of symbolic social boundaries and were being ‘‘overpowered but not tamed’’.20 While Fanon’s insights into colonial psychology came from case studies of violence and disorder in mid-twentieth-century Algeria, his application to nineteenthcentury sugar towns in Queensland is both methodological and conceptual. For he frames violence in terms directly linked to colonial circumstances. The third representation of Islanders’ violence below is related but more ambiguous and governed by a conscious resistance to the assumption that we are able to historically explain Islanders’ violence, particularly when its origins are so effectively masked by the history through which it was recorded. In relation to incidents of assumed insanity or ‘‘crankiness’’ such as has intermittently appeared throughout the previous chapters, we will explore the extent to which this behavior can be seen as indistinctly mapping those dimensions of Islanders’ everyday world that were rarely recorded—the dimensions, that is, of emotion, belief systems both spiritual and religious, the internal (or horizontal) social stratifications of communities, and the whole autonomous world of imported and developed cosmologies. This largely unseen dimension is very effectively marginalized and rendered subaltern by discursive practices and disciplinary limitations that require us to stamp an authoritative explanation on past events.21 To a large extent, the need to occupy a position of authority compels repetition of the discursive practices of the past. In relation to violence in Islander communities in the nineteenth century, authoritative explanations are not offered because I cannot ask people why they did it. Instead, I endeavor to provide a contrast for the current orthodoxy of ethnological explanations by offering historical scenarios that are consistent with the social and historical context. My hope is that through these three approaches we might develop a more nuanced, historically mediated, and proportionate picture of the violence that has been such a ubiquitous presence in the record and histories of Islanders’ negotiations of life in Queensland. m

As discussed in previous chapters, Queensland’s criminal statistics throughout the nineteenth century reflected and manifested circulating colonial discourses on Kanaka violence. Apart from social order offenses such as public drunkenness, the singular offense for which Islanders were most frequently and overwhelmingly remanded and imprisoned was common assault.22 Between 1877 and 1893 Islanders served 607 separate prison terms for common assault. This was rivaled only by 410 sentences for breaches of the Masters and Servants Act,

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despite there being no charges for common assault for 1893, when arresting trends appear, for reasons unknown, to have transferred such charges to drunkenness and obscene language.23 These statistics would appear to confirm that Islanders were committing a large number of cases of petty, unpremeditated, and motiveless assaults, not serious enough to count as assault inflicting bodily harm, but more serious than obscene language and drunkenness. In addition, the charge of disobedience under the Masters and Servants Act, when brought against Islanders by European overseers and planters, was commonly made in conjunction with charges for common assault. The image that forms on the statistical surface of these figures corresponds with the petulant violence caricatured by Percy Clarke. Closer inspection, however, reveals far more nuanced occurrences that are suggestive of the kinds of reasoned ways Islanders managed both the control exerted by planters and overseers on the plantations and the regulated violence they knew was sanctioned against them. The following four incidents from the late nineteenth century are representative of the kinds of charges that were being brought. In Maryborough in 1877, a manager, Walter Bradman, on doing his rounds of the Islander quarters, came across one laborer, Grog, who had stored under his bed a number of stumps of wood. In Bradman’s words he asked Grog to get rid of the logs to prevent fire but was ignored. When he said, ‘‘Grog you savee what I say?’’ Grog turned round and lifted a stick to me and said ‘‘you want to fight?’’ . . . [A]s I was backing away he threw the stick at me. . . . It did not stick me. . . . I then went to the house and produced my revolver. . . . In the meantime he had picked up another stick. . . . I said Grog what is the matter with you this morning—put those sticks down and go to your work—he threw them down and went to his work—the words he used were ‘‘you want plenty fight’’.24

Grog was found guilty of assault and sentenced to seven days’ confinement on a diet of bread and water. In 1881 Avoka Plantation’s overseer, John Brennan, took an Islander laborer, Joweeton, to court for assault, stating that he had ordered people to work in the morning but saw Joweeton sitting by a fire near where he was supposed to be working in the cane. Brennan ordered him to work, to which Joweeton replied he was too cold to work. Brennan stated that he let Joweeton sit ‘‘for over five minutes’’ before he ordered him again to work. Joweeton ignored him, and when Brennan went up to him and touched him on the shoulder ‘‘for the purpose of raising his attention, . . . he immediately got up and rushed to the nearest boy and pulled his hoe from him he then approached me with the hoe

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uplifted’’. Brennan approached Joweeton, took hold of his arm, and ‘‘brought the hoe to the ground’’. When Joweeton threatened him again, Brennan simply ‘‘ordered him again to his work—to which he very slowly went uttering in his own language something’’.25 Joweeton was found guilty, but his sentence was not recorded. The following year, on Rubyanna Plantation, the authority of overseer Isaac Francis was challenged by Islander laborer Billy, who was charged with refusing a lawful order. In Francis’ words, I told prisoner to go to work with other boys. . . . [H]e said no bloody fear—too bloody cold—then I caught him by the sleeve of the coat and asked him to go and he said no and called the other boys to come and help him to fight me—I asked him again 2 or 3 times to go to work—he said no—so I left him by himself—standing at the humpy door. . . . The boy is generally very good he’s not tried this on before.26

Finally, in mid-August 1898, Frank Clark took up employment on a farm managed by Arthur Easey in Bundaberg. On a Saturday morning about a week later, Clark started work at six forty-five, as on any other morning, and went down to the humpies in which Charley and Tommy, two Islander employees, were staying. Getting them up for work, he ordered them to go chipping instead of cutting the cane, as they had been doing the day before, and, as he later stated in evidence, ‘‘Tommy replied and said ‘no good go chipping’. I . . . said to him ‘go and do as you are told’ ’’. When Clark later saw Tommy without his hoe on his way to where he would do the chipping, he asked him where his hoe was. Tommy replied, ‘‘[T]wo fellow boss, no good, one day chip him one day cut cane’’. At that Clark ordered Tommy to work and testified that ‘‘Tommy then said ‘I fight him you’. . . . Tommy then hit me on the face and chest with his hands. I hit at Tommy.’’ 27 Tommy and Clark broke stakes off the nearby fence with which they struck each other before resorting to fists. Tommy called for Charley, and Clark called for Arthur Easey. Easey stated that he saw Charley join Tommy and chase Clark into his house. Charley broke down the front door and fought with Clark and was soon joined by Tommy. The four men fought together in the house until Clark eventually fled with Tommy and Charley in pursuit. Easey later testified that they ‘‘were all running. The defendants were very excited and yelling all the time’’. Clark was trying to reach a neighboring farm while Charley and Tommy were, as Clark stated, ‘‘throwing roots and dirt on to me as they ran after me and they got their dog on to me, the dog caught me by the arm. . . . I heard defendants say, as they ran after me ‘me kill em you’. They were excited and I had to

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run for my life’’. Charley and Tommy eventually gave up the chase and went instead to the office of the inspector of Pacific Islanders at Childers, staying there until Tommy was later arrested. Clark made it to the neighboring farm, where he was treated for exhaustion, shock, and bruising and had the wound on his scalp stitched. At the office of the inspector of Pacific Islanders Tommy was also treated for a similarly deep scalp wound.28 In the trial record, the cases of assault mentioned above appear as singular altercations between individuals of fairly equal standing, where labor relations are merely a backdrop and the recruiting vessels, disciplinary standards, and indenture contracts remain superficially absent. While this is to be expected and is partly due to the legal processes through which the incidents have been recorded, the absence nevertheless reflects wider colonial convictions regarding the timelessness and naturalness of Islanders’ violence. Like Victoria Plantation and the incident with Percy Clark, Islanders’ outbursts of violence were rarely attributed with a motive or cause. Even in the more detailed case of Tommy and Charley, in which the entire transcript of witness testimonies has survived, no attempt to establish the motives of Tommy and Charley was made. Without Islanders’ own testimonies in the depositions, reason and rationale and the ability to offer explanations belonged only to the overseer or victim. Unlike the reasoned and corrective responses of the European plaintiff, therefore, the threats and assaults by Islanders appear as explosive tantrums in reaction to reasonable and lawful orders, infringements on dignity, unreasonable frustration, or laziness, while lacking motive, premeditation, or intellectual engagement. Perhaps this was in fact the case. But when considered contextually, other explanations become consistent with the available information. For the purposes of filling in the historical gaps, the immediate context of the courtroom is surprisingly telling. In the cases above, power relations seem absent and the colonial boundaries that policed relations between Europeans and Islanders is not at first apparent. European overseers and planters are therefore situated at the mercy of Islanders’ unpredictable and temperamental violence. But we must not forget the courtroom through which these cases have been transmitted to the present. These incidents were heard in the courts as part of a reassertion of discipline and colonial authority. This is apparent when we consider the kinds of cases that were being heard in the colony’s Courts of Petty Sessions. Bundaberg’s summons register for the 1880s and 1890s, for example, contained a number of cases that imply this function. In 1887 two counts of assault and one of disobedience of orders were brought against ‘‘Charlie alias Talla South Sea Islander’’ by Alfred Faulkner (assault and disobedience) and Charles Faulkner (assault),29 and two charges for assault and disobedience against ‘‘Peter South Sea Islander’’ were brought by Alexander Cooper in the same year.30 In

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these instances assault by an Islander against a European was not just assault. It was also disobedient. The outcomes of cases of assault against Europeans reflect this. In 1889, for example, two charges of assault brought against Ismall and Willie Aoba resulted in the cancellation of Willie Aoba’s sentence of one month for assault ‘‘at the request of the employer’’, while a concurrent charge of ‘‘unlawfully abetting one Willie and others to assault the complainant’’ resulted in a sentence of fourteen days’ hard labor.31 The case against Willie Aoba, along with the fact that charges for assaults were often accompanied by charges of disobedience, indicates that what was actually being charged and punished in these cases were signs of resistance to planters’ authority and that disobedience was equated with violence or assault. But does this tell us anything about cases such as that of Tommy and Charley? The only indication we have of any past between Tommy, Charley, and Clark was that Tommy did not like the inconsistency of Clark’s orders and that Clark was the newcomer, having been in charge of Tommy and Charley for only a week when the incident occurred. Before beginning employment with Easey, Clark had ‘‘never had charge of Islanders’’, and there were whispered rumors that his attitude was that ‘‘the only way to treat ‘boys’ was to knock them down’’.32 In addition, immediately after the incident, Tommy and Charley went straight to the office of the inspector of Polynesians in town, where they were finally arrested. Whether they went to complain about Clark or to turn themselves in is not clear from the witness depositions, but their choice to go to the inspector’s office implies that their attack on Clark was related to conditions under their labor contract over which the inspector had jurisdiction. Because the case of Tommy and Charley contains fleeting glimpses of a wider context, it offers an exemplary point of departure for speculating on the basis of similar and more detailed scenarios. Typical is that involving the manager of Rubyanna Plantation, Robert Shepherd, whose attitude was that ‘‘the best way to deal with the Kanaka’’ was to ‘‘hammer’’ them and ‘‘to use a certain amount of force with them’’.33 Shepherd was not popular amongst Islanders on Rubyanna or Oakwood (his previous position), where, as he stated, ‘‘[T]he boys threw stones at me . . . because when they did not get out of their huts I pulled them out’’. It was while at Oakwood in 1892 that Shepherd reported that ‘‘I was out in the field and got word that Tallo was sitting down and when I came up to him he went to start work while smoking. I took his pipe from him and he drew his knife on me when I did so’’. Shepherd responded by giving him ‘‘a thorough good hiding. . . . I gave him part of a hammering while I took the knife and part afterwards’’. He declined to charge Tallo with assault, feeling that he had taken enough action himself and ‘‘had punished the boy enough’’.34 With reference to Shepherd’s past and the broader information we have

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available to us regarding the nature of the indenture contract, the threat made by Tallo can tell us at least two different stories. The most familiar one was that simply because Shepherd took Tallo’s pipe, and because Tallo was Melanesian, he exploded in a murderous temper, but Shepherd, cool in a crisis, disarmed and overpowered him, and taught him a sound lesson using his extensive experience in the art of managing the laziness and volatility of gangs of Kanakas. Another story is that, tired from overwork, or perhaps bouts of illness, and having lost patience with taking orders, being called and treated as a ‘‘boy’’, being watched and under surveillance, and feeling and seeing the rough overseeing tactics of Shepherd, Tallo lashed out at the overseer who pushed him too far in trying to take his pipe. Both stories, in the absence of direct evidence from those involved, have been told with speculative embellishment. But only the latter makes reference to a physical context that can be confirmed and the self-descriptive testimony of the overseer involved. The latter, one could argue, makes historical sense, and while speculative, it is able to shed interpretive light on what the resort to violence signified about Islanders’ experiences of the colonial project. While the wider colonial context can reveal much about the buildup to apparently explosive acts of violence, there are points of detail buried in the cases above that offer further insights. In the cases above the sentences for the charged offenses and the offenses themselves were disproportionate. With the exception of Tommy and Charley the assaults were threats rather than actual assaults, and in the cases of Grog, Joweeton, and Billy, the offenses they committed did not include any blows or injury. Likewise, in addition to Tallo not actually striking Shepherd, witnesses to the incident asserted that Tallo had not pulled a knife but had only threatened to hit Shepherd, a point of detail that in the end was less relevant than the threat itself.35 In the cases considered, assaults and threats of violence were inseparable from nonviolent refusals of given orders. Although this detail does undermine the apparent statistical confirmation of Kanakas’ violent tendencies, the point here is not to argue that violence did not actually occur. Rather, it is to point to the detail of Islanders’ apparently explosive violence in order to make qualitative suggestions regarding their negotiation of the regime to which they were bound under the labor contract. Rather than an overreaction, these cases were something of a discursive aberration, for restraint was the more marked response than violence. Notable in all cases, except that of Tommy and Charley, was the absence of actual physical violence and a restraint that is as informative as the lashing out. This is not restricted to the cases considered above, but has been a characteristic of the many incidents that have appeared in previous chapters. For instance, the assault mentioned in chapter 5 against Morlay when he protected Corah from McSuigan in 1885 was more remarkable for the fact that, having had two bones broken by McSuigan

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and having fellow laborers Tom and Tetumin come to his aid armed with sticks, Morlay had armed himself with a spade, but all three had refrained from hitting McSuigan. As Morlay later stated, ‘‘[M]e take him spade want hit him overseer but no hit him’’; instead he chose to go to the Polynesian office and bring charges against McSuigan.36 These points of detail undermine colonial explanations for Islander violence and those historiographical repetitions that assert that violence was an ‘‘ethnically Melanesian’’ mode of response to aggravation, or a kind of ethnic reflex, the ‘‘only constant feature’’ of which was ‘‘the extreme violence of the incidents’’.37 Violence seemed anything but an ethnic reflex. As Augustus Barton testified, when he pulled the blanket off a ‘‘boy [who] refused to turn out in the morning . . . the boy jumped up in a rage’’, and rather than threatening him, ‘‘came into Mr. Caulfield immediately’’.38 Such conscious strategy in Islanders’ attempts to utilize the courts and the structures nominally established for their protection was as typical a defense mechanism as threatening or striking overseers or managers. Bundaberg’s police court register, for example, also included some, although admittedly few, cases of Islander men and women taking Europeans to court for assault and threatening language, and as the Caulfield inquiry of 1897 showed, when Islanders had an inspector who listened to their grievances, they tended naturally to use his services.39 While it is apparent that people utilized the colony’s protective bureaucratic structures when they could, the ability to do this was always ambiguous and depended heavily on peoples’ awareness of protective mechanisms, a nonstandard degree of autonomy on the plantations, and the effectiveness of individual inspectors. Moreover, the line between legally seeking protection and illegally deserting or absconding from hired service was ill defined, and many individual protests accordingly became crimes. In May1868, for example, three employees, Lawie, Waiwassie and Simonia, who were shepherding in Bowen, were taken to court for desertion, having prematurely terminated their contract. They ‘‘positively refuse[d] to return’’ to Bowen and cited maltreatment, overdue wages, and insufficient clothing, housing and food, and regular whippings and beatings as reasons for their refusal. The court found, however, that no matter how ill the treatment, they were under contract and had therefore deserted, or absconded, and were to be compelled to return to service.40 Likewise in1874, while twelve men were on their way to the Rockhampton police magistrate to complain that they were fed only thin slices of bread, not clothed properly, and were called ‘‘black f’’, their employer overtook them on the road to town, reached the Police Magistrate first, and charged them with absconding.41 Finally, as late as 1901, when five laborers employed by the Mulgrave Central Mill Company in Cairns were fined and their ‘‘ringleader’’ sentenced to two months’ impris-

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onment for absenting themselves from hired service for three days, they were bailed on the proviso that they return to hired service. They refused. Citing maltreatment, they stated that ‘‘[w]e no go back, and will go to gaol’’. They were fined between six and twenty pounds each, or between four and two months’ imprisonment.42 Intermittently throughout the nineteenth century, Islanders were aware of and were willing to utilize the protective legislation that existed for them when they could, although this did not always pay off. Moreover, their own experiences on the plantations and with the protective structures that existed meant that they were keenly aware of the violence that was inherently sanctioned against them. They were tactical in their use of protective measures and were wary of behaving in ways that would result in disproportionate punishments or would jar into action the violent capabilities of colonial structures. Within the context of their reasoned, calculated, and calm actions, we begin to gain a feel for the significance of apparently explosive acts of violence, or violent threats, against European overseers and employers. In explosive incidents, perhaps the greatest significance lies in the absence of the other responses people historically adopted. Accordingly, a way of reading these incidents might be to take them as implying a momentary or accumulated desperation or anger that reflects widely on the direct pressures of plantation life. As in the case of Tallo, and perhaps in the case of Tommy and Charley, the violence they committed or threatened to commit can be interpreted as responses to overseers for whom some evidence exists of their violent management and overseeing techniques and philosophies. In the context of the intermittent testing of boundaries of discipline and protection that we have seen Islanders undertaking through the courts, it is historically consistent to say that, in general, apparently explosive and motiveless violence was in fact the cumulative outcome of the plantation and colonial experience. This leads us to a consideration of the more ambiguous aspect of Islanders’ violence that has been most prone to interpretations that draw heavily on racialized imagery and caricatures. In other words, we will consider the violence that occurred between Islanders and was unambiguously more brutal and fatal than that which we have already considered—or so-called intertribal warfare. m

In 1892 the following incident was relayed to the Northern District Court sitting in Mackay. Two Aoba Islanders, Tarra and Allo, employed at Homebush, returned to their quarters on a Sunday evening in mid-September. Allo went straight to his house, while Tarra went to the kitchen for his evening meal.While Tarra was counting out seven pieces of bread for his meal, a group of Malaita

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Islanders came to the kitchen. Without warning two approached Tarra from behind and struck him with a block of wood, fracturing his skull. As Tarra stated, ‘‘Mylato hit me from behind—Malbonalla hit me—he hit me one time I finish’’.43 Allo meanwhile was in his house, where he said he heard ‘‘a row in the kitchen— other boy fight em Tarra’’. For reasons upon which he did not elaborate, Allo started running towards the nearby mill but was caught on the road by Malaita Islander Louie, who struck him twice on the head. As Louie later testified in court, ‘‘I hit Allo with a tomahawk and knocked him down and then plenty more boys came and hammered him when Allo stop on ground. We then went on to the bridge and had another fight with more Aoba boys’’.44 Allo was off work for at least five weeks and unconscious for a week with serious head injuries. The attack that injured Tarra and Allo in 1892 was one of a number of serious physical assaults and murders committed within the Islander population during the nineteenth century, and particularly from the 1890s. Such incidents were frequently explained and recorded as outbursts of either imported wars and feuds between ‘‘tribes’’ from the islands or the result of more general islandbased tribal mentalities. There are a number of exemplary cases with enough historical detail to highlight the instability of interpreting this violence as simply a Melanesian or Kanaka thing. In cases of violence within Islander communities, injuries and murders were sustained from attacks that appeared, at least in the courts, to have occurred, as in the case of Tarra and Allo, with no warning and for no apparent reason. In Mackay in 1892, for example, two laborers on River Estate in Mackay, Harry and Tommy, had gone to Hill End on a Sunday afternoon to buy kerosene and a mosquito net. On their way home, they met six men on the road. As Harry later stated, ‘‘I say good day along altogether. Billy and Charlie say to me where you island, me say Sandwich Island—Charlie say where you work, me say me work along master George—me want to come home me say good night altogether’’. As they left, Charlie lunged at Tommy with a pocketknife, cutting his face. When Tommy and Charlie subsequently went to the police and charges of assault were laid, Charlie pleaded guilty. Although pleading guilty, Harry was questioned by the police magistrate about Charlie’s sobriety: ‘‘I see Charlie and Billy first time altogether on Sunday—I think Charlie and Billy drunk’’.45 In a second case in Bundaberg a few months earlier, Tomato and his friends, all from Oba Island, had gone into town in the evening. On their way home they went through East Bundaberg, and as Tomato later testified, they ran into people from Malaita, who asked them where they worked. They replied that they worked on Noakes’ plantation. The Malaita men then asked them what island they came from; when they replied that they came from Aoba, the Malaita men ‘‘[n]o say nothing more. Malayta boy then stick him me belong knife. . . . He first

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cut the right side of my head the first time. Me run away—me come back again and Malayta boy say ‘who are you’. . . . I say me man Solomon, I gammon.46 The fighting continued regardless, and when the case went to court Tomato was still off work due to injuries. All the defendants in this case pleaded guilty, and all witnesses, including the defendants, described the incident in the same way. Despite this, the answers given to the unrecorded questions of two attending Polynesian inspectors and the police sergeant indicate that the court’s interest was similar to that of the Mackay magistrate a few months earlier: how much grog had they consumed and was it tribal. Orrmay, for example, answered one question with ‘‘I no take him any grog that night’’.47 Another defendant, Quioney, responded, ‘‘[W]e come along town that night because we want to make a row with man of Aoba. Altogether boy Aoba along Mr. Holt make him row along boy Malayta along Mr. Holt. We fight him Aoba boy because Man Malayta along Mr. Holt tell him’’.48 Just as the fight in Bundaberg appeared to have been defined in terms of standing feuds between plantation-based island groups, other incidents of what were called tribal violence occurred in the midst of highly stylized and organized fights or mock battles of the kind that provided occasional entertainment for the sugar districts. In 1894, for example, Tallie, Towhee, Toarla, Sam, and Witegar stood trial for the murder of Far-fan-nor, who was shot twice in the head with arrows at Bingera Plantation in Bundaberg. The fight had been something of a spectator event and was on a grand scale, elaborate in style and massive in numbers. In the words of one participant, [B]oy Malayta sing out. . . . When boy Malayta finish sing out boy Aoba he take him Nulla-Nulla and spear and run man Malayta along their house man Malayta go along house and he get spear and Nulla Nulla and run boy Aoba then boy Aoba run man Malayta. Malayta boy then run man Aoba. When each side been run one another two time each, they began to fight.49

The fighting spilled into nearby fields, scattered across gullies and riverbeds, and ended after Far-fan-nor was killed. Asked in court, Araali, an Oba Islander, explained in unusual detail what the fight had been about. I come from same island as all the men in the dock. I have got a wife. Woman Aoba cross with Malayta man because he come along cane where they work. Some man Aoba cross too with Malayta man about woman. I did not call the Aoba men together to fight on Saturday. The fight did not begin until after we knocked off work at 4 o’clock I think fight about 5 o’clock.50

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In all of the cases above, as in the cases of explosive violence already considered, the apparently unprovoked nature of the attacks resulted in questioning that focused intensely on establishing whether or not a feud (i.e., a tribal feud) existed. Tribalism was the stand-in for motive, and the efforts of the court were focused on ascertaining the tribal affiliations and motivations of those involved. The reasons offered by Islanders varied from ‘‘returning marks’’ and the perpetuation of feuds to the unplanned outcomes of stylized fights or sing-sings. Rarely were detailed accounts provided, such as Araali’s account above for the fight at Bingera. Not only did these appear to be less than murderous feuds, but in addition, on closer scrutiny it was, like that of other incidents of tribal violence, more than apparent that Islanders’ tribal violence was a colonial specialty. Imported Melanesian tribalism was the only explanation that appeared to make sense to colonial courts. The questions of the court regarding island origin, premeditation, and alcohol consumption in each of the cases above were guided by, and reflect, this. Throughout the nineteenth century, tribal feuds and resulting violence amongst Islanders remained a notorious point of fascination within settler society. As explored in previous chapters, Islanders’ tribal mentality, or inability to deal with feuds and disputes in a rational way, was seen to be inherent, and unbridled revenge, murderous brutality, and savage rationale was seen to be at the center of community relations. This has been repeated and has remained unchallenged in more recent histories where, through a concern to give emphasis to the significance of indigenous points of reference for Islander communities in Queensland, historians have claimed such unsupported truths as, ‘‘[i]n seeking deaths in compensation for deaths, Melanesians did not feel obliged to kill the person they thought directly responsible. If possible they would locate and deal directly with the murderer; otherwise, they were satisfied with any death’’.51 As Moore would explain in later publications, for generic Melanesians ‘‘murders, either through sorcery or by physical violence, had to be avenged to maintain social equilibrium’’.52 While this may or may not be the case, the notion of there being a principally tribal logic governing Islanders’ violence in Queensland not only recapitulates the colonial prose, but it is also intensely ahistorical. The colonial world of oppressive regimes of labor, informal social segregation, and social and legal sanctions of violence against colonial threats like the Kanaka Menace was the world in which grew the animosity between groups. Summary research of western Pacific laborers in Fiji would tend to underscore the importance of this specific colonial world. As Peter Corris suggested in his study of Solomon Islanders in Fiji, where the European population was comparatively small and where indentured Islanders spent time in Fijian villages rather than on the fringes of European towns, there was significantly less group violence

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than there was in Queensland. In Kanaky/New Caledonia, on the other hand, Shineberg has recorded that what she calls gang violence amongst Island groups was different again, being apparently more public but equally as systematized and dynamic as in Queensland.53 While in need of further in-depth research, these comparative situations indicate potential value in considering the sustained pressure of the colonial context in the production of group violence. What we can historically verify about the feuding violence in Queensland is that tribalism was a term whose reference was constantly changing and that ‘‘tribes’’ frequently had a colonial specificity. They were variously articulated in terms of plantations or whole island groups and had a very fluid, rather than ossified, nature. This fluidity is apparent when we note that in many of the unprovoked attacks that have appeared in previous chapters the victims claimed to have been oblivious to the reasons they were attacked. For example, in 1889, when Bollo went searching in Bundaberg for an Oba, Aurora, or Santo Islander to avenge a ‘‘mark’’, the testified response of his victim, Jack, when attacked, was, ‘‘Hullow mate, me no savvy you killem me for nothing’’.54 A similar incident occurred in 1891 in Mackay, when a Tanna Islander, Davy, was killed by Tovaro during a fight that broke out on Habana between Aoba and Tanna Islanders. Davy was shot in the head with an arrow as he came out of his hut on Christmas day. As his friend Charley Canna stated, Davy ‘‘staggered about and came close up to me he called my name and said me die—he spoke no more—I pulled the arrow out of Davy’s head. . . . Davy did not speak again—Davy did not sing out when the arrow struck him. . . . I am sorry that Davy is dead’’.55 Although Davy’s friends had known that the ‘‘Aoba Islanders were cross with us, we came from Tanna’’, they stated that they were surprised Davy was shot and were ‘‘cross now with [Tovaro] for shooting Davy’’, for ‘‘Tovaro and Davy had no row’’ and, as Cow stated, ‘‘I wanted Tovaro to go to the Lockup’’.56 This latter detail is suggestive. Beyond the certainty of the courts and European commentators in these cases, Islanders who were actively involved were not apparently drawing on deeply rooted tribal feuds and divisions. Likewise, while they utilized the courts as much as they could against violent employers, their appearance as plaintiff, as in the instance of Davy’s murder, was also frequently in cases of assault against groups of Islanders. On 30 July 1889, for example, ‘‘Terookey South Sea Islander’’ brought separate complaints of assault against Boyfarra, Mallowa, and Cosow on the same day that another Islander, Bangareet, brought separate charges of assault against Woos, Tarwal, and Nargut; and on 28 November 1890, Tuart-mer-mer and Longa-rak-ka brought separate charges of assault against Henry and Sam Motlab and Fred Aoba.57 The multiple characters of these brief and unelaborated registers of complaints are similar in form to the cases that have appeared with qualitative detail and con-

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tained apparently unprovoked attacks. Their significance is that instead of ‘‘returning marks’’ and continuing feuds as a tribal mentality might dictate, the victims of these assaults took their attackers to court. Because of the particularities of the tunnel vision of colonial scrutiny, violence was what was most visible and salient to the colonial gaze, rather than the presence of healthy or functional social cohesion. In all of the cases related above, however, we can catch glimpses of a world of value systems, cultural protocols, and respect systems whose specificities and subtleties have been obscured or subsumed by colonial expertise, imaginings, anxieties, and blanketing notions of tribalism. In each act of violence above, however, we are also able to observe cohesive rather than simply destructive qualities: the strengths of friendships, surprise that such an attack would be committed, and attempts to avenge or stem feuds through legal processes. The violence that dominates colonial records was one relatively extraordinary aspect of Islanders’ world in nineteenth-century Queensland, and it constituted merely the outer edges of a richer, multilayered community that emerged from the heterogeneity that initially existed amongst its members. But because of the privileged status of Islanders’ violence in the colonial record, there exists potential for us to read it as a communicative performance where peoples’ actions spoke in ways that were less mediated by the transcribed and limited abilities of the nineteenthcentury anglicized Pidgin through which verbal communication was made. It is to this communicative aspect and a brief consideration of apparent ‘‘crankiness’’ and insanity that we will turn before coming back to these cases of group violence. m

The violence we have considered above arguably communicates in direct and indirect ways the social impacts of colonial displacement and disempowerment on both a community and individual level. The more telling, and at the same time most opaque, of violent incidents were those cases whose explanations referenced Islanders’ assumed psychological infancy and fragility or their unsoundness of mind and crankiness. The story of Simmon, who was killed in1874 and whose inquest depositions were sent for advice to the attorney general by William Goodall, is exemplary. Lacking an interpreter at the inquest, Goodall had to rely for evidence on two white men, whose testimony, he stated, was ‘‘ample as to the facts’’, rather than that of the Islanders ‘‘who witnessed the murder’’ but who spoke only ‘‘a little indifferent English’’.58 His conclusion of the event was that ‘‘this man was murdered by a fellow countryman named Bath, or Bow, who appears to have been insane at the time and who remains up to this date, under close supervision by the doctor as a dangerous lunatic’’. No further

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elaboration of Bath’s (or Bow’s) reasons, motives, or apparent insanity was or would be given. A murder that occurred two years later on Branscombe Plantation, although recorded with more detail than the last, would likewise maintain its silence. In the early hours of Saturday, 25 March 1876, a Malo Islander, Mulwelltellah, was attacked as he slept by another Malo Islander, Desopey. As a witness later testified, ‘‘Mulwelltellah was in the hut he was asleep: Desopey got up and attacked [Mulwelltellah] with the tomahawk: he struck him several times over the head: I ran away, and all the other boys too: Mulwelltellah ran away too’’.59 Desopey ran into the cane, where he was found soon afterwards and taken back to the house where he had attacked Mulwelltellah.60 Andrew Cahill, the senior constable at Walkerston, arrived a few hours later to arrest Desopey and stated that he ‘‘arrested the prisoner . . . on a charge of attempting to murder one Mulwelltellah, a countryman of his: I spoke to prisoner [sic], said I must take him to the Mackay Lockup: he said ‘All right, come on’. I then brought him to the Mackay lockup’’. Desopey made no further statements and gave no indication as to why he had attacked Mulwelltellah, leaving us only passing and brief references to the lead up. Witnesses stated that ‘‘the wounded man and prisoner had [no] quarrel’’ but that ‘‘Desopey [was] always a fighting man’’. Desopey had been in Queensland for about eighteen months, and Dr. Robert McBurney testified that ‘‘I have known him for some time past as a sickly boy. . . . On Friday last as I am informed he showed some strangeness of behavior’’. Henry Robinson, the superintendent of Branscombe, also stated that Desopey had ‘‘been very sick for some time: but not at all troublesome’’ and that for ‘‘a day or two previous to this affair I noticed prisoner to act in a strange manner: burying his clothes’’.61 In both these cases, the violence remained inexplicable in the colonial record and was designated as insane, or just part of the strange things Kanakas do. In this sense they were not unique. Throughout the period of the indentured labor trade, particularly amongst plantation laborers, reference was frequently made to incidents of Islanders going ‘‘cranky’’, being of unsound mind, or behaving in bizarre and insane ways. A number of examples have been related in previous chapters of extreme emotional responses to recruitment or conditions in Queensland that led to suicidal behavior. Kelah’s distress in Brisbane Gaol and Warraka’s crying and death in the sugar cane upon the death of his brother are vivid examples. In each case the extremity of their behavior is suggestive of the individual impact of colonial changes. In most cases of ‘‘cranky’’ behavior, however, and Warraka is a remarkable exception to this rule, such incidents will only ever be suggestive because their recording lacks explanation. Behavior that was notably bizarre or that registered emotional extremes was frequently rendered unremarkable in a context of widely held beliefs that Kanakas, as savages,

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were of such intellectual immaturity that unsound minds, insanity, and hysterical behavior were merely an unguarded extension of their normal state. Only incomplete fragments of their lives and characters were therefore recorded, and the assumed fragility of Kanaka rationality and sanity was merely confirmed in the process of witnessing, explaining, and recording such occurrences. More than temper and tribalism, the explanation of insanity was a powerfully silencing prose that divorced each incident from any possible causal relationship with the physical or temporal context within which it occurred. These recording processes ironically normalized bizarre incidents that might otherwise stand as telling testimony of the individual impact of colonialism. The silencing function was most noticeable with charges of unsoundness of mind, from which we can detect signs of its application to behavior that was dangerous rather than insane. A case in point is the arrest on 17 January 1898 of Billy Solomon, a forty-year-old laborer in Port Douglas, under suspicion of being of unsound mind. The only indication that we have of why this may have been was that amongst his sundries on arrest he had ‘‘six spears and 5 [shillings and] 3 [pence]’’ and that the arrest was accompanied by no other charges of assault, grievous bodily harm, murder, or even resisting arrest.62 We can only speculate, on the basis of cases already considered in previous chapters, as to what Billy Solomon’s behavior and its relationship to his six spears might have been. In the cases discussed in chapter 3, for example, nativeness (the spears) was often equated with incommunicability, lack of reason, and irrationality—or unsoundness of mind. In another example in Bundaberg, Luluwah, or ‘‘labourer no. 34’’ of Bingera Plantation, was described by his employer, Angus Gibson, as having been ‘‘always a bad boy’’ to the extent that Gibson had often ‘‘wondered whether he was alright’’. Luluwah was, Gibson stated repeatedly, recalcitrant, frequently turned up late to work, and was assumed to have been often ill only because of a hangover. Gibson applied to the Polynesian office for loss of time through drunkenness despite the fact that Luluwah’s attending doctor had attributed his illness to a cause other than alcohol. The Polynesian office refused Gibson’s request, but nevertheless withheld Luluwah’s wages. Aware that his medical certificate stated he was not suffering a hangover and that the Gibsons were therefore not entitled to withhold his wages, Luluwah visited the office to claim his withheld money, which after three visits he received. Caulfield stated afterwards that after consultation with the Gibsons, who ‘‘refreshed [his] memory about the boys [sic] character’’, they ‘‘came to the conclusion that he was demented’’. This was a conclusion they thought was confirmed by Luluwah’s ‘‘unruly’’ behavior after contact with the Polynesian office when ‘‘he worked for about a month after that but worked very indifferently’’.63

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In Luluwah’s case, and perhaps Billy Solomon’s, unsoundness of mind and dementedness were applied to behavior that was not in accordance with Islanders’ social role in the colony. In Luluwah’s case in particular the recorded basis of the accusation of dementedness was little more than indifference and an inappropriate lack of subservience within the labor contract. In these two cases, the ability of the brand of insanity to detach the colonial and social context is obvious. But in the cases of Bath or Bow and Desopey’s attacks in the 1870s, some reference to the context of the plantations or colonial world will allow us to begin to work through the discursive themes of insanity and, relatedly, tribal mentalities. As seen in previous chapters, in 1884, Donaldson on Pioneer Plantation used hobbles to contain absconding and ‘‘cranky’’ Islanders from the Heath, and one of Martin Wessel’s complaints against Caulfield during the 1897 public service inquiry was that Caulfield had ‘‘cautioned [him] about locking up a mad Islander’’—a caution he felt was unjustified against such a standard practice.64 This blasé familiarity implies an absent record of the history and social context of apparent incidents of Islander insanity: a context that we can glimpse in planter and police responses, the hobbles, the jails, and, in the case of Pioneer, the sickness and death rates that surrounded new arrivals. In Desopey’s case, he had been in the colony for eighteen months, during which time he had always been sick. We know that in the days leading up to his attack on Mulwelltelah that he had behaved bizarrely and was burying his clothes. Through this fragmented information, we can reconstruct enough of the history of this incident to speculate on the colonial impact. But we must remain alert to the possibility that imposing rational explanations on an incident like this might also limit the possibilities of what Desopey’s story is telling us. It may have been a senseless attack, an act of desperation under circumstances upon which we can only speculate based on the wider colonial context. Mulwelltellah and Desopey may have been in conflict, and Desopey’s behavior before the incident may well indicate psychological illness or imbalance. In the end, however, the sources remain silent on the individual specificities of this incident. Rather than limit its wider communicative possibilities, there is informative value in simply searching for historical explanations and the resulting reflection of the context of the colonial world in Queensland, the recruitment, the recruiting voyage, the plantation regime, the illness, the death rates, and the poised violence of the colonial structure. As with these cases of assumed insanity or crankiness, refraining from imposing definitive and authoritative explanations allows the violence within Islander communities to communicate information that colonial records could never articulate. As was discussed at the outset of this study and this chapter, it is essential

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to avoid imposing new layers of authority, and new explanations for violence in these nineteenth-century communities. While I have stressed the colonial context and the pushes and pulls of the social pressures of the plantations and sugar towns, what has been left out of the story so far is the private world of these communities. Moore and Mercer and those who provided information to the Oral History Collection in the 1970s talked freely about imported social protocols, taboos, and sorcery that may well offer explanations for Desopey’s and others’ behavior, for as they have argued, metaphysical practices from the islands remained constant and even intensified on the plantations in Queensland.65 The potential presence of sorcery and the related continuity of island cosmologies in mediating social relations on the plantations are not denied in this study despite the fact that they are not examined. The potential presence of these things has been deliberately ignored in a conscious effort to restore historical and social explanatory factors to the dominance of Melanesianism in existing records and histories. Aspects of magic, sorcery, and the metaphysical, along with other dimensions of Islanders’ pasts such as emotional registers of colonization or those similar dimensions that might have added to the flat caricatures of Islanders as Kanakas in the records, will remain in many respects the ‘‘unseen’’ dimensions of the past.66 As long as we can access Islanders during the nineteenth century only through the records of colonial administrations and gazes, the true extent of the social autonomy of Queensland Islander communities in their embryonic state are likely to remain, like Dipesh Chakrabarty’s subaltern pasts, nonvisible.67 But obviously this does not mean these dimensions were not there. While Islanders’ reasons and motives during violent behavior were accounted for within established colonial modes of representation, we can nevertheless read, question, and speculate on the actions of people, and by opening up the possibilities of meaning in their actions, we thereby open the possibilities of gaining glimpses of the breadth and depth of what we cannot see. m

Violence that occurred within emergent Islander communities in Queensland during the nineteenth century could be severe. At worst people used tomahawks, spears, bows and arrows, knives, guns, and cane knives on each other with sometimes, although not always, lethal force. Acknowledging this reality is important, for in considering Islanders’ violence in relation to the colonial context and away from racialized discourses, it is significant that violence within the community had a far greater potency than was generally unleashed against white employers or overseers. It is also significant that this violence often had an incoherence and haphazardness that is incompatible with the breadth of

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community cohesion that has been explored in previous chapters. Yet existing explanations for this violence are minimalist and can be found largely in the explanations inherent in the labels of tribalism and Melanesianism. The idea, however, that feuding and tribal behavior was just part of the way Melanesians ethnographically think—a Melanesian thing—does not stand up to historical scrutiny. Why was it not the same in Fiji? Why were feuds actively pursued in Queensland by some and ended through the courts by others? Why did it develop such Queensland-specific characteristics where allegiances constantly shifted and ‘‘tribes’’ were organized on the varied bases of plantations, individual islands, and colonially created island groups and future nations? In the context of the cohesive communities that developed at the same time, why did the violence continue? And in the end, can it tell us anything about Islanders’ experiences of colonization, and to what extent might we consider it as expressive or indicative of colonial pressures? In order to understand this violence as both a symptom and an outcome, we need to approach it with the types of questions that would be asked of violence in any marginalized group of the past that has not been the subject of such racialization. Names again seem significant. Shineberg’s naming of violence within imported Islander communities in the sugar districts of Kanaky/New Caledonia as gang fighting is exemplary of such a shift in focus.68 This subtly relegates the violence to the realm of the sociological with its consideration of power dynamics, disadvantage, and marginalization as explanations, rather than simply the realm of the cultural, which, while social, places no emphasis on the role of contextual power, oppression, and disadvantage—or in a word, colonialism. The internalized brutalizing, and even tribalizing, process of colonization that Fanon grappled with in Algeria seems relevant at this point, as does his deceptively nuanced concept of muscular tension. In many of the previously discussed charges of assault brought by overseers and employers in Queensland’s Courts of Petty Sessions, Fanon’s notion of muscular tension could be applied as an interpretive term, or optic, whose focus extends to the historicity of these ‘‘eruptions’’ over trivial orders and slights against dignity. Likewise, in cases of so-called intertribal violence, muscular tension places the onus of explanation on the physical and social external pressures imposed by the colonial world. We might thus understand this violence as the byproduct of the survival and articulation we have previously considered. Caution is warranted here, for this is a potentially prescriptive explanation. In attacking science’s notions of the natives’ hysterical tendencies and reflexive use of force and violence, Fanon asserted universalisms, albeit human and historical ones rather than racial and biological, that implied a rule of cause and

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effect. It is a rule as capable of essentialisms and with as much potential to deintellectualize and pathologize colonized peoples’ adjustments to colonialism as any ethnological explanation. Its applicability to the fighting and violence that occurred within Islander communities is therefore made with due care and is adopted here as a consciously stylized description of complex and subtle processes. Islanders’ strategic political and economic experience, as described in previous chapters, their use of the courts against each other and Europeans, and their exploitation of even slightly more sympathetic Polynesian inspectors makes visible the ways in which they were directly protecting and defending themselves in accordance with the way colonial violence and benevolence functioned. Their frustrations were often focused and directed, and it is within this context that we must nest Fanon’s model of muscular tension. The notion of muscular tension, in its categorical sureness, does establish a valuable and deceptively subtle perspective with which to historicize Islanders’ violence. A language metaphor, around which this study is arranged, also expresses this subtlety. The outbreaks of horizontal violence outlined above were, in a sense, ruptures caused by the depth and weight of vertical pressure of the colonial world and the closeness of the communities contained by its guarded boundaries. The inwardness of this aggression makes historical sense in terms of the embedded nature of colonial force.Violence was burrowed into the woodwork of the colonial structure in Queensland, and individual overseers and employers did not need to be constantly whipping and chaining Islanders for its ubiquity both to shadow acts of resistance and to silently but solidly support the orders of the master. Vertical pressure was overt and subtle and as explosive, perpetual, and latently present as the violence with which Islanders were characterized. Islanders were subject to legal and social pressures within the formal and informal segregation of Queensland’s sugar districts, and collective and individual pressures caused by their personal displacement and disempowerment were compounding features. Beyond the violence that has been singled out for prominence in this chapter, we have also observed the ongoing productive attempts of men and women on the plantations to create self-reliant, and self-defining, identities and communities or to make history continue. While colonialism caused catastrophic disruption to societies in the western Pacific, the evidence we have been left of Islanders’ adjustments in Queensland shows that they did not self-destruct or implode and crumble under the weight of a fatal impact. They developed new strengths, of which survival was the most resilient, and violence was part of this dynamic. Outbreaks of violence, while they cannot be singularly explained, may be read partly as the misdirected or blind strikes of the desperate and brutalized, partly the release of the tension of

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colonial pressures and the tribalizing impact of colonial violence, and partly as actions with meaning that is autonomous and that transcends the colonial province. Unifying all of these, however, and as a social reflection of power dynamics, the violence that Islanders committed in Queensland, whether community violence or individual incidents, was a deeply physical registration of the colonial impact.

Conclusion Structural Continuity and the Violence of Forgetting

Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present. What animates such appeals is not only disagreement about what happened in the past and what the past was, but uncertainty about whether the past really is past, over and concluded, or whether it continues, albeit in different forms, perhaps. –Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism IF, IN THIS STUDY, we have been following any kind of chronological direc-

tion, we come to an end with the arrival of the twentieth century. This is not because of the arrival of a new century, but because it ushered in a new era when Islanders would face deportation and, as the culmination of their time in Queensland, be forgotten. The engineered forgetting of their presence, service, and treatment during the nineteenth century was contested, but the campaign to be remembered would take another hundred years before being formally successful. It therefore seems appropriate that we bring together the themes under investigation in this study with a discussion of the nature of forgetting and remembering. To do so, we will start in 1901, when the communities of Australian South Sea Islanders that had begun to emerge by this time and that had been forged through united allegiances and fractured divisions faced the massive disruption of compulsory deportation. Of the ten thousand-strong population, only about twenty-five hundred would stay. As part of its birth into the twentieth century, Australia had committed itself to a lingering era of race-based democracy, and this was most potently represented in the twin policies of white Australia and Aboriginal protection. What this meant for those Islanders who stayed is that although the Queensland government had abandoned the royal commissioner’s suggestions of establishing a separate Islander reserve system, they had not abandoned the underlying principle of allowing people to stay, but only under segregated and regulated conditions. In other words, only as long as they could be forgotten.

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Photo 11. The first shipment of deported Islanders waiting for a medical examination outside the courthouse in Cairns. Note the bike and other goods. Reported in The Queenslander, 3 November 1906. Source: ‘‘Kanakas—Cairns, ca. 1906’’. Photographed by R. A. Ruddle. ‘‘Kanaka’’ Box, John Oxley Collection, State Library of Queensland. Negative number 142325.

The period of unstated segregation that characterized most of the twentieth century in Australia was more than a colonial legacy. Just as structures underpin the cosmetic changes of a building, so, too, did colonial structures continue to underpin Australian society in its future. Islanders who remained did so as legal aliens who could not be naturalized and who would be restricted from cultivating and leasing property, accessing social benefits, gaining legal employment, and voting at both the state and federal level. Under varied industrial legislation and race-based union bans, they were excluded from the sugar industry, which by 1902 was the only place Islanders could legally be employed. The impact can be statistically illustrated. In 1902, 86 percent of Queensland sugar was produced by Islander labor. Deportation from 1906 and the sugar bounty of 1904, which paid growers more for sugar produced by white labor, meant that by 1908 this figure had dropped to 12 percent; by 1919 it was 7 percent, and by the end of the same year only a handful of Islanders officially remained in the industry. The infamous dictation test, introduced nationally as a way to prevent nonwhite immigration, was also introduced into Queensland’s sugar industry in 1911. After

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this time, Pacific Islanders were required to read and write fifty words in English before being granted a certificate to work in the cane fields, and after 1913 they needed to pass a dictation test as a qualification for growing or cultivating sugar anywhere in Queensland.1 This exclusion from their main source of employment and economic survival was compounded by a wider range of other industries, from construction and mining to the banana industry, which introduced similar restrictive measures excluding Islanders from engaging in legal and therefore protected and regulated employment. Many Islander communities were reduced by white Australia’s targeted economic exclusion to subsistence living, extreme poverty, and an economic reliance on illegal and dangerous employment such as, most infamously, cane cutting by moon and lamplight. In addition, a range of measures that closely mirrored the trends of the nineteenth century, such as local color bars, both formal and informal, remained in place to thoroughly strip Islanders of effective rights.2 The nature of their civil status in Queensland is typified by the amendments made in 1934 to Queensland’s notorious Aboriginal Protection and the Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act considered in chapter 3. These amendments formalized the power of white Aboriginal protectors, or those operating under their authority, to define, at their discretion, any Pacific Islander or person of mixed Pacific Island descent as Aboriginal for the purposes of control under the act.3 While detailed research is yet to be conducted into the number of South Sea people who were brought under the legislation either before or after 1934, this legislative amendment is expressive of the effective legal and social status that Islanders had as black Queenslanders.4 With regard to Queensland’s franchise, the exclusion of ‘‘aboriginal natives of Australia and the Islands of the Pacific’’ remained until 1965. While this ambiguously meant that Islanders born in Queensland were technically entitled to vote, the real question is whether any black Queenslander would have been able to exercise this right when everyone knew black people were not allowed to vote. The children of the first generation of Islanders therefore enjoyed formal rights, but only as a technicality.5 In the end Islanders’ effective social status stemmed from being black in a country where whiteness was the basis for rights and privileges. There are a few published accounts that flesh out the contours of life after deportation under these conditions. These include those personal accounts written by Noel Fatnowna, Mabel Edmund, and Faith Bandler; the collection of interviews published by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) as The Forgotten People; and the detailed local research of historians Patricia Mercer, Carol Gistitin, and Clive Moore. The Black Oral History Collection recorded by Moore and Mercer and the ABC also is a rich archive. From these we can view a community reeling from their losses after deportation as friends, brothers, sis-

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ters, cousins, lovers, and spouses were deported. As one interviewee said in1977 of the immediate aftermath in Mackay, When I look at the river, I think of the hundreds of black people on North bank and South bank [of the Pioneer River]. . . . The government said you can live in Australia, but they didn’t say we’ll give you a—ah—grant—he just told us we were free now, but he didn’t tell us how free we were, and we still under bondage.

This interviewee described also how the indigenous community in Mackay initially helped Islander communities to adjust and learn what and how to eat from the country around them.6 This interviewee, like others, also spoke of the years following deportation when the church emerged as a cultural center of gravity, when the continued divisions and allegiances within communities mellowed and intensified, and when poverty and prejudice were eventually countered by the gradual clawing back of rights and recognition. While there was much in terms of colonial relations that continued seamlessly from the nineteenth century into the twentieth, the period following 1901 was arguably marked by one significant change. While colonial relations of the nineteenth century had been marked by a fixated attention and surveillance, this shifted during the period of white Australia to a dedicated amnesia and neglect. This change facilitated continuity, and the erasure of Islanders’ presence through economic, social, and political exclusion meant that the Australian state continued to attempt to legislate away any financial and social autonomy and growth, and white Australia continued to play at will with the identities of both indigenous and Islander peoples in ways that could have a massive impact in the context of the administrative and legislative violence being waged against indigenous communities. With white Australia so clearly characterized by attempts to eradicate race through exclusion, assimilation, and forgetfulness, the political response of indigenous peoples and South Sea Islanders alike was a sustained campaign for not just rights but recognition and remembrance. The reemergence of organized political agitation began most publicly in the 1960s with people like Faith Bandler, who was of both indigenous and South Sea Islander descent. Bandler devoted herself to fighting for black causes and civil rights at the same time that indigenous peoples’ political activity regained lost momentum in the push for the granting of full citizenship status in the 1967 referendum.7 But formal equality of rights would be only one element of political agitation. Just as the Australian civil rights era failed to deliver substantive equality to indigenous people in ways specific to their status as first peoples, so, too, for South Sea Islanders the lack of any formal recognition as a group facing disadvantage as a result of group-specific and targeted oppression remained un-

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resolved. Campaigns accordingly shifted after the 1960s towards calls for a basic recognition of South Sea Islanders’ identity and status. From the1970s a political voice asserting black consciousness, a distinct South Sea identity, and the right to recognition reemerged through such organizations as the Australian South Sea Islanders United Council. With a focus on community pride and recognition, by the 1970s and 1980s political activity and consciousness began to lead back to the islands through support for independence movements and the tentative return of the sons, daughters, and grandchildren of the first generation of recruits.8 While success was being gained within South Sea Islander communities, successful steps in white Australia were a long time coming. It was not until1992 that the federal government began to take notice of South Sea Islanders’ claims and campaigns. In that year the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) inquired into the condition of South Sea Island communities.9 The published report, Call for Recognition, found that Islanders faced systemic disadvantage on par with indigenous Australians when it came to accessing the services and standard of living of most of white Australia. With no recognized status as a historically disadvantaged community, however, the commission found that South Sea Islanders had no avenues for redressing disadvantage and discrimination other than to identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander in order to access the very limited resources available to indigenous Australians to counter disadvantage. Accordingly, the HREOC inquiry recommended formal government recognition of the past and of Australian South Sea Islanders as a discrete community defined by cultural distinction and past and present discrimination. This was forthcoming. The Australian government formally recognized South Sea Islanders in 1994, followed in 2001 by the Queensland government’s statement that South Sea Islanders have a ‘‘unique spirituality, identity and cultural heritage’’ that has been ‘‘ignored and denied’’ and that they have ‘‘played a major role in the economic, cultural and regional development of Queensland’’. This was accompanied by a statement that stopped short of an apology but offered regret that South Sea Islanders ‘‘experienced unjust treatment and endured social and economic disadvantage, prejudice and racial discrimination’’ and a promise to make moves towards addressing the current disadvantage faced by communities.10 Formal acknowledgement and recognition was a major win for those who fought for it. However, while I do not wish to detract from the significance of this achievement, it is worth highlighting the comparative detachment of regret over an apology. Regret eludes historical connections between the past and present and helps to distance and disown historical violence by detaching it from structures of power as regrettable happenings of the past. This is of course

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part of a separate debate that has been fought well beyond Queensland’s borders and shores. Australian governments’ recognition and regret has occurred in a global context of campaigns in the late twentieth century from indigenous and colonized peoples for apologies, reparations, and compensation from the governments of nations that reaped the benefits of colonialism’s extensive theft of land and labor. Comparable movements for recognition, remembrance, and recompense range from the issuing of apologies from states and institutions such as churches for crimes committed during the eras of colonialism and slavery 11 to legal and moral claims on Western nations, companies, and former colonial powers for reparations and compensation in domestic and international courts and forums.12 While it is beyond the scope of this study to engage in-depth with these debates, the issue of apologies, regrets, and reparations in the international context is raised here to underscore the wider significance that is being placed on remembering colonial pasts. In particular, it is to draw attention to the role of remembering in the restorative project of decolonizing the present and the future. The labor trade was more than a regrettable historical accident or aberration. It was constituted by the legal, political, economic, and philosophical infrastructure that has operated continuously from the nineteenth century to the present. This brief account of the twentieth century brings our story to a close. But the continuity of the administered violence of the nineteenth century through the neglect and forgetfulness of the twentieth and the weight that has been placed on telling the past is elaborated here as a reminder of where we started. This study began with the primary concern of decolonizing histories of the trade by attempting to read against the layers of racialized discursive filters through which records of Islanders were first deposited and then interpreted in historical accounts. This stemmed from a concern to find out more, to recover more people, stories, and nuances from the records without recapitulating the discursive means by which this colonial past was authorized and justified. The tracing of the structural, by which I mean discursive and infrastructural, continuity and connectedness of the past to the present has therefore been a concern of this study. It is this that strikes me as one of the failings of previously discussed historiographical debates over coercion and agency within the labor trade. The polarization of the debate over coercion and agency seems to assume that these are mutually exclusive conditions, despite being used in reference to a history of blurred dualities. As we have seen, Islanders in Queensland during the nineteenth century were colonized and dispossessed but not indigenous, aliens and displaced but not immigrants, bonded and enslaved but not slaves, and agents and autonomous but not free.With the two poles of this debate being

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either voluntary labor migration or a history of kidnapping and slavery, the possibility that the trade could have been structured as one thing (a replacement for slavery) but turned into something else by Islanders (at best a volatile but nevertheless available means of migrating) does not seem to have much space. Likewise, the possibilities for exploring the intricacies and continuities of colonial rule are potentially reduced to a search for obvious coercion. This study has therefore endeavored to assume coercion and agency as coexistent conditions. Being arranged around the conceptual framework of the vertical and horizontal axis of the past, the study has been designed to bring these two conditions into a dialogue and exchange. The resulting picture, I hope, is one that both celebrates the efforts of the generation of Islanders that came to Queensland against a detailed picture of what they were up against. Along with existing histories we have charted the beginnings of today’s South Sea Islander community at those sites closest to peoples’ original displacement. The horizontal chapters have plotted the depth and breadth of the lives and communities Islanders established in colonial Queensland through such scenes as those of arrival and departure, the emerging community identities both unified and divisive, and the colonizing nature of colonial violence. In the process we have seen the way the totality of these histories cannot be captured by the limited terms of reference of the colonial world and its language. We have seen those aspects of horizontal pasts that fleetingly came into focus in the extensive volumes of colonial records. Although distorted by perspective and discursive filters, these records nevertheless contained the impressions left by Islanders: impressions that marked out, or implied, the extent of adjustment, resistance, acquiescence, survival, and rebuilding that they exercised in Queensland. We have seen the ways in which people maintained, where possible, their medicinal and culinary knowledge and practices; religious, spiritual, and magical knowledge; music and leisure; and both cosmological and situational epistemologies, such as the measurement and placement of time and the marking of space, the knowledge of land, and the genealogical connections and relations throughout Queensland and across the oceans to the Islands. We have seen how this maintenance seemed essential to managing the loss, the change, the displacement, and the rootlessness that attended the stories people told in forums as diverse as government Royal Commissions and inquiries, court cases, and the oral and written records, memoirs, and films of more recent years. It has been a given throughout this study that peoples’ home islands continued to provide a framework for cultural and social production in Queensland. Indeed, it would be ludicrous to claim that any diasporic group, European colonists included, did not actively maintain and revive the dynamics of home. But my emphatic focus

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has been upon the influence of the colonial context, the ways in which collective and individual experiences manifested, and the ways in which new worlds, communities, and identities that were specific to colonialism were articulated with autonomous frames of reference. The concentration in these chapters on the apparently insignificant and on the detail that would be taken for granted amongst communities that have not been the nearly silent subject of such voluminous and racialized discussions constitutes a recognition of unremarkable behavior in remarkable circumstances. The focus is intended as step towards the discontinuation of the labeling of Islanders’ pasts through reference to ahistorical racial difference, or Melanesianism, through the use of the very discursive tools through which colonialism was generated, imposed, and then sustained. While the history of South Sea Islanders in the nineteenth century was one clearly characterized by struggle and survival, we are able to appreciate this only against the backdrop of that which made struggle and survival necessary—the dynamics and politics of the violence that permeated the colonial context. The drives, mechanisms, and processes by which the taking of land, resources, and labor from sovereign indigenous communities in Queensland and the western Pacific, and the discussions and images that oiled this process were essentially and inherently violent. Be it a dispersal or punitive raid, labor drive, or the civilizing mission at large, violence remained ubiquitous in potential, although it was not performed in each moment of colonial contact between colonizers and colonized. From the most discrete and local interactions between planters and laborers who lived side by side with Islanders and in relationships that could be mutually dependent to the more removed levels of courts, jails, and those squatters, planters, doctors, and lawyers that ran the colony, violence against the colonized remained both colonial obligation and birthright. Through various processes we have explored the way violence was burrowed into the social, legal, and economic framework of the colonial world in Queensland. The ferocious and indiscriminate violence of colonial frontiers was perpetuated in the continuous imperatives of the settled and administered districts where violence merely changed modes. The semi-legal Native Mounted Police, piratical labor recruiters, and fear-stricken or greed-inspired settlers and visitors were replaced by legal boundaries, police, magistrates, hospital orderlies, doctors, Polynesian inspectors, Aboriginal protectors, and masters and overseers. The violence that was extra-legal in frontier-type situations was administered in the inside districts and measured, regulated, and legislated. While immigration agents, police commissioners, and registrars general kept copious figures of Islanders’ mortality rates, imprisonment rates, and sickness and birth rates, such recordings of this systemic violence enabled its perpetuation. The cumulative effect was a standardization through constant viewing, mea-

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surement, and investigation in inquests, police investigations, government inquiries, Select Committees, and Royal Commissions whose findings and consequent recommendations often collapsed into the wider causes of the violence under investigation. In normalizing violence they also contributed to the generation of (racial) spaces in which violence was morally acceptable and therefore participated directly in the imagination and production of categories of race. Time and again in this study we have seen race as an idea and a language deployed as a viewing prism. Depending on which way the prism was turned, violence could disappear—disappear, that is, to the extent that it was replaced with discipline, civilization, control, or self-defense. As such, race displaced the violence it authorized onto the discourses that authorized it. Understanding violence as having a structural presence in colonial societies is a significant way of ensuring that we can recognize it in the presence of obscuring discourses like that of race. It also aids us in observing the connective tissue that binds the multiplicity of discursive trends and discrete acts of violence that occurred in the past as part of settler-colonialism’s overarching imperative.13 This takes us beyond the myopia of historical questions regarding individual intent and deed and alerts us to the underlying sameness of cosmetic changes over time in government, policy, and public sentiment. At the beginning of the twenty-first century for example, indigenous Australians still have the highest infant mortality, lowest life expectancy, and highest incarceration rates in Australia, and Australian South Sea Islanders, at least in the 1990s, when figures were last collected, face comparable systemic disadvantage.14 This is despite some thirty years of attention, inquiry, debate, and policy changes and nearly forty years of formal equality and the dismantlement of race-based legislation. But still, figures indicating disadvantage are statistically gauged and investigated by state and federal government enquiries. The relevance of this does not lie with the correlations that can be drawn between the past and the present. Rather, it lies with the innate continuity between the colonial past and its ongoing future, for from a structural viewpoint the past is only temporally and therefore abstractly distant from the present. In a context where the denial of histories of colonial violence is claiming increasingly greater space in mainstream debates over the past, there is significance also in the act of simply remembering as a tribute to the survival, resistance, acquiescence, and demise of those who have been forgotten.15 Just as this study opened with reference to Kelah, so it will close with reference to a story and a moment that made a similarly fleeting appearance in the archives. On the 11 March 1871 a telegram was sent from Maryborough to the colonial secretary’s office stating that an Islander on board the Queensland ‘‘for some reason or other jumped overboard as the vessel was steaming between the

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bay and Moreton Island. Was recovered and from his conduct on board had to be secured with strait jacket and ropes until he arrived here’’.16 The Islander, whose name was never recorded, had only just arrived in the colony and was charged with unsound mind. One of the passengers on board, Joseph Ridley, saw what had happened and later testified in the court trial to what he had seen. He described being on board the Queensland when he saw ‘‘one of the sailors came up to the prisoner—who fell over the vessels [sic] side—I motioned to the Polynesian (the Prisoner) to come up—but he motioned me to send away the sailor—the sailor went away—the prisoner then came up and stood quite quietly for about half an hour on the forecastle’’. When the unnamed Islander was later approached by crew members, he climbed over the railing again. This time four or five members of the crew wrestled him back on board and tied him up under the forecastle for the rest of the day and until midnight that night. Ridley’s testimony continued, At midnight I heard a noise on deck—I went up and saw the prisoner struggling with a lot of sailors—a heavy and strong chain was shackled to his ancle [sic], a straight jacket was put on him and they attempted to gag him—the sailors held his nostrils to make him open his mouth—they could not gag him I saw the gag covered in blood it was a short bit of rough wood an inch and a half thick. . . . [N]ext morning, Friday—we were coming up the river—the prisoner was howling the whole way coming up—crying and moaning—just before we got to the wharf—he was carried down below and chained to the leg of the table.17

When the charge of unsound mind against this unnamed Islander was heard in Maryborough, the charge was dismissed with the strength of two medical testimonies that certified his sanity and explained that his behavior was due to having been taken from his home, probably against his will, and, being alone with no translator able to speak his language, ‘‘he has got with a state of frenzy from which he will probably never recover except by being restored to his countrymen’’.18 We do not know what the outcome of this case was, what happened to the unnamed Islander when his case was dismissed, or whether he was returned to his island and village given that there was nobody around who could communicate with him well enough to even find out his name. He therefore appears to us as potentially another nameless and silent victim whose story begins and ends in this glimpse. However, although it is the case that we cannot recover him from the archives, his actions have ensured that we know he existed. Like Kelah and so many of the individuals who have appeared in the preceding pages, the actions of the unnamed Islander speak eloquently of his

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experiences of arriving in Queensland and the banal conditions that produced that experience. The unnamed Islander’s story underscores the importance of not sterilizing the corporeal existence of violence and the presence of whips, fists, and guns by articulating, scrutinizing, and talking through it. At the same time his story speaks to the banality of that violence: we can observe the witness who did nothing, the recruiting vessel that was legally equipped to recruit with guns, handcuffs, gags, straitjackets, and chains, the fact that such treatment could result in a court hearing testimony as to the criminality of the victim, and that it is only because of this that this anonymous Islander left a record as one of many ‘‘recruits’’ on one of many vessels that made one of many voyages to one of many Pacific Island communities that supplied men, women, and children to Queensland in a tropical climate considered unacceptably fatal to whites. The recorded actions of the unnamed Islander remind us of all of this so that in a way he has retained some voice. Hence to return to the central theme of historical memory, the overall purpose of this study has been to find some means and tools for remembering the colonial past in a context where forgetting has been historically significant. Here lies the intrinsic value of charting new ways of reading the record of the past in order to bear witness to the traces of distress, confidence, fear, anger, sadness, and joy left by people such as Kelah, Wandro, Mareegee, the unnamed Islander, and the many men and women who signed their shaky ‘‘X’’ on testimonies in court and government inquiries. Their stories are ones that chart a dual tale of slavery, oppression, exploitation, and kidnapping on the one hand and survival, resistance, agency, and pride on the other. Like Kelah’s silence and vacant stares in Brisbane Gaol and the unnamed Islander’s distress, they do so in ways that are subtle but expressive and with an ambiguity that eludes authoritative designation despite the clarity of their physical registration.

Notes

Introduction 1. Queensland State Archives: JUS/N 41 no. 291 of 1874. Inquest into the death of Compan. No details from the inquest survived, only the torn death certificate. 2. Queensland State Archives: COL/A 212 in letter 1921 of 1875. Bundle of Correspondence Relating to the Imprisonment of Kelah. 3. Queensland State Archives: COL/A 212 in letter 1921 of 1875. Containing Sheriff’s Office to Under Colonial Secretary, 17 November 1874. 4. Queensland State Archives: COL/A 212 in letter 1921 of 1875. Containing Alfred Davidson to Sheriff, 14 November 1874. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Queensland State Archives: COL/A 212 in letter 1921 of 1875. Containing Immigration Agent to Colonial Secretary, 15 December 1874. 8. This study considers the indentured labor trade that supplied Queensland’s plantation industries and, to a lesser extent, the industries of Queensland’s pastoral districts. It does not consider the pearling and sea-bound industries of Queensland and the Torres Strait Islands whose economic and colonial circumstances forged different, albeit related and connected, circumstances. 9. Asterisk, Isles of Illusion. This was based on his letters from Vanuatu to his friend Bohun Lynch between 1912 and 1920. He later wrote a novel based on his experiences called Gone Native: A Tale of the South Seas. Charlie Savage arrived in Fiji in 1803 and would become a beachcomber of mythic proportions. Reference was made to him, his influence, and his downfall to savagery and death throughout the nineteenth century. For one of the more detailed accounts, see Dillon, Narrative and Successful Result. 10. This is in reference to Hector Holthouse’s Cannibal Cargoes. 11. Islanders in Queensland were variously called Polynesians and, by the later nineteenth century, as the name gained wider currency, Melanesians. In Queensland they were called Kanakas, a generic term for ‘‘people’’ derived from Hawaiian. The term is now widely regarded as offensive because of its use in the past. Throughout this study, ‘‘Polynesian’’, ‘‘Melanesian’’, and ‘‘Kanaka’’ are generally used only in

187

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Notes to Pages 4–8

accordance with their use in texts under analysis, or in discussions of them as figures of discourse. When referring to people I say ‘‘South Sea Islanders’’, ‘‘Islanders’’, and ‘‘western Pacific Islanders’’. These are terms that derive their meaning and significance, like Epeli Hau’ofa’s ‘‘West Oceania’’, from geography rather than race or color. See note 3 in Hau’ofa, ‘‘Pasts to Remember.’’ 12. The discussion regarding archival silences and ambivalence is too vast to list here. See for particular relevance and interest to this study, Bhabha, ‘‘Of Mimicry and Man’’; Chakrabarty, ‘‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History’’; Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; Spivak, ‘‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’’; and Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, particularly chaps. 1 and 3. 13. Of greatest concern was the fact that ‘‘natives whose language is unintelligible and not known to any interpreter’’ were being introduced into the colony. Queensland State Archives: COL/A 212 in letter 1921 of 1874. Containing Colonial Office to Colonial Secretary’s Office, 24 July 1875. 14. Baden-Powell, In Savage Isles and Settled Lands, 105. 15. Florence Young, Pearls from the Pacific, 180–181. 16. Mühlhäusler, ‘‘Melanesian Pidgin English’’, 96, 98; Dutton, Queensland Canefields English, 103–105. For the development of pidgin languages in the southwestern Pacific and Queensland regions, from which plantation Pidgin in Queensland would derive, see Keesing, Melanesian Pidgin; Crowley, Beach-la-Mar to Bislama; and Dutton, ‘‘The Origin and Spread of Aboriginal Pidgin English in Queensland.’’ For linguistic analyses and overviews, see the collection Verhaar, Melanesian Pidgin and Tok Pisin. Finally, see also Linden Wolfe, ‘‘Bittersweet,’’ which includes mainly white terms. 17. Aruneke, New Guinea: ‘‘Report with Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the . . . Royal Commission’’, Journals of the Queensland Legislative Council (1885), 1463. 18. Mühlhäusler, ‘‘Melanesian Pidgin English’’, 96. 19. Interview with Tom Lamon, Text 3, in Dutton, Queensland Canefields English, 43. The conversation was as follows: ‘‘BD: Ah, they call policemen bulimæn. TED: Bully what? BD: Bully man. That’s this country mind you. TED: Ah, I see. BD: Bullyman . . . that’s the way they pronounce it. If we might be in the street talking and one of them’d look up he says—he’ll say ‘Oh, here’s a bullyman coming’ ’’. (TL is Tom Lamon, BD is the interviewer, and TED was a relative of Lamon’s.) 20. Mühlhäusler, ‘‘Melanesian Pidgin English’’, 96. 21. Ibid., 98. 22. Brady, The King’s Caravan, 244. 23. Foreman, The History and Adventures of a Queensland Pioneer, 133. 24. A University Man, Colonial Adventures and Experiences by a University Man, 34; and Brady, The King’s Caravan, 276. As Brady put it, ‘‘[I]f so many Queenslanders did not drink whiskey and soda before breakfast, the average length of life in

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the North might be higher. I ventured to say this to a man in Mackay. He said it was better to drink whiskey and soda before breakfast than rum and milk. One had to drink something’’. See also the report of the Grog Royal Commission: ‘‘Report of the Royal Commission . . . Intoxicating Liquors in Queensland.’’ Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1901). 25. For example, an eccentricity, whether born of hardship or not, that Brady found particularly appealing: ‘‘A good many people leaned against posts. More people would have leaned if there were more posts. . . . This fashion of leaning up against things is general in Queensland’’. Brady, The King’s Caravan, 246. 26. Queensland State Archives: CPS 3A/P3. Boolamal v. George Milner, Assault, Bundaberg Court of Petty Sessions, 12 October 1880. Deposition of witnesses. Francis Clarke, Police Constable, Bundaberg, and Boolamal and Laffon. 27. The historiography of frontier conflict in Australia is too extensive to relate here. For a recent historiographical essay, see Attwood, ‘‘Historiography on the Australian Frontier,’’ 169–184. 28. A University Man, Colonial Adventures and Experiences by a University Man, 152–153. 29. Letter from George Cain to Rebecca Miles, 7 May 1866, in News from Nulla, 4. Thanks to Nikki Henningham for this reference. Her more detailed discussion of these letters is contained in Henningham, ‘‘Perhaps if there had been more women in the North.’’ 30. Kennedy, The Black Police in Queensland, 272. 31. Browne, A Journalist’s Memories, 57. 32. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 29, 31. 33. Taussig, ‘‘Culture of Terror—Space of Death,’’ 471. 34. Morris, ‘‘Frontier Colonialism as a Culture of Terror.’’ 35. See, in particular, Saunders, ‘‘The Workers’ Paradox’’, ‘‘The Black Scourge’’, and ‘‘Troublesome Servants’’; Corris, ‘‘ ‘Blackbirding’ in New Guinea’’, Passage, Port and Plantation, and ‘‘ ‘White Australia’ in Action’’; Moore, Kanaka and ‘‘Whips and Rum Swizzles’’. 36. See, in particular, Bolton, A Thousand Miles Away,135–158, and Planters and Pacific Islanders; Corris, ‘‘Introduction’’, i–ix; Parnaby, Britain and the Labor Trade; Saunders, ‘‘The Pacific Islander Hospitals’’ and ‘‘The Black Scourge’’. 37. See Finnane and Moore, ‘‘Kanaka Slaves or Willing Workers?’’; Moore, ‘‘Me Blind Drunk’’; Price and Baker, ‘‘Origins of Pacific Island Labourers in Queensland’’; Saunders, ‘‘Melanesian Women in Queensland’’; Shlomowitz, ‘‘Markets for Indentured and Time-Expired Melanesian Labor’’ and ‘‘Time-Expired Melanesian Labor in Queensland’’. 38. See, in particular, Corris, Passage, Port and Plantation and ‘‘ ‘Blackbirding’ in New Guinea’’; Graves, Cane and Labour, ‘‘Colonialism and Indentured Labor Migra-

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Notes to Pages 12–16

tion’’, and ‘‘Truck and Gifts’’; Corris, ‘‘Kwaisulia of Ada Gege’’; Keesing and Corris, Lightning Meets the West Wind; Scarr, ‘‘Recruits and Recruiters.’’ 39. For an overview of this debate, see the exchange between Doug Munro and Tom Brass in Munro, ‘‘Revisionism and Its Enemies’’; Brass, ‘‘The Return of ‘Merrie Melanesia’ ’’; Moore, ‘‘Kanakas, Kidnapping and Slavery’’ and ‘‘Revising the Revisionists’’; Munro, ‘‘The Labor Trade in Melanesians’’; and for a reductive historiography, Grubb, ‘‘Social Science versus Social Rhetoric’’. For a recently published balance of agency and coercion that takes account of the collective and individual subtleties of collective and individual agency and coercion, see Shineberg, The People Trade. 40. ‘‘Damage’’ here refers to Doug Munro’s referencing of comparable debates regarding slavery in the United States. See Munro, ‘‘Indenture, Deportation, Survival’’. 41. The diseases from which Islanders suffered were cause for much statistical analysis in the annual reports of the Registrar General, who was particularly concerned with the incidence of pulmonary diseases. See the annual vital statistics in Queensland Votes and Proceedings. See also Saunders, ‘‘The Pacific Islander Hospitals’’; and Shlomowitz, ‘‘Mortality and the Pacific Labour Trade’’. 42. Gray, The Kanaka, 7. Women rarely constituted more than 10 percent of the number of people recruited. See Saunders, ‘‘Melanesian Women’’; and Jolly, ‘‘The Forgotten Women’’. 43. Queensland State Archives: JUS/N 74 no. 56 of 1881. Inquest into Death of Wandro, Wingarra, 21 February 1881. Employer, Frances Atkinson, and witness [name indecipherable, from Wandro’s Island]. Testimonies. 44. Fatnowna, Fragments of a Lost Heritage; The Forgotten People; and Edmund, No Regrets. The Oral History Collection recorded by Clive Moore and Patricia Mercer is held in the James Cook University Oral History Project. 45. Notable inclusions in this body of work are Finnane and Moore, ‘‘Kanaka Slaves or Willing Workers?’’; Mercer and Moore, ‘‘Melanesians in North Queensland’’; Mercer, ‘‘Pacific Islanders in Colonial Queensland’’; Moore, ‘‘The Mackay Racecourse Riot’’, Kanaka, ‘‘Me Blind Drunk’’, and ‘‘The Counterculture of Survival’’; Saunders, ‘‘Troublesome Servants’’ and ‘‘The Black Scourge’’. See also Patricia Mercer’s twentieth-century history of the South Sea Island community in Mercer, White Australia Defied; and Gistitin, Quite a Colony. 46. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 4. 47. For accounts and analyses of anticolonial, nationalist, and indigenous revival and re-invention of the term ‘‘Melanesian’’, see Narokobi, ‘‘History and Movement’’ and The Melanesian Way. 48. Saunders, ‘‘Troublesome Servants’’, 179. 49. Moore, ‘‘Me Blind Drunk’’, 117. 50. Moore, ‘‘The Counterculture of Survival’’, 81, 88.

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51. Moore, Kanaka, 269. See also Saunders, ‘‘Troublesome Servants’’ and ‘‘The Black Scourge’’. 52. Guha, ‘‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency’’; Mani, ‘‘Contentious Traditions’’; Chakrabarty, ‘‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History’’. 53. Available literature on reading-against-the-grain type methodologies is too extensive to list here. In addition to those already mentioned and in relation particularly to the western Pacific, see Jolly, ‘‘Specters of Inauthenticity’’; and Douglas, ‘‘Encounters with the Enemy?’’ from which the term ‘‘countersigns’’ is borrowed. See also her ‘‘Doing Ethnographic History.’’ 54. Dening, Reading Writings, 41. 55. Gramsci, ‘‘Notes on Italian History’’, 53–54. See also Guha, ‘‘Preface’’, 36– 37; and Prakash, ‘‘A View from Afar(South Asia)’’. 56. Prakash, ‘‘Introduction’’, 16. 57. This makes reference to Mercer and Moore’s focus on the retention of indigenous practices in Mackay. Mercer and Moore, ‘‘Melanesians in North Queensland’’. 58. See chap. 6 in Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism, 163–214. On debates exemplifying the political potency denoted by the idea of repressive authenticity, see the exchange between Hanauni Kay-Trask and Roger Keesing in Trask, ‘‘Natives and Anthropologists’’. For the idea of articulation, see Hall, ‘‘The Local and the Global’’ and ‘‘Old and New Identities’’; Clifford, ‘‘Valuing the Pacific’’ and ‘‘Indigenous Articulations’’; and Jolly, ‘‘On the Edge?’’ These ideas are discussed in detail in later chapters. 59. Prakash, ‘‘A View from Afar(South Asia)’’, 296. For more discussions of decolonizing histories that have been influential to this study, see Hau’ofa, ‘‘Epilogue: Pasts to Remember’’; O’Regan, ‘‘Who Owns the Past?’’; Hanlan, ‘‘Beyond the English Model of Tattooing’’; Thaman, ‘‘Decolonizing Pacific Studies’’. 1. The Frontiers: Savages, Going Native, and the Rightness of Might 1. The debate over the transmission of Kuru is a noteworthy example of how the idea of cannibalism asserts itself in relation to this region. See Lindenbaum, Kuru Sorcerer, 20; Berndt, Excess and Restraint; Arens, ‘‘Rethinking Anthropology’’, 39–62. 2. Arens, The Man-Eating Myth, 9. 3. The anthropological marking out of Melanesia was established by 1832. For more on origins, see Nicholas Thomas, ‘‘The Force of Ethnology’’, 27–41, and ‘‘Melanesians and Polynesians,’’ 133–170. For a discussion of the way gender has dominated and continues to dominate the terms under which the western Pacific continues to be discussed, see Jolly, ‘‘From Darkness to Light?’’, 148–177.

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Notes to Pages 23–28

4. Cromar, Jock of the Islands, 112. 5. Bishop, The Beachcombers, 45–46. Although semi-fictional, Bishop prefaced the account with the following: ‘‘reality is its chief component—solid, unequivocal reality—black, shameful reality. Imagination had no scope for the conception of aggravated horrors,’’ vii. 6. Julian Thomas, Cannibals and Convicts, 343. 7. Obeyesekere, Cannibal Talk, particularly chap. 8. On the automated nature in which cannibalism was associated with the Pacific, see his ‘‘British Cannibals,’’ 630–654. 8. Asterisk, Isles of Illusion, 23, 24, 46. See also Michael Young, ‘‘Gone Native in the Isles of Illusion’’, 193–223; and for comparative interest, see Thomas and Eves, Bad Colonists. 9. Hulme, Colonial Encounters; Boucher, Cannibal Encounters; and Honour, The New Golden Land; for more recent but less detailed discussion, see Hulme, ‘‘Introduction: The Cannibal Scene’’, 1–38. 10. Julian Thomas, Cannibals and Convicts, 1. 11. Cook and King, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, 371. Cook’s methods of inquiry throughout the Pacific have been discussed by Obeyesekere in his ‘‘British Cannibals’’, 648. 12. Williams and Marshall, The Great Map of Mankind, 294. 13. Wilson, A Missionary Voyage, 283, 284. 14. Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition, 101. 15. T. Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, 211–212. Bokola was understood as the Fijian term for a human body. 16. Johnston, Camping among Cannibals, 227. 17. Gordon Cumming, At Home in Fiji, 114. 18. Webb, ‘‘Observations on the Hill Tribes of Na Viti Levu, Fiji’’, 626. 19. This material is expanded in a larger, more detailed study: Banivanua-Mar, ‘‘Cannibalism in Fiji’’. See for a discussion of two of the most well known eyewitness accounts that emerged from Fiji, Obeyesekere, ‘‘Cannibal Feasts in NineteenthCentury Fiji,’’ 63–86, and ‘‘Narratives of Self,’’ 69–111. 20. In reference here to Arens’ controversial The Man-Eating Myth. 21. Shineberg, The People Trade, particularly chap. 7, 75–89. 22. National Library of Australia, The First Mackay Planters Association Minute Book, 1878–1885. MS 1869. 23. Wawn, The South Sea Islanders, 297. 24. Testimony of Matthew Deviscoe and Raby Wilson at the trial of Henry Mount and William Morris for murder on the Carl, in Searle, Mount and Morris, 12, 34. The ‘‘rescuing’’ technique is well documented in recruiters’ published reminis-

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cences and government records. See also, for examples, Docker, The Blackbirders; ‘‘Report with Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Royal Commission’’, Queensland Legislative Council Journals (1885): 1341–1532; and Cromar, Jock of the Islands, 54. 25. Julian Thomas, Cannibals and Convicts, 148–149. 26. Wawn, The South Sea Islanders, 209–214, 385. ‘‘Findlay’s Directory’’ was in reference to A. G. Findlay, A Directory for the Navigation of the North Pacific Ocean (London: Richard Holmes Laurie, 1870); and A Directory for the Navigation of the South Pacific Ocean, (London: Richard Holmes Laurie, 1874). 27. Cromar, Jock of the Islands, 80. 28. Markham, The Cruise of the Rosario, 200 29. Wawn, The South Sea Islanders, 125. 30. Markham, The Cruise of the Rosario, 163, 213; Cromar, Jock of the Islands, 58–60; Rannie, My Adventures among South Sea Cannibals, 30. 31. Rannie, My Adventures among South Sea Cannibals, 67,175; Wawn, The South Sea Islanders, 127. 32. Markham, The Cruise of the Rosario, 103; Wawn, The South Sea Islanders, 75; Cromar, Jock of the Islands, 310. 33. Paul Lyons, ‘‘Lines of Fright’’, 126–148. See also Obeyesekere, ‘‘British Cannibals’’; and Taussig, The Nervous System. 34. Gaggin, Among the Man-Eaters, 14, 16–17. 35. Julian Thomas, Cannibals and Convicts, 338; Melvin, The Cruise of the Helena, 3; Hope, In Quest of Coolies, 10–11. 36. Testimony of James Murray, Sydney trial of Joseph Armstrong and James Dowden, cited in Markham, The Cruise of the Rosario, 113–114, 114–115. See also Deviscoe’s testimony and Wilson’s affidavit cited in Searle, Mount and Morris Exonerated, 16, 30–36. 37. Deviscoe’s testimony, cited in Searle, Mount and Morris Exonerated, 16–17. 38. Murray’s testimony in Markham, The Cruise of the Rosario, 115. 39. See Deviscoe’s testimony in Searle, Mount and Morris Exonerated; and Murray’s evidence in Markham, The Cruise of the Rosario, 113–115. See also Archibald Watson’s version in the appendices, Carter, Painting the Islands Vermilion. 40. Searle, Mount and Morris Exonerated, 21–22. 41. Deviscoe’s testimony and Wilson’s affidavit, in Searle, Mount and Morris Exonerated, 12, 34. 42. Julian Thomas, Cannibals and Convicts, 339. 43. See minutes of evidence in ‘‘Report with Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Royal Commission’’, Queensland Legislative Council Journals (1885), 1341–1532; personal histories such as Faith Bandler’s account of her father’s memories in Bandler, Wacvie; and recruiters’ accounts such as Melvin’s in The Cruise of the Helena, 28,

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Notes to Pages 33–37

96–99, 101–105; Julian Thomas, Cannibals and Convicts, 331, 340–345, and particularly with relation to the problem surrounding changed diet, 350–351; and Bishop, The Beachcombers, 119. 44. Deviscoe’s testimony and letter of James Murray (Senior) to the Herald, 23 May 1873. Cited in Searle, Mount and Morris Exonerated, 16, 37. 45. Searle, Mount and Morris Exonerated, 7; Markham, The Cruise of the Rosario, 111. 46. Searle, Mount and Morris Exonerated, 25–26, 27. 47. Ibid., 26, 27. 48. Lawson, So Freedom Came, 10. 49. Bishop, The Beachcombers,15; Markham, The Cruise of the Rosario, vi; Lucas, Cries from Fiji and Sighs from the South Seas, 19. 50. Members of the crew of the Hopeful were tried for murder in the Queensland Supreme Court. Neil McNeil and Bernard Williams were sentenced to death. Their sentences were later commuted to life imprisonment under increasing public pressure not to hang Europeans for the murder of Islanders. The captain and government agent were sentenced to life imprisonment, and other members of the crew received seven to ten years. The government agent died in prison in 1886, and all other prisoners were released in 1890. See for details Docker, The Blackbirders, 199–233. For more on this period and British attempts to regulate, see ‘‘Correspondence respecting the Natives of the Western Pacific and the Labour Traffic’’, Sessional Papers (1883): 1–187. 51. Commissioners’ summary, ‘‘Report with Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Royal Commission’’, Queensland Legislative Council Journals (1885): 1369– 1370. 52. Secretary of State for the colonies to Governor of Queensland, 7 October 1876, ‘‘Despatch Respecting Rumors of Massacres’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1877): 755. An infamous example of this kind of reasoning from the Australian frontiers is the Myall Creek Massacre, for which seven Europeans were hanged in the first and only conviction for the massacre of Aboriginal people. In his sentencing, the presiding Justice Burton stated, ‘‘You were removed from a Christian country and placed in a dangerous and tempting situation . . . you were one hundred and fifty miles from the nearest Police station on which you could rely for protection— by which you could have been controlled. I cannot but deplore that you should have been placed in such a situation’’. ‘‘Mr. Justice Burton Pronounces Sentence on the Myall Creek Murderers’’, in Atkinson and Aveling, Australia 1838, 393. 53. See Taussig, ‘‘Culture of Terror’’; Paul Lyons, ‘‘Lines of Fright’’; Morris, ‘‘Frontier Colonialism as a Culture of Terror’’; and on rumor and violence, Stoler, ‘‘In Cold Blood’’. 54. In order of appearance: Hope, In Quest of Coolies, 58; The Vagabond [Julian

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Thomas], Sydney Morning Herald, 30 November 1880, contained in ‘‘Intercolonial Conference’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1881): 1090. 55. Samson, Imperial Benevolence. 56. Markham, The Cruise of the Rosario, 93. 57. Ibid., 102, 103. 58. Ibid., 142–152, 202–203. 59. Ibid., 203, 204. 60. Wawn, The South Sea Islanders, 209–214. 61. Asterisk, Isles of Illusion, 113. 62. Charles Lumley Hill, Member, for Cook. Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 50 (1886): 1737. 63. The Vagabond, ‘‘Intercolonial Conference’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1881): 1096. 64. Albert Norton and Maurice Hume Black, Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 50 (1886): 1737, 1795. 65. Douglas to Forbes, 25 November 1886, ‘‘Massacres in British New Guinea’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1887): 721. 66. Forbes to Douglas, 16 February 1887, ibid., 722–723. 67. Douglas to Forbes, 16 February 1887, ibid., 725. 68. ‘‘Correspondence Relating to Commodore Wilson’s Report on the Labour Trade in the Western Pacific’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1882): 579. 2. Survival, Arrival, and Growth: The World Islanders Built 1. Queensland State Archives: CRS/146. Regina v. Bernard Williams, Murder and Kidnapping by Crew of the Hopeful, 1885. Deposition of Oral Testimony. Dayanammo. 2. Public Records Office, United Kingdom: FO 58/135. Consul March to Earl Granville. See also for correspondence regarding the return of kidnapped Islanders from the Carl: Public Records Office, United Kingdom: CO 309/109 in letter 2552 of 1873, Governor of Victoria to Earl of Kimberley, Colonial Office, 29 January 1873; and for account of the return voyage, Public Records Office, United Kingdom: FO 58/141,Vernan Lushington, Admiralty, to Foreign Office, 26 December1873. Finally, Dr. James Murray offered his services to assist in survivors’ repatriation; see Public Records Office, United Kingdom: FO 58/140, Dr. Murray to Commodore Stirling in Admiralty to Foreign Office, 15 July 1873. 3. This is influenced by some key discussions of the complexities of oral research in colonial scholarship that critique the means by which indigenous peoples’ memories can be silenced as much by the insistence that all memories are a counternarrative to colonization as by being interpreted, ordered, and subordinated. See,

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Notes to Pages 45–49

for the discussion from which the term ‘‘embedded’’ was borrowed, Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 198, particularly 163–203. See also Spivak, ‘‘Can the Subaltern Speak’’; and Bird Rose, Hidden Histories. Clive Moore has controversially raised questions about the validity of the way the trade is remembered by South Sea Islanders as a period of slavery in Moore, ‘‘Kanakas, Kidnapping and Slavery’’, which was based on a shorter earlier version, ‘‘Oral Testimony and the Pacific Island Labour Trade’’, 28–42. 4. Moore, Kanaka; Gistitin, Quite a Colony; Mercer, White Australia Defied. See also, for regional studies, Hayes, On Plantation Creek; Fatnowna, Fragments of a Lost Heritage; Edmund, No Regrets; Bandler, Wacvie. 5. For a recent historiographical survey, see Munro, ‘‘Revisionism and Its Enemies’’ and ‘‘The Labour Trade in Melanesians’’. See also the relevant section on historiography in the introduction of this study. 6. Docker, The Blackbirders, 233–234; Corris, ‘‘Kwaisulia of Ada Gege’’ and Passage, Port and Plantation. 7. Giles, A Cruize of a Queensland Labour Vessel, 92. 8. James Kirby, ‘‘Report to the Select Committee on the General Question of Polynesian Labour’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1876): 129. 9. Shineberg, The People Trade, 230–236. 10. Julian Thomas, Cannibals and Convicts, 350–351. 11. Bandler, Wacvie, 20. Wacvie tells the stories of Bandler’s father and composites of other people. Wacvie Mussingkon was taken from Craig Cove, Ambrym Island in June 1883. 12. Journal of Nixon, 10 July, cited in note 89 of Giles, A Cruize of a Queensland Labour Vessel, 113. 13. Ibid., 117. 14. The figure Shlomowitz provides is 0.8 per thousand for Europeans. Shlomowitz, ‘‘Indentured Melanesians in Queensland’’, 203–207. See also Shlomowitz, ‘‘Mortality and the Pacific Labour Trade’’, 34–55. 15. Julian Thomas, Cannibals and Convicts, 345. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 340. See also Giles, A Cruize of a Queensland Labour Vessel, 64; and Melvin, The Cruise of the Helena, particularly 3 and 28. 18. Melvin, The Cruise of the Helena, 101, 102–104. 19. Womakada, Normanby Island, in ‘‘Report with Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Royal Commission’’, Queensland Legislative Council Journals (1885): 1513. 20. Wawn, The South Sea Islanders, 360. 21. These figures are collated from the annual police commissioners’ statistics recorded in the Queensland Parliamentary Papers. They have been tabulated in an appendix included in the study from which this book derives. See appendices 4 and

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5, Banivanua-Mar, ‘‘Bulimen and Hardwork’’, 361–363. Figs. 2 and 3 in this book are based on the information tabulated in these appendices. 22. Queensland State Archives: COL/A 381, in letter 1073 of 1884. Polynesian Inspector Mackay to Immigration Agent, 26 January 1884. 23. James Cook University, North Queensland Collection: PMR/LB/7. Pioneer Plantation Letter Books. Letters: 4 October1884; 29 December1884; 3 January1885; 9 May 1885. 24. Ibid., 9 May 1885. 25. Seli, Sudest Island, ‘‘Report with Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Royal Commission’’, Queensland Legislative Council Journals (1885): 1404–1405. 26. Komyoyo and Womakada in ibid., 1512–1513. 27. Tanadu, in ibid., 1456. 28. In order of appearance: Komyoyo; Womakada; Vi-Ra-Giu of Tubitubi; Amino of Tubitubi; Wirre-Wirre-tot of Nuakata, in ibid., 1512, 1513, 1527, 1528. 29. Barama and Tipatapatana, in ibid., 1434, 1436. 30. Tatiaga, in ibid., 1397. 31. Moraton and Yah-da from St. Aignan Island, in ibid., 1524. 32. Andow, in ibid., 1398–1402. 33. Of those giving evidence to the commission, 31 percent were translated twice (their language to a common language or indigenous or Pacific Pidgin to Queensland plantation English); 60 percent were translated once from their language to Pacific Pidgin to Queensland Pidgin or plantation English; and 7 percent spoke Queensland plantation English; 2 percent were linguistically isolated. These figures provided by the Royal Commissioners, but for the divisions between Pacific or Melanesian Pidgin and Queensland Pidgin or plantation English, see Crowley, Beach-La-Mar to Bislama, 578. 34. Eiwuseta and Ueuega, in ‘‘Report with Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Royal Commission’’, Queensland Legislative Council Journals (1885): 1476–1477. 35. Sheridan, in ‘‘Report of the Select Committee on the General Question of Polynesian Labour’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1876): 100. 36. William Canny, in ibid., 195. 37. Shlomowitz, ‘‘Mortality and the Pacific Labour Trade’’, 49, and ‘‘Epidemiology and the Pacific Labor Trade’’, 585–610; Moore, Kanaka, 245–263; see also Mercer, White Australia Defied, 148–149. 38. This was regularly noted by Queensland’s registrar-general in his annual reports. See, in particular, ‘‘Vital Statistics, 1885’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1886): 368; and Queensland State Archives: PRE/88 in letter 12075 of 1901. Mortality Rates of Pacific Islanders in Comparison to Other Races in Queensland, 1891– 1900. 39. In the early days of the trade, Islanders also labored on cotton plantations

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Notes to Pages 53–57

and, until the 1870s, in the pastoral industry where they not only ‘‘shepherded, but made fences and dams’’. See Richmond, Queensland in the ‘‘Seventies’’, 41. See also Fysh, Taming the North; and the evidence of the ‘‘Report to the Select Committee on the General Question of Polynesian Labour’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1876); Eden, My Wife and I in Queensland, 313–314. 40. In order of appearance: Wrathall Bull, Early Experiences of Life in South Australia, 408; Eden, My Wife and I in Queensland, 328, and Davitt, Life and Progress in Australasia, 273. 41. The Forgotten People, 52. See also Mühlhäusler, ‘‘Melanesian Pidgin English’’, 99. 42. Davitt, Life and Progress in Australasia, 273. 43. Warum-woreahre, in ‘‘Report with Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Royal Commission’’, Queensland Legislative Council Journals (1885): 1526. 44. Wrathall Bull, Early Experiences of Life in South Australia, 409–411. See also evidence of Metcalf, O’Halleran, Adams (Goondi Estate), and Canny (Queensland Sugar Company), in ‘‘Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire . . . Sugar Industry’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1889): 150, 174, 179, 194. Aboriginal sugar workers were generally not paid wages or indentured. 45. Turner, Rural Life in Sunny Queensland, 62–66. See also Moore, ‘‘Whips and Rum Swizzles’’, 126–127. 46. Turner, Rural Life in Sunny Queensland, 62–66; Lawson, So Freedom Came, 64. 47. Turner, Rural Life in Sunny Queensland, 62–66. 48. Entry for19 November1878, Cowley, Newspaper Cutting Book; and Rutlidge, Guide to Queensland, 55. 49. Eden, My Wife and I in Queensland, 327. 50. This is in reference to the Victoria Mill, which was considered at the time to be exceptional. Shepherd, Victoria 100 Years Onwards, section on ‘‘Development and Community Impact’’, n.p. 51. Lugard, Letters from Queensland, 12. 52. Clarke, The ‘‘New Chum’’ in Australia, 293–294. 53. The Forgotten People, 33. 54. JCUOHC: BOHC, 19B: Side A, 1975; and JCUOHC: BOHC, MP, R/R 10, 1977, Interviewee 1. Also JCUOHC: BOHC, MP, R/R 11, 1977, Interviewee 1; and The Forgotten People, 32–33. 55. JCUOHC: BOHC, MP, R/R 17, 1977, Interviewee 1; JCUOHC: BOHC, MP R/R 3, 1977, Interviewee 1; and JCUOHC: BOHC, MP, R/R 15, 1977, Interviewee 3. 56. Turner, Rural Life in Sunny Queensland, 62. 57. Clarke, The ‘‘New Chum’’ in Australia, 295; Davitt, Life and Progress in Australasia, 272–273.

Notes to Pages 57–62

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58. JCUOHC: BOHC, MP, R/R 10, 1977, Interviewee 2; and JCUOHC: BOHC, MP, R/R 17, 1977, Interviewee 1. See also Fatnowna, Fragments of a Lost Heritage, 112–113, and Bandler, Wacvie, 35. 59. ‘‘Occupations of Polynesians According to the Census of 1891’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1892): 825. 60. Blake, ‘‘The Kanaka: A Character Sketch’’, 81. Cited in Moore, ‘‘Whips and Rum Swizzles’’, 129. 61. See, e.g., Turner, Rural Life in Sunny Queensland, 62–66; Moore, ‘‘Whips and Rum Swizzles’’, 129–130; Davitt, Life and Progress in Australasia, 274. 62. Eden, My Wife and I in Queensland, 326. 63. Hope, in ‘‘Progress Report from the Select Committee . . . Polynesian Labourers’ Act’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1869): 79. 64. In order: Eden, My Wife and I in Queensland, 326; Queensland State Archives: CCT 3A/N3, Regina v. Howman et al., Assault, 1892; Queensland State Archives: CCT 3A/N3. Regina v. Pataboo, Murder, 1892. See also Moore, ‘‘Whips and Rum Swizzles’’, 128: The average Islander hut was ‘‘12' to 15' long, 6' to 8' wide and 4' to 5' high, thatched with bladey grass or cane trash, with quite waterproof roofs of a 2" to 3" thickness’’. 65. Lawson, So Freedom Came, 64. 66. Lugard, Letters from Queensland, 16. 67. Gore, cited in Moore, ‘‘Whips and Rum Swizzles’’, 128. Another example is offered by Wallace, who wrote on 3 July 1883 that ‘‘[a]ll Kanaka huts ‘Kalamia’ burned to ground boys lost everything good opportunity compel planters build hut wood please advise by circular’’, Queensland State Archives: COL/A 364 in letter 3400 of 1883. Telegram from John A. Wallace, Polynesian Inspector, to Immigration Agent contained in letter to Colonial Secretary’s Office, 3 July 1883. 68. Lugard, Letters from Queensland, 16. 69. Hayes, ‘‘Pacific Islanders on Queensland Plantations’’, 304–305, 385–387. 70. Hayes, ‘‘Pacific Islanders on Queensland Plantations’’, 360. 71. Davitt, Life and Progress in Australasia, 274, 275; Moore and Mercer, ‘‘Melanesians in North Queensland’’; Moore, ‘‘The Counterculture of Survival’’. 72. Hayes, ‘‘Pacific Islanders on Queensland Plantations’’, 194–309. 73. Turner, Rural Life in Sunny Queensland, 62–66; Lugard, Letters from Queensland, 16. See also Eden, My Wife and I in Queensland, 328; Roth, The Discovery and Settlement of Port Mackay, Queensland, 57. 74. Eden, My Wife and I in Queensland, 328. 75. Hayes, ‘‘Pacific Islanders on Queensland Plantations’’, 252–269. 76. Medicine administered by planters, particularly those designed to stop people pretending they were sick, was discussed particularly on JCUOHC: BOHC, 7B: Side B, 1974; JCUOHC: BOHC, 8B: Side A, 1974; and JCUOHC: BOHC, 19B:

200

Notes to Pages 62–64

Side A, 1975: ‘‘They, they’d give ’em a half a bottle [of castor oil], Dad said, and not food, and he reckoned well these blokes’d be helpless, they’d nearly die on their, on their feet. Then they’d tell ’em the next time they’ll, they’ll ah, give ’em a whole bottle, but then he said the treatment itself was bad enough’’. When asked to clarify whether this was for sickness or punishment the interviewee was adamant that it was a punishment’’. See also Clarke, The ‘‘New Chum’’ in Australia, 296. 77. See evidence of William Canny, Robert Cran, William Farquhar, and Alfred Bowen in the1876 Select Committee inquiry, ‘‘Report of the Select Committee on the General Question of Polynesian Labour’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1876): 78–80, 83, 132–133; John McDonnell, John Ferrett, and George Raff, in ‘‘Progress Report from the Select Committee . . . Polynesian Labourers’ Act’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1869): 37, 83, 85; and Richmond, Queensland in the ‘‘Seventies’’, 49. 78. In order of appearance: Clarke, The ‘‘New Chum’’ in Australia, 297; Lugard, Letters from Queensland, 18. 79. For classic debates regarding the role of agricultural independence in coerced labor regimes in the United States and the Caribbean, see Mintz, Caribbean Transformation; Genovese, Roll Jordon Roll; and Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation, 1–13. 80. Campbell, in ‘‘Progress Report from the Select Committee . . . Polynesian Labourers’ Act’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1869): 72. See also the evidence offered by Raff, ibid., 85, 92. 81. Cowley, Newspaper Cutting Book, entry for 10 January 1879. 82. Cumming, The Story of My Trip to Queensland, 98–99. 83. Hope, in ‘‘Progress Report from the Select Committee . . . Polynesian Labourers’ Act’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1869): 77. 84. Turner, Rural Life in Sunny Queensland, 62–66. 85. See Lugard, Letters from Queensland, 18; White, Thirty Years in Tropical Australia, particularly 1–3; Feetham and Rymen, eds., North Queensland Jubilee Book 1878–1928, 64–65, on Goodwin Robinson’s mission work in Mackay at Te Kowai Mill; and Florence Young, Pearls from the Pacific, about the Queensland Kanaka Mission. Christian missions in Queensland played an increasingly significant role and were utilized by Islanders as a means of gaining not just spiritual fulfillment, but also literacy, and a means of community celebration and cohesion. The missions appear in this account as a presence amongst many that shaped the colonial context. They are not dealt with in isolation here. For a dedicated discussion, see Mercer, White Australia Defied, 7–12. Of tangential interest, too, see, for work on Islander missionaries in the Torres Strait, Mullins, ‘‘ ‘Heathen Polynee’ and ‘Nigger Teachers’ ’’, 152–167.

Notes to Pages 64–67

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86. Moore, ‘‘Whips and Rum Swizzles’’, 130–131. 87. Boothby, On the Wallaby, 152. 88. T. P. Pugh, police magistrate, Bundaberg, in ‘‘Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire . . . Sugar Industry’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1889): 323. 89. Ibid., 322. 90. Queensland State Archives: COL/A 452 in letter 457 of1886. Thomas Judge, Sub-Inspector of Police at Mackay to Commissioner of Police, Brisbane, 31 December 1885. 91. John Drysdale, in ‘‘Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire . . . Sugar Industry’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1889): 254. 92. Queensland State Archives: COL/A 792 in letter 10053 of 1895. Polynesian Office, Mackay to A. S. Cowley, Brisbane, 28 February 1895, Bundle of Correspondence Relating to the Amendments Proposed to Polynesian Labourers’ Act. 93. Bowen, sub-inspector of police (Cairns), in ‘‘Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire into and Report . . . Pacific Islanders to be Deported’’, Queensland Parliamentary Papers (1906): 291. 94. Paget and Duffy, in ‘‘Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire . . . Sugar Industry’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1889): 300, 319. 95. Wright, in ibid., 328–389. 96. Queensland State Archives: CPS 12 E/6. Port Douglas Watch-House Book. For example: Jimmy, arrested 22 April 1891 for drunkenness, carried a comb, looking glass, and five pounds; and Billy Solomon, arrested under suspicion of being of unsound mind, carried six spears and five shillings and three pence. 97. JCUOHC: BOHC, 7B: Side B, 1974. 98. JCUOHC: BOHC, MP, R/R 18, 1977. 99. Melvin, The Cruise of the Helena, 48–49. 100. Evidence of John Campbell, in ‘‘Progress Report from the Select Committee . . . Polynesian Labourers’ Act’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1869): 70. See also ‘‘Report with Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Royal Commission’’, Queensland Legislative Council Journals (1885); and ‘‘The Return of the New Guinea Islanders’’, Queensland Legislative Council Journals (1885): 1588–1604, particularly the letter from H. H. Romilly to Sir Peter Scratchley, 20 July 1885, 1597–1598. 101. Cowley, Newspaper Cutting Book, entry for 19 November 1878; See also Melvin, The Cruise of the Helena, 18–19. 102. According to planters who gave evidence to the 1889 Royal Commission, average wages for first contract laborers ranged from eight to ten pounds and could reach as high as fifteen pounds. Collated by Graves, ‘‘Crisis and Change in the Queensland Sugar Industry’’, 267.

202

Notes to Pages 68–74

103. In order of appearance: Richmond, Queensland in the ‘‘Seventies’’, 42; Cowley, Newspaper Cutting Book, entry for 19 November 1878; and Melvin, The Cruise of the Helena, 15. 104. Turner, Rural Life in Sunny Queensland, 62–66; Clarke, The ‘‘New Chum’’ in Australia, 290; Wrathall Bull, Early Experiences of Life in South Australia, 410. 105. Letter from Willi Ipi dated 3 May 1906, in ‘‘Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire into and Report . . . Pacific Islanders to be Deported’’, Queensland Parliamentary Papers (1906): 896. 106. Dabie, in ibid., 780. In full it reads: ‘‘10819. Suppose you get passage, you go home? Yes. 10820. Would you go without any money and without a box? No; I can’t go with nothing’’. 107. Ererow and Tom Low, in ibid., 749, 781. 108. The total expense was just under 5,984 pounds. ‘‘The Return of the New Guinea Islanders: Expenditure’’, Queensland Legislative Council Journals (1885): 1605. 109. Ibid., 1600. 3. The Settler Colony: Kanakas, Blacks, and Racial Borderlands 1. Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 59 (1889): 2251–2252. 2. This argument owes a massive debt to Patrick Wolfe’s work on settlercolonialism and ‘‘logic of elimination’’. Although an endnote hardly does justice to this influence, the arguments he has developed of relevance to my own are laid out and developed in the following: Wolfe, ‘‘Land, Labor, and Difference’’, 866–905, and his Settler Colonialism, particularly the chapter titled ‘‘Repressive Authenticity’’, and ‘‘Structure and Event’’. 3. Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 31 (1880): 139, 161. 4. Whiteness studies are now a burgeoning area of scholarship and too extensive to list in full here. Influential in the early stages of this study were Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness; and Cheryl Harris, ‘‘Whiteness as Property’’, 1709–1791. 5. William Walsh, in Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 5 (1867): 332. 6. Ibid. 7. Henry Challinor, in ibid., 333. 8. Thomas Stephens and Charles Fitzsimmons, in ibid., 334, 335. 9. John Douglas, in ibid., 341. 10. This semi-legal force, by virtue of being of dubious legal standing, was granted, as the North Australian put it in 1862, ‘‘ill-defined and unascertainable powers—powers which, in practice and according to their interpretation, usurp the functions of magistrate, jury, and judge.’’ ‘‘Treatment of the Blacks in the Leichhardt District’’, North Australian, 21 January 1862. Cited in Reynolds, This Whispering in

Notes to Pages 74–78

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Our Hearts, 96. For more on Queensland’s frontiers, see Reynolds, Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers and Land, and The Other Side of the Frontier; and Loos, Invasion and Resistance. 11. ‘‘Alleged Massacre of Blacks at the Morinish Diggings’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1867): 983–990. 12. Bowen to the Duke of Newcastle, dated 6 January 1860. Cited in Bowen, Thirty Years of Colonial Government, 117. 13. Unpaid Aboriginal labor, particularly domestic and agricultural, was extensively exploited in Queensland’s agricultural and seaborn trades. Although not an exhaustive list, see Loos, ‘‘Queensland’s Kidnapping Act’’; Raymond Evans, ‘‘Don’t You Remember Black Alice, Sam Holt?’’; McGrath, Born in the Cattle; Rosser, Dreamtime Nightmares; May, From Bush to Station; Raymond Evans, ‘‘ ‘Kings’ in Brass Crescents’’; or the revised version in Fighting Words, 180–200. 14. Eden, My Wife and I in Queensland, 326. 15. Report of Anti-Polynesian Meeting, Brisbane, 1871. Cited in Saunders, ‘‘The Black Scourge’’, 153. 16. Towns, South Sea Island Immigration, 3. 17. Ibid., 2–3. 18. Police Magistrate, Brisbane, to Under Colonial Secretary, 25 September 1867, in ‘‘Introduction of South Sea Islanders into Queensland’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1867): 119–131. 19. Louis Hope, in ‘‘Progress Report from the Select Committee . . . Polynesian Labourers’ Act’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1869): 37–38. 20. Claudius Buchanan Whish, sugar planter, and Bancroft, resident surgeon, Brisbane Hospital, in ibid., 64, 67. 21. Eden, My Wife and I in Queensland, 237, 327–328. 22. Ibid., 330–331. 23. John Campbell, sugar grower, in ‘‘Progress Report from the Select Committee . . . Polynesian Labourers’ Act’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1869): 70. 24. Queensland State Archives: COL/A 172 in letter 1953 of 1872. Case before G. Smith and W. Walsh, 1872. 25. Spiller and his family were among the first European settlers in the Mackay District who faced extensive resistance from traditional owners of the area between 1864 and 1868. See the reminiscences of Ryan in ‘‘Echoes from the Past’’, Daily Mercury, 13 September 1922, as cited in Hislop, Sweet Settlement, 28; and Tareha, The Legend of the Leap, 12–13. 26. Queensland State Archives: COL/A 172 in letter 1953 of 1872. Case before G. Smith and W. Walsh, 1872. Spiller: ‘‘I have no reason to know why the prisoners should be more dissatisfied and behave worse than any other Polynesians on the plantations; they have never been punished’’.

204

Notes to Pages 79–83

27. Ibid. 28. ‘‘Progress Report from the Select Committee . . . Polynesian Labourers’ Act’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1869): 79. 29. Queensland State Archives: CPS 10B/G1. Police Station Letterbook. Police Magistrate Goodall to Colonial Secretary, 18 May 1877. 30. Ibid. 31. Archibald Archer, in ‘‘Progress Report from the Select Committee . . . Polynesian Labourers’ Act’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1869): 76–77. 32. Arthur Hodgson, Colonial Secretary; James Preston; John McDonnell, in ibid., 94, 99. 33. Ibid., 99. 34. Queensland State Archives: CPS 10B/G1. Police Station Letterbook. Police Magistrate Goodall to Colonial Secretary, 18 May 1877; and Queensland State Archives: COL/A 238 in letter 2815 of 1877. Alfred Davidson to Colonial Secretary, 14 May 1877. Containing telegram from Percy Ramsay, Maryborough, to Colonial Secretary’s Office, 25 May 1877. 35. Bailey, in Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 23 (1877): 40; and Queensland State Archives: COL/A 238 in letter 2815 of 1877. Alfred Davidson to Colonial Secretary, 14 May 1877. This case is discussed again in chapter 5. 36. See, for regionally relevant studies of colonial anxieties over racial contamination, in contexts where white women were potent symbols of property, Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire; and for an in-depth case study, see her Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power; Inglis, The White Woman’s Protection Ordinance, originally published as Not a White Woman Safe; and for the expression of fears about protecting property through notions of racial contamination, see Cheryl Harris, ‘‘Whiteness as Property’’; Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness. 37. ‘‘Report of the Select Committee on the General Question of Polynesian Labour’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1876): 125. 38. See Saunders, ‘‘The Black Scourge’’, 177–178. 39. Clune, Free and Easy Land, 170. See also Tareha’s account of the varied versions of the legend in her The Legend of the Leap; Moore, ‘‘Blackgin’s Leap’’, 61–67; and Thea Astley’s dramatization of it in her The Kindness Cup. 40. ‘‘Report of Board of Inquiry . . . Aboriginal Reserve at Mackay’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1876): 157–158 . On the Durundur reserve, see the in-depth studies of Raymond Evans, ‘‘Queensland’s First Aboriginal Reserve’’. 41. ‘‘The Revd. Duncan McNab and the Aborigines’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1876): 172, esp. 165. The petition states, ‘‘Sir, We, James Diper, Charles Diper Ghepara and William Watiman Nilapi, being aborigines of Queensland, hereby humbly request Your Excellency to reserve for the use and benefit of each of us one thousand acres of land . . . and we desire to be acknowledged the lawful

Notes to Pages 83–86

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owners of said land and to be supplied by the existing Government of Queensland with legitimate title deeds to that effect; as we and our ancestors from time immemorial have possessed and used these lands and appurtenances for hunting and fishing, and now we desire to use them for grazing and agriculture’’. 42. Ibid., 164. The reply to the original application stated that the ‘‘Minister for Lands also considers the area of land applied for to be too large, and would be beyond the capacity of any ordinary native aboriginal to improve’’. For an in-depth study of McNab, see Cryle, ‘‘Duncan McNab’s Mission’’, and Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts, 105–108. 43. Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 21 (1876): 1423. 44. Ibid. 45. The correspondence of the year was published as The Way We Civilise, 3. See also Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts, 91–108. 46. The Way We Civilise, 5–6. See also the relevant debates in Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 33 (1880): 1130–1146. 47. Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 33 (1880): 1135. See also the letter by ‘‘Outis’’ to the Queenslander dated 22 May 1880, in The Way We Civilise, 31. 48. Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism. Although the book deals extensively with the underlying logic of elimination of settler-colonialism, chapter 6 on ‘‘Repressive Authenticity’’ is especially fine. 49. See Rannie, My Adventures among South Sea Cannibals, 68: ‘‘I was told of one old respectable Kanaka who, with his wife and children, was sitting in a spring cart on the public road, quite innocent of any complicity in the disturbance. He was cruelly murdered in his cart by a white man on horseback, who rode at him and dashed his brains out, bespattering wife and children with the husband’s and father’s blood. No one knew the actual number of Kanakas killed that day, as the bodies of some of them were found long afterwards where they had crawled away among the sugarcane and lain down to die’’. And Faith Bandler’s father’s memories: ‘‘Again Wacvie remembered, remembered going with the men and getting the bodies from the deep furrows, where they lay hidden by the thick leaves of the sugar cane plants. He recalled helping to dig, that night, the common grave, into which they had lowered the dead’’; Bandler, Wacvie, 93. 50. Moore, ‘‘The Mackay Racecourse Riot’’, 181; and Rannie, My Adventures among South Sea Cannibals, 67–68. 51. ‘‘Preliminary Statement of Census for the Year 1881’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1881): 1101–1120. Contained in table 4, ‘‘Population in Electoral Districts, the number of Minors and Adults Composing the Male population, also the Number of Chinese and Polynesians, Males and Females and number of Adult Males (exclusive of Chinese and Polynesians)’’. According to these figures, there were only 1,000 Islander women in Queensland and between 142 and 245 in Mackay in 1883.

206

Notes to Pages 86–89

52. ‘‘Preliminary Statement of Census for the Year 1886’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1886): 737–768. 53. J. Ashburton Thompson’s report in ‘‘The Temporary Closure of the Hospital for Pacific Islanders at Mackay: Correspondence Respecting’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1884): 709. See also Moore, ‘‘Whips and Rum Swizzles’’, 127. 54. National Library of Australia: The First Mackay Planters Association Minute Book, 1878–1885. MS 1869. The entry for the Mackay Planters Association for 15 February 1884 reads, ‘‘The Chairman briefly stated . . . that he had received a letter from the Secretary of the Cemetery Board, complaining that the deaths at the Kanaka Hospital was giving more work than could be properly undertaken’’. Over the months following, arrangements were made for burials at the cheapest possible rate of 2/1 per head. 55. Finch-Hatton, Advance Australia!, 166–167. A similar situation erupted in Normanton in 1888, when ‘‘the white people of Normanton became panic stricken and rose almost en masse against the coloured people there’’. See for more detail Boyd Morehead, Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 55 (1888): 297. 56. Peter Corris’ editorial notes for Wawn’s The South Sea Islanders, 324. National Library of Australia: The First Mackay Planters Association Minute Book, 1878–1885, MS 1869. See ‘‘Employment of Time-Expired Polynesians’’; ‘‘TimeExpired Polynesians in the Colony on the 31st December, 1883’’; ‘‘Convictions of Polynesians, Cingalese, Maltese, Malays and Chinese’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1883–1884): 1445–1448, 1449–1452, 1453–1454. 57. Shlomowitz, ‘‘Markets for Indentured and Time-Expired Melanesian Labour’’, 74–75. 58. Ibid., 75. In 1884, time-expired Islanders constituted 13 percent of the population of Islanders in Queensland. See ‘‘Polynesians in the Colony on 30 June 1883, and Polynesians who have died during the year1883’’ and ‘‘Time-Expired Polynesians in the Colony on the 31st December, 1883’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1883–1884): 1425–1428, 1445–1448. Shlomowitz has estimated that between 31 percent and 35 percent of Pacific Islanders were time expired from 1888–1892; between 51 percent and 67 percent from 1893–1899; between 42 percent and 46 percent from 1900–1901; and between 32 percent and 39 percent from 1902–1904. 59. King, in Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 33 (1880): 839. 60. Perkins, in Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 32 (1880): 348–349. 61. Walsh and McLean, in ibid., 346, 855. 62. Florence Young, Pearls from the Pacific, 39. 63. Blundell and Morehead, in Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 32 (1880): 334. 64. Brady, The King’s Caravan, 257–259. 65. Ibid., 257.

Notes to Pages 89–92

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66. Queensland State Archives: COL/A 694 in letter 4362 of 1892. Planters Association, Bundaberg, to Colonial Secretary, 11 April 1892. 67. With regard to the Special Service boy, see entry for 2 January1899, Queensland State Archives: POL 3A/P7. Bundaberg Police Station Duty Diaries, 13 March 1898 to 3 February 1900. The Peace Preservation Act is discussed in chapter 5 of this study. 68. ‘‘Coloured Population of Queensland’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1897): 1095–1104; ‘‘Results of Census of the Coloured Alien Population of Queensland’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings, (1898): 821; on the question regarding number and crimes of Kanakas, see Vincent Lesina, in Queensland Parliamentary Debates 83 (1899): 1032–1035. Resumed 7 December, 1174–1182; resumed 20 December, 1502. Return of ‘‘Half-Castes’’ in Queensland, 9 October 1901, Queensland Parliamentary Debates 88 (1901): 1176. 69. Indigenous prisoners were counted in the jail statistics (and as a separate category of prisoner after 1887) but were not counted in the general population during this time. The effect is that the difference in the compared proportions of this figure would in reality have been greater, for had Aboriginal people been counted in the general population, the Islander proportion of this population would have been smaller. 70. On Maryborough: Duffy, ‘‘Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire . . . Sugar Industry’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1889): 319, 346; and for Bundaberg: Queensland State Archives: CPS 3A/P3. Boolamal v. George Milner, Assault, 1880. Deposition of witnesses. Boolamal, Francis Clark, David Andrews, and George Milner. Milner stated, ‘‘[T]here was a man had a bit of liver tied on a string—this man was throwing this liver at the coolie boys and they picked it up to give to him to throw again.’’ One of the occasions of these incidents becoming more serious was that involving Migaloo Malayta, who was tried for the murder of David Humphries in 1904. See Queensland State Archives: CCT 3A/N13. Rex v. Migaloo Malayta, Murder, 1904. See also Queensland State Archives: POL 3A/P10. Bundaberg Police Station Duty Diary. Entry for Sunday 26 December 1903: ‘‘At 5 pm a serious riot between Kanakas and Whites in Bourbon street. One white man killed named David Humphries. Kanaka offender arrested by Const’’. 71. Brady, The King’s Caravan, 307. 72. Lesina, in Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 82 (1899): 150. See also ‘‘Statutory Criminal Law in Force in Queensland . . . with a Table of the Statutes’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1896): 697. 73. ‘‘Meston, Archibald, Report on the Aboriginals of Queensland . . . under instructions from the Queensland Government’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1896): 727. 74. Meston is discussed in more detail in the study from which this derived.

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Notes to Pages 92–96

See Banivanua-Mar, ‘‘Bulimaen and Hard Work’’, 136–137; and Thorpe, ‘‘Archibald Meston’’, 57–58. For Meston’s opinions towards frontier violence, as published in those newspapers he edited, such as the Ipswich Observer, see 52–67. 75. ‘‘Meston, Archibald, Report on the Aboriginals of Queensland . . . under instructions from the Queensland Government’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1896): 727. 76. Ibid., 725, 727. 77. ‘‘Measures Recently Adopted for the Amelioration of the Aborigines’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1897): 45. 78. Ibid., 43. See also Parry-Okeden’s ‘‘Report on the North Queensland Aborigines and the Native Police’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1897): 37. 79. Kerr, in Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 78 (1897): 1631. 80. While Meston had addressed the issue of child stealing, his preferred option had been to leave children with parents. But as Home Secretary Horace Tozer pointed out in 1897, ‘‘The very class of person he wanted to get at were the half-caste girls out in the West and other places . . . under the present law relating to reformatories every child born of an aboriginal mother was a ward of the Home Secretary until he or she was twenty-one years of age. He could bring them in at any time, and had often done so’’. Horace Tozer, in Queensland Parliamentry Debates, vol. 78 (1897): 1630. Tozer was referring to the Industrial and Reformatory Schools Act (1865), which gave the colonial secretary wardship over ‘‘neglected children’’, partially defined as any ‘‘child born of an aboriginal or half-caste mother’’. For an overview of state child removal policies, see Raymond Evans, ‘‘A Permanent Precedent’’, 123–146, and ‘‘The Duty We Owe’’, 147–166; Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home, 25–26, 71–91, 617–624; Kidd, in The Way We Civilise; and Huggins and Huggins, Auntie Rita. 81. Vincent Lesina, in Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 82 (1899): 150. 82. Ibid., 116; emphasis added. 83. Queensland State Archives: CCT 3A/N2. Regina v. Big Peter, Murder, 1889. Depositions of witnesses. 84. Ibid. Depositions of witnesses. This was reconstructed mainly from the testimony of Kitty Eureka, but also from the testimonies of Kitty Bundaberg, Davey Silva, Rosy, Captain Cook, and Constable Charles Henry Brooks. 85. Ibid. Depositions of witnesses. Thomas May. 86. Ibid. Depositions of witnesses. Charles Brooks and Thomas May. 87. Queensland State Archives: PRI/8 Brisbane. Return of Polynesians who served sentences in H.M. Prison. 88. Queensland State Archives: PRI/8 St. Helena. Return Shewing [sic] Number of Polynesian Prisoners Convicted of crime, 1896. See also Queensland State Archives: CCT 3A/N2. Regina v. Toorey et al., Rape, 1889.

Notes to Pages 96–98

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89. Queensland State Archives: PRI/8. St. Helena. Return Shewing [sic] Number of Polynesian Prisoners Convicted of crime, 1896; Queensland State Archives: CCT 3A/N2. Regina v. Pollyogomea et al., Murder, 1889. Mycomb was acquitted. See also Queensland State Archives: 3A/P3. Bundaberg Police Station Duty Diaries, particularly entries between 6–15 July. 90. While only one white man was hanged for rape in Queensland (1882), the only Islander that was not hanged for the conviction of raping a white woman was Billy, alias Johnny, from Mackay, who was convicted of rape in 1889. Though he originally received a death sentence, this was later commuted to life imprisonment. See Harris, ‘‘The Terror of the Law’’, 37–39. 91. Though exceedingly rare, Europeans were occasionally brought to trial for violent crimes against Aboriginal people during the post-frontier period. See Highland, ‘‘Aborigines, Europeans and the Criminal Law’’ and ‘‘A Tangle of Paradoxes’’. 92. Queensland State Archives: JUS/N 129 no. 118 of 1886. Inquest into death of ‘‘Terani’’, Rockhampton, 1886. Manager of Yeppoon Sugar Company, testimony. See also Saunders, ‘‘The Pacific Islander Hospitals’’, for attitudes towards hospitalization for Aborigines and Islanders. 93. Queensland State Archives: CCT 3A/N2. Regina v. Big Peter, Murder, 1889. Depositions of witnesses. Thomas May, testimony. See also Highland, ‘‘Aborigines, Europeans and the Criminal Law’’; and Reynolds, ‘‘Fringe Camps in Nineteenth Century Queensland’’, esp. 250–253. 94. Return in debates, ‘‘Classified Half-Castes in Queensland’’, and ‘‘Coloured Alien and Half-Caste Prisoners’’, Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 88 (1901): 1176, 2256–2259. 95. See, e.g., evidence of T. P. Pugh, police magistrate at Bundaberg, ‘‘Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire . . . Sugar Industry’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1889): 218–219. 96. Queensland State Archives: CCT 3A/N3. Regina v. Howman et al., Assault, 1892. Deposition of witnesses. McKay stated in court that a tradition had emerged in Bundaberg: ‘‘The Witness Orrimay has been in the Lock-up yard since the rising of the court this morning. He was not there by any one in particular’s instructions. He was there that he might get his dinner. . . . It is not an unusual thing to give Pacific Islanders and Aboriginal witnesses a meal at the lockup’’. 97. Queensland State Archives: PRI/8 Queensland. Return Shewing [sic] Offences and Convictions of Polynesians in the Colony of Queensland. See also Registrar-General’s Annual Statistics and Vital Statistics in Queensland Votes and Proceedings and Queensland Parliamentary Papers yearly to1908. These figures have been compiled as a table in the study from which this book derived. See Banivanua-Mar, ‘‘Bulimaen and Hard Work’’, 353, 363. Appendix1: Execution Figures for1871–1906; Appendix 5: Incarceration of Islanders for period 1885–1895 as compiled by Prisons

210

Notes to Pages 99–104

Department, 31 December 1895. This table shows that between 1871 and 1907, of the fifty-four people sentenced to death in the courts and executed, eight were Aboriginal and twelve were South Sea Islanders. This amounted to a total of 37 percent of executions. 98. Statistics for figure 3 were compiled from annual police, comptrollergeneral of prisons, and sheriff ’s reports for the colony. More detailed compilations of these figures have been conducted and included in Banivanua-Mar, ‘‘Bulimaen and Hard Work’’, 361–363. Appendices 3 and 4. 99. This analysis owes much to the insights of critical race scholarship. Of particular significance in relation to the policing of space, see Ford, ‘‘Urban Space and the Color Line’’,117–147; Gotunda, ‘‘A Critique of ‘Our Constitution is Color-Blind’ ’’; Marvin Jones, ‘‘Darkness Made Visible, 442–447. 4. South Sea Islanders Resisting Kanakas: Identity, Consciousness, and Community to 1906 1. Queensland State Archives: PRE/88 in letter 4205 of1903. Press cutting dated 21 March 1903, for the attention of the Under Secretary, to Chief Secretary’s Office, 3 June 1903. 2. Queensland State Archives: PRE/88 in letter 3322 of 1903. J. Chamberlain to Chief Secretary’s Office. Confidential. 20 March 1903. 3. Alfred Deakin, Department of External Affairs, in the capacity of Acting Prime Minister, 29 September 1902, ‘‘Correspondence Relating to the Pacific Island Labourers Act, 1901’’, Commonwealth Parliamentary Papers (1903): 979. 4. Right Reverend George Horsfall Frodsham, Bishop of North Queensland, ‘‘Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire into and Report . . . Pacific Islanders to be Deported from Queensland’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1906): 852–853. 5. Saunders, ‘‘The Black Scourge’’, 206. See also Saunders, ‘‘Troublesome Servants’’; and Moore, ‘‘The Counterculture of Survival’’. 6. Moore, ‘‘The Counterculture of Survival’’ and Kanaka; Mercer and Moore, ‘‘Melanesians in North Queensland’’; Fatnowna, Fragments of a Lost Heritage. 7. Queensland State Archives: PRE/87 in letter 4757 of 1903. Nambour South Sea Island Cane Growers to Chief Secretary’s Office, 18 June 1903. See, for more on this in the Mackay area, Moore, ‘‘The Counterculture of Survival’’, 69–74. 8. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 11. 9. See in particular Jolly, ‘‘On the Edge’’, 417–466. See also Hau’ofa, ‘‘Our Sea of Islands’’; and Clifford, Routes. 10. Clifford, ‘‘Indigenous Articulations’’ and The Predicament of Culture, particularly ‘‘Identity in Mashpee’’, 277–346; Hall, ‘‘Gramsci’s Relevance’’ and ‘‘On Post-

Notes to Pages 104–107

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modernism and Articulation’’. See also Hau’ofa, ‘‘Epilogue’’, 461–462, on Oceanian people remaking themselves rather than being passively remodelled. While many have discussed articulation theory in relation to the western Pacific, Clifford’s work has followed a trajectory explicitly concerned with the role that identity plays in the operation of colonial power. His notion of the articulated site of indigeneity is itself borrowed from Stuart Hall, although his discussions of articulation in relation to the western Pacific make his work particularly relevant here. 11. JCUOHC: BOHC MP R/R 21, 1977. 12. JCUOHC: BOHC MP R/R 10, 1977. See also The Forgotten People, 46. 13. JCUOHC: BOHC MP R/R 11, 1977. See also The Forgotten People, 47. 14. JCUOHC: BOHC MP R/R 2, 1977. See also The Forgotten People, 53. See particularly Fatnowna, Fragments of a Lost Heritage. 15. JCUOHC: BOHC MP R/R 8, 1977, Interviewee 2. 16. William Canny, ‘‘Report of the Select Committee on the General Question of Polynesian Labour’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1876): 76–78. 17. Eden, My Wife and I in Queensland, 335. 18. Claudius Whish, in ‘‘Progress Report from the Select Committee . . . Polynesian Labourers’ Act’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1869): 64. 19. Tom Lamon, cited in Dutton, Queensland Canefields English, 23–25. The following is an excerpt from Tom Lamon’s (TL) interview, including only the anglicized, rather than English, translation provided by Dutton: ‘‘BD: But you can’t speak English? TL: I not speak English when I came out this country. BD: When he asked you to cut cane you understand or he show you how to cut it? TL: No, er—we only given cane knife . . . okay we went out then to cut cane. . . . [H]e gives cane knife and he says go cut cane there oh man—one man he—he watched over. One man he watched over you call him overseer . . . he watches then he comes he says ‘now cut cane here. You don’t cut it too high. . . . You cut it low, low down later it—it grows again’. . . . [O]h okay it’s okay everyone understands then and cuts the cane. TED: Did one of you—one of the boys—could one of the boys speak English or did . . . TL: Oh, yes some boys they spoke English. TED: Where did they learn English? TL: Heh? . . . BD: Where they learn English. Here, or . . . TL: Oh learn this country’’. (The interviewer is BD and TED was an observer.) 20. Queensland State Archives: CCT 3A/N3 Regina v. Pataboo, Murder, 1892. Deposition of witnesses. Peerahboy. 21. In order of appearance: William Canny in ‘‘Report of the Select Committee on the General Question of Polynesian Labour’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1876): 76–78; JCUOHC: BOHC, 1B: Side A, 1974, Interviewee 2; JCUOHC: BOHC MP R/R 15, 1977, Interviewee 3; JCUOHC: BOHC MP R/R 21, 1977. 22. Queensland State Archives: CCT 3A/N3 Regina v. Pataboo, Murder, 1892. Deposition of witnesses. Halagooa.

212

Notes to Pages 107–111

23. Hope, In Quest of Coolies, 14. 24. JCUOHC: BOHC, 1B: Side A, Interviewee 1, 1974; and JCUOHC: BOHC, 3B: Side A, 1974. Also discussed on JCUOHC: BOHC, 4B: Side A, 1974; and JCUOHC: BOHC, 7B: Side B, 1974. 25. Queensland State Archives: POL 3A/P4 Bundaberg Police Station Duty Diaries. Entry for 26 December 1899; Queensland State Archives: POL 3A/P7 Bundaberg Police Station Duty Diaries. Entries for 2 January 1899 and 26 December 1899. 26. Queensland State Archives: POL 3A/P5 Bundaberg Police Station Duty Diaries. 27. Lawson, So Freedom Came, 65. 28. Collinson, More About Cairns, 63. 29. For Bundaberg in 1887, see Robert Arthur Johnstone, in ‘‘Report . . . to Inquire into the General Management of the Gaols’’, Queensland Votes and Proceeding (1887): 888. For Bundaberg in 1894, see Queensland State Archives: CCT 3A/N3 Regina v. Tallie et al., Murder, 1894. Deposition of witnesses. Frederic Charles Roebuck and Towhee, or Peter. 30. JCUOHC: BOHC, 51B: Sides A and B, 1977. 31. Hope, In Quest of Coolies, 113. 32. Edward Martin, in ‘‘Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire into and Report . . . Pacific Islanders to be Deported from Queensland’’, Queensland Parliamentary Papers (1906): 644. 33. Shlomowitz, ‘‘Markets for Indentured and Time-Expired Melanesian Labour’’, 80–83. 34. Rannie, My Adventures among South Sea Cannibals, 83, 108, see also 65, 67– 68, 108. 35. Ibid., 297–298. 36. ‘‘Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire . . . Sugar Industry’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1889): 50. 37. Graves, ‘‘Crisis and Change in the Queensland Sugar Industry’’, 268. Graves does not include the wage rates for women. See also Saunders, ‘‘The Black Scourge’’, 167–175, 192–208; and particularly Saunders, ‘‘Troublesome Servants’’. 38. Shlomowitz, ‘‘Markets for Indentured and Time-Expired Melanesian Labour’’, 80–83. 39. Sugar Journal and Tropical Planter 3 (1894): 82. Cited ibid., 85. 40. ‘‘Report on the Cane Sugar Industry of Australia’’, Commonwealth Parliamentary Papers (1901–1902): 9–10. 41. Richard Augustine Donnelly, in ‘‘Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire into and Report . . . Pacific Islanders to be Deported from Queensland’’, Queensland Parliamentary Papers (1906): 734.

Notes to Pages 112–113

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42. Letter from Fanny Nicol to Alfred Deakin, dated 9 September 1902, in ‘‘Correspondence Relating to the Pacific Island Labourers Act, 1901’’, Commonwealth Parliamentary Papers (1903): 988. 43. Peter George Grant, in ‘‘Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire into and Report . . . Pacific Islanders to be Deported from Queensland’’, Queensland Parliamentary Papers (1906): 742. 44. ‘‘Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire . . . Sugar Industry’’, Queensland Votes and Proceeding (1889): 50. See also Gistitin, Quite a Colony, on the history of the Rockhampton community. 45. ‘‘Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire . . . Sugar Industry’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1889): 50. 46. ‘‘Occupations of Polynesians’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1892): 825. There were 9,428 Islanders, of whom 7,311 were engaged as ‘‘sugar grower’s labourer’’ (77.5 percent). Of these, there were 8,602 men in the colony and 6,724 engaged as ‘‘sugar grower’s labourer’’ (78.1 percent), as were 587 of the 826 women (71 percent). 47. Ibid. 48. ‘‘Ninth Census of Queensland’’, Queensland Parliamentary Papers (1902): 1211. ‘‘Table Showing Occupations of Chinese, Pacific Islanders, Japanese, Natives of India and Ceylon (coloured), Other Alien Races, and Aborigines (including HalfCastes) according to the Census of 1901’’. 49. Queensland State Archives: CCT 3A/N3 Regina v. Pataboo, Murder, 1892. Deposition of witnesses. Cesar. 50. Queensland State Archives: CCT 3A/3 Regina v. Howman et al., Assault, 1892. Deposition of witnesses. Leva Wagga. Queensland State Archives: CCT 3A/N5 Regina v. Tallie et al., Murder, 1894. Deposition of wittnesses. Arali. 51. Queensland State Archives: CCT 10/N1 Regina v. Jack, Inflicting Grievous Bodily Harm, 1891. Deposition of witnesses. Marsali. 52. Letter from Willi Ipi to Royal Commissioners, dated 3 May 1906, in ‘‘Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire into and Report . . . Pacific Islanders to be Deported from Queensland’’, Queensland Parliamentary Papers (1906): 896. 53. Petition to the King,1902, in ‘‘Papers relating to the Pacific Island Labourer’s Act, 1901’’, Sessional Papers (1902): 827. 54. Henry Tongoa and Sigges, in ‘‘Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire into and Report . . . Pacific Islanders to be Deported from Queensland’’, Queensland Parliamentary Papers (1906): 617, 669. In Mackay, Islanders leased land from the larger plantations, growing the cane for the central mill. 55. ‘‘Summary of Pacific Islanders Apparently Domiciled’’, Commonwealth Parliamentary Papers (1903): 903. 56. Letter from Henry Tongoa, representing the Pacific Islanders Association,

214

Notes to Pages 113–115

in ‘‘Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire into and Report . . . Pacific Islanders to be Deported from Queensland’’, Queensland Parliamentary Papers (1906): 617. 57. ‘‘Petition Read and Received, 28 June, 1905’’. Commonwealth Parliamentary Papers (1905): 5. 58. ‘‘Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire into and Report . . . Pacific Islanders to be Deported from Queensland’’, Queensland Parliamentary Papers (1906): 903. In 1906, 13 people had freehold land, and 317 were under lease agreements, contained in Appendix17: Summary of Returns Prepared by Local Inspectors of Pacific Islanders. 59. ‘‘Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire into and Report . . . Pacific Islanders to be Deported from Queensland’’, Queensland Parliamentary Papers (1906). See for Brisbane/Nambour, John O’Neil Brenan, 572–574; for Rockhampton, Islanders Alfred Malezieux from New Caledonia, Billy Wootam, Peter Aroo, and Jimmy Pentecost, 595, 597–598, and Joseph Broadhust Bocklehurst, 587–588; for Mackay, see Islanders Henry Tongoa and Noah Sabbo, 617, 669, and the petition from the Pacific Islanders Association, 617; see also Rev. John McLean, 634–635, and Frank James Stevens, 666; and for Cairns, see Willy Ipi’s letter to the commission, 896, and John Richmond Edmonds and Richard Augustine Donnelly, 730– 731, 734. 60. Evidence of Sigges, in ‘‘Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire into and Report . . . Pacific Islanders to be Deported from Queensland’’, Queensland Parliamentary Papers (1906): 669. 61. JCUOHC: BOHC, 40B: Side A, 1977. Interviewee 1. 62. Shepherd, Victoria 100 Years Onwards, section on ‘‘Development and Community Impact’’, n.p. 63. Florence Young, Pearls from the Pacific, 42. 64. ‘‘Death Rate of Pacific Islanders in 1884–5’’, Queensland Legislative Council Journals (1885): 1221–1222. 65. JCUOHC: BOHC MP R/R 21, 1977. 66. See Queensland State Archives: CCT 3A/N2 Regina v. Big Peter, Murder, 1889; and evidence of T. P. Pugh, in Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire . . . Sugar Industry’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1889): 322. 67. Collinson, Early Days in Cairns, 77–78. JCUOHC: BOHC MP R/R 21, 1977. 68. ‘‘Ninth Census of Queensland’’, Queensland Parliamentary Papers (1902): 912, 1053, and 1070–1071. In particular: ‘‘Table No. 14. Showing the Number of Chinese, Pacific Island, Japanese, Natives of India and Ceylon (coloured) &c. and Inmates of Charitable Institutions in each Census District’’; ‘‘Table No. 72. Showing Degree of Education of Different age Periods, inclusive and also exclusive of Chinese, Pacific Islanders, Japanese, Natives of India and Ceylon (coloured), Other

Notes to Pages 115–117

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Alien races, Aborigines and Half-Castes’’; and ‘‘Table 89. Showing the Civil or Conjugal Condition of the Population at the Age Periods, inclusive and exclusive of Chinese, Pacific Islanders, Japanese, India and Ceylon (coloured), Other Alien Races, Aborigines and Half-Castes’’. 69. ‘‘Summary of Pacific Islanders Apparently Domiciled’’, Commonwealth Parliamentary Papers (1903): 987; and Appendix 17 of the ‘‘Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire into and Report . . . Pacific Islanders to be Deported from Queensland’’, Queensland Parliamentary Papers (1906): 903. According to the 1903 figures, of the 353 Islanders considered domiciled, 92 were married, and of these 33 were married to Europeans. Similarly, in the figures collected by the 1906 Deportation Royal Commission, of the 273 Islander men married, 40 were married to Europeans. 70. In order of appearance: Queensland State Archvies: PRE/88 in letter 10302 of 1902. Registrar General to Home Office, 2 July 1902; and Richard Augustine Donnelly, in ‘‘Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire into and Report . . . Pacific Islanders to be Deported from Queensland’’, Queensland Parliamentary Papers (1906): 734. 71. Alfred Deakin, in ‘‘Correspondence Relating to the Pacific Island Labourers Act, 1901’’, Commonwealth Parliamentary Papers (1903): 982. 72. See particularly the annual reports of the Northern Protector of Aborigines for 1901 and 1902. In Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1902) and (1903): 1139– 1141, 460–461, respectively. See also the Chief Protector’s annual reports for 1904, 1905, and 1906 in which he expresses concern over the inability of Aboriginal protection to ‘‘deal’’ with, or classify, children born of an Aboriginal father and nonAboriginal mother, or a parent who is an Islander. These can be found in Queensland Parliamentary Papers (1905): 727–728, 736; (1906): 923, 928; (1907): 1270–1271. 73. A. S. Cowley, in Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 87 (1901): 1698– 1699. 74. J. F. G. Foxton, in ibid. 75. Petition to the King,1902, in ‘‘Papers Relating to the Pacific Island Labourers Act’’, Sessional Papers 96 (1902): 827; Corris, ‘‘White Australia’’, 237–250. 76. Maluini, Malatya, in ‘‘Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire into and Report . . . Pacific Islanders to be Deported from Queensland’’, Queensland Parliamentary Papers (1906): 526–527. 77. Andrew Toysin, in ibid., 598. 78. Noah Sabbo, in ibid., 669. 79. Goliern Narto from Aoba, in ibid., 598. 80. Written statement by Sam Keree from Tanna, in ibid., 774. 81. Alfred Malezieux, in ibid., 597, 779. 82. Ibid., 597.

216

Notes to Pages 118–126

83. Noah Sabbo, in ibid., 669. 84. George Yassari from Malicolo, in ibid., 716. 85. Peter Wien from Lifu, speaking as the nominated representative for the North Rockhampton community, in ibid., 599. 86. Henry Tongoa, Chairman, Pacific Islanders’ Association, in ibid., 618. 87. JCUOHC: BOHC, 11B: Side A, 1974. 88. JCUOHC: BOHC MP R/R 2, 1977. 5. The State: Inside Colonial Violence, Law, and Order 1. Geoffrey Bolton, cited in Saunders, ‘‘The Black Scourge’’, 200. See the chapter ‘‘Lords of the Lash: Methods of Coercion, Correction and Restraint’’, 19–208. 2. Queensland State Archives: HOM/A8 in letter 5175 of 1897. Inquiry into the . . . Polynesian Office for the District of Bundaberg,1897. Deposition of witnesses. Martin Wessel, testimony, 6–9. 3. Ibid. Deposition of witnesses. Martin Wessel, testimony, 5. 4. Ibid. Deposition of witnesses, 21–34. 5. Ibid. Deposition of witnesses, 56–58. 6. Ibid. Deposition of witnesses. Angus Gibson, testimony, 33. 7. Ibid. Deposition of witnesses, 82–85. 8. Ibid. Deposition of witnesses, 10–11, 19. 9. Ibid. Report. 10. Saunders, ‘‘The Black Scourge’’, 179. Adrian Graves estimated that between 1888 and 1898, when modernization of the trade saw the replacement of the old plantation system with central mills, the ratio of employers to Islanders rose from around 1:7 to 1:4. See Graves, ‘‘Colonialism and Indentured Labour’’, 254–258, and ‘‘Crisis and Change in the Queensland Sugar Industry’’, 261–280. 11. Cited in Saunders, ‘‘The Black Scourge’’, 206. 12. Queensland State Archives: HOM/A8 in letter 5175 of 1897. Inquiry into the . . . Polynesian Office for the District of Bundaberg,1897. Deposition of witnesses. Martin Wessel, testimony, 10–11. 13. Ibid. Deposition of witnesses, 13. 14. Queensland State Archives: CPS 3A/P3. The Polynesian Inspector v. Ralph Chaffelow, Assault and Battery, 1879. Corah, testimony. 15. Queensland State Archives: DCT 10/N3. Regina v. Harry Millard, Assault, 1884. Deposition of witnesses. Tucaro, testimony. 16. Queensland State Archives: CPS 3A/P7. Morlay v. McSuigan, Assault, 1885. Deposition of witnesses. Morlay, testimony. McSuigan was found guilty and fined. 17. Sholto Bowles, Polynesian inspector, Johnston River District, in ‘‘Report of

Notes to Pages 126–130

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the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire . . . Sugar Industry’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1889): 203. 18. Further examples of this are given by Saunders, ‘‘The Black Scourge’’, 195– 196. See also Finnane and Moore, ‘‘Kanaka Slaves or Willing Workers?’’, 141–148; and Saunders, ‘‘The Workers’ Paradox’’, 213–219. 19. Arthur, The Defence of Transportation, 18. Cited in Saunders, ‘‘The Workers’ Paradox’’, 215. 20. Queensland State Archives: CPS 3A/P4. Masserach v. G. Greathead, Assault, 1881. Deposition of witnesses. Masserach, testimony. 21. Ibid. 22. Queensland State Archives: CPS 3A/P4. G. Greathead v. Masserach, Threatening Language, 1881. 23. William Canny, planter and employer at Eton Vale Plantation, in ‘‘Report of the Select Committee on the General Question of Polynesian Labour’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1876): 75. 24. William Canny, in ibid., 74. 25. Report of the Select Committee on the General Question of Polynesian Labour’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1876): 107. 26. Queensland State Archives: JUS/N 41 no. 258 of1874. Inquest into the death of Hammangi, 28 September 1874. 27. Ibid. From the cover letter by Sergeant Doyle, addressed to the police commissioner, dated 7 October 1874. 28. Queensland State Archives: JUS/N 41 no. 258 of1874. Inquest into the death of Hammangi, 28 September 1874. James Muggleton, testimony. 29. Ibid. Robert McBurney, testimony. 30. Ibid. John Stuart and Robert McBurney, testimony. 31. Ibid. James Muggleton, testimony. 32. Queensland State Archives: COL/A 380 in letter 973 of 1884. Inquiry into the death of Islander ‘‘Locy’’, Immigration Agent to Colonial Secretary, 5 February 1884. James Murray, testimony. It is not clear whether this was the same James Murray of the Carl infamy. 33. Ibid. John McDonald, testimony. 34. See Saunders, ‘‘The Black Scourge’’, 197–198. See for an account of the more subtle process of acquiescence in New Caledonia, Shineberg, The People Trade, 158– 165. 35. E.g., evidence regarding the police magistrate at Cardwell in the 1876 Select Committee. See ‘‘Report of the Select Committee on the General Question of Polynesian Labour’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1876): 119. 36. Although not elaborated here, Hammangi’s and Locy’s deaths were not

218

Notes to Pages 130–131

unique, with countless deaths under suspicious circumstances appearing in the archives from across the sugar districts. In Bundaberg, the special occurrences section of the police station duty diaries, for example, is full of strange deaths from which nothing arose. On 20 April 1884, e.g., ‘‘the body of a Kanaka [was found] hanging in the scrub near his place. He was suspended by a scrub vine round the neck attached to the limb of a tree. Body was naked and much decomposed. He was a New Ireland boy named ‘Inatass’ ’’. On 9 April 1887, ‘‘At 2.30 pm the PM reported that James Clark struck a kanaka at Noahs with his fist the boy died instantly’’. Though an inquest was recorded, no followup information is available for these and other cases— particularly drownings—that were reported. See Queensland State Archives: POL 3A/P2–P7, P10. Bundaberg Police Station Duty Diaries. 37. Richard Sheridan, in ‘‘Report of the Select Committee on the General Question of Polynesian Labour’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1876): 104. Sheridan eventually resigned, citing the untenable nature of his position as Polynesian inspector and the inability to stop abuse in the trade. See ‘‘Resignation of Mr. Sheridan from the Office of Inspector of Polynesians’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1877): 1209. 38. Queensland State Archives: JUS/N 34 no. 200 of 1872. Inquest into the death of Vacon, Mackay, 1872; and Queensland State Archives: CPS 10B/G1. Police Station Letterbook. William Goodall to Robert McBurney, 5 February 1877. In 1872 Sgt. William Doyle was visited by a European laborer, John Riley, who stated that ‘‘about 5 weeks ago a nigger driver named Smith . . . did cruelly illtreat and beat one of the niggers [Vacon] by breaking three of his ribs and shoulders with a hoe in the cane field. . . . [T]he nigger is dead and buried and . . . several of the niggers who were working with him at the time could state all particulars in the matter also two white men named Charlie Edmondson and Bill’’. A body was exhumed, upon which the doctor Robert McBurney could find ‘‘no natural marks of violence’’. No one on the plantation was willing to speak to police about the incident, and the case was closed. In 1877 William Goodall received information that ‘‘a South Sea Islander employed on the Branscombe Plantation [Mittabrissey] was yesterday or the day before so severely beaten that he died immediately’’. An exhumation, inquest, and investigation was ordered, but the body that was exhumed showed no signs of violence. In neither case could the police be sure they had exhumed the right bodies. 39. See ‘‘Kanaka Statistics’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1889): 225–228. As was pointed out by the registrar general, however, ‘‘probably this number is not accurate, as deaths are not always reported’’. 40. The figures for European mortality rates before 1879 are not included in fig. 1 because consistent figures were not recorded until that year. Reliable figures for 1872–1874 for Islanders are not available from the colony’s vital statistics. These years are therefore not represented on the graph. Finally, the colony-wide rate is in-

Notes to Pages 131–134

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clusive of all mortality rates except for mortality of indigenous people, who were not generally included in census data. 41. John Drysdale, in ‘‘Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire . . . Sugar Industry’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1889): 254. 42. The legislated provisions included 1 flannel shirt, 1 pair of trousers, and 1 blanket per year; 1 lb. of beef or mutton (or 2 lbs. of fish); 1 lbs. of bread or flour; 5 oz. of sugar or molasses; 2 lbs. of vegetables (or 4 oz. of rice or 8 oz. of maize meal); 1.5 oz. of tobacco (a week); 2 oz. of salt; 4 oz. of soap daily under the 1868 act. Act 31 Victoria no. 47, The Polynesian Labourers Act, 1868. Cited in Eden, My Wife and I in Queensland, 319–324. 43. ‘‘Report, with Details of Inspection . . . R. Cran and Co., Maryborough’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1880): 415–423. 44. Queensland State Archives: COL/A 301 in letter 3903 of 1880. Contained in bundle COL/A 301 in letter 5861 of 1880. Immigration Agent to Colonial Secretary, 17 May 1880. 45. Queensland State Archives: COL/A 301 in 5861 of 1880. Immigration Agent to Colonial Secretary, 17 May 1880. Bundle of correspondence from R. Cran & Co. to Immigration Agent, 30 July 1880. 46. Ibid. Charles Horrocks to Colonial Secretary. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. See also Saunders, ‘‘The Pacific Islander Hospitals’’. 49. Dr. J. Ashburton Thompson to Robert Gray, 17 March 1884, in ‘‘The Temporary Closure of the Hospital for Pacific Islanders at Mackay’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1884): 704. 50. Ibid. 51. For an introduction to discussions of the economic logic of slavery and indentured labor systems and the translation of this economy into social outcomes (where slave owners invested in the future of their slaves while masters had no longterm incentive to protect their workers), see Shineberg, The People Trade; Christopher Morris, ‘‘The Articulation of Two Worlds’’; Northrup, Indentured Labour in the Age of Imperialism; Engerman, ‘‘Servants to Slaves to Servants’’; and Saunders, ed., Indentured Labour in the British Empire. 52. Walter Paget, in ‘‘Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire . . . Sugar Industry’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1889): 270. 53. Lugard, Letters from Queensland, 12–13. There were twelve pence to a shilling and twenty shillings to a pound. Enslaved labor continued to be used in parts of the Caribbean until 1884, by which time the economic logic of paying for free labor—and therefore reducing the cost of accommodation, thoroughly superceded slavery. See Mintz, Sweetness and Power. 54. Peter Airey, debate, Shearers and Sugar Workers Accommodation Bill,

220

Notes to Pages 134–140

Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 95 (1905): 488. See also Elkington, ‘‘Tropical Australia’’, Commonwealth Parliamentary Papers (1905): 1393–1394; and for a thorough bibliography on the theory of white races in the tropics from the time, see Gregory, The Menace of Colour. 55. Graves, ‘‘Crisis and Change in the Queensland Sugar Industry’’, 269. 56. Michelson, Cannibals Won for Christ, 155–156. 57. The influential literature on the rule of law and colonialism is too extensive to list here. Of particular influence to this study, however, are Saada, ‘‘The Empire of Law’’; Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency. The ideas in this section relating to the rule of law have also emerged from countless conversations with Julie Evans, which cannot be referenced. See instead Julie Evans, ‘‘The Rule of Law in the SettlerColonial Encounter’’ and ‘‘Colonialism and the Rule of Law’’. 58. Bowen, Thirty Years of Colonial Government, 82. Governor of Queensland, George Bowen, to the Minister for the Colonies, 29 April 1859. 59. Ibid., 130–162. Governor’s Opening Address to Parliament, 1860, as published in the Times, 20 August 1860. See also letter to Duke of Newcastle, 10 April 1860, 202–206. 60. ‘‘Report of the Select Committee on the Defence of the Colony’’, Queensland Legislative Council Journals (1866): 3. 61. ‘‘Report of the Commissioner of Police for the Year 1878’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1879): 752. 62. David Dalrymple, in Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 71 (1894): 502. 63. William Brookes, in ibid., 569. 64. William Brookes, in ibid., 573. 65. Horace Tozer, in ibid., 473. 66. Andrew Dunsford and David Dalrymple, in ibid., 503, 514. 67. William Browne, in ibid., 514. 68. Anderson Dawson and Charles Powers, in ibid., 473, 485. 69. David Dalrymple and Andrew Barlow, in ibid., 502, 504. 70. David Dalrymple, in ibid., 502–503. 71. Charles McDonald, in ibid., 514. 72. Charles MacDonald, in Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 46 (1885): 500. 73. Paton, Newspaper Cuttings. Cutting from the Telegraph, 26 December 1894. 74. On the rule of law as a ‘‘privileged mode of domination’’, see Saada, ‘‘The Empire of Law’’, 103–104. 75. Docker, The Blackbirders, 68–71. 76. ‘‘Inquiry into the ‘Jason’ Case’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1871– 1872): 781–791. 77. Ibid., 785, 789–790. Meiklejohn never fully recovered and was later

Notes to Pages 140–143

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confined permanently in Gladesville Asylum in Sydney. See Docker, The Blackbirders, 74. 78. Docker, The Blackbirders, 45–46. 79. Regina v. Coath, Reports of Cases, 179. 80. Ibid., 180–181. 81. Ibid., 181. 82. Ibid., 182. 83. See ‘‘Despatches Respecting John William Coath, Late Master of the Schooner, ‘Jason’ ’’, and ‘‘Inquiry into the ‘Jason’ Case: Further Papers and Correspondence Relating to’’, Queensland Legislative Council Journals (1874): 549–553 and 347–359, respectively. 84. Regina v. Vos and Others, Queensland Law Journal Reports (1896): 215–219; and Docker, The Blackbirders, 233–234, 248–253. 85. Regina v.Vos and Others, Queensland Law Journal Reports (1896): 215. Others on trial were George Thomas Olver, Michael Joseph Curry, Alfred Cuthbert Hall, Arthur Absalom, and Alfred Dowsett. 86. Ibid., 216. 87. Paton, Newspaper Cuttings. ‘‘Lessons of the Manson Cases’’, Brisbane Courier, 27 March 1895. Space does not permit a lengthy account of debates regarding the use of indigenous or Islander peoples’ evidence in Queensland’s courts. The issue remained throughout the century a delicate subject, as indigenous and Islander witnesses could have proven in the courts the existence of atrocities committed in Queensland and the Pacific. The debates surrounding the passing of, and amendments to, the Oaths Act throughout the century were heated, emotive, and vicious about the nature of black testimony. See debates in the year following the release of Coath in Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 16 (1874): 234ff, 299ff, 47; (1874): 621ff; the debates of 1875 and 1876 over the Oaths Amendment Act, in Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vols. 18 and 19 (1875); and vol. 21 (1876): 815ff; Oaths Act Amendment Bill, Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 42 (1884): 89, 155. 88. Paton, Newspaper Cuttings. ‘‘Lessons of the Manson Cases’’, Brisbane Courier, March 27 1895: ‘‘Relieved as the community naturally is by the acquittal of the prisoners in the William Manson cases, we cannot hide from ourselves that the position is in some respects more serious than if they had been found guilty. A verdict of guilty would have vindicated the efficiency of the related laws and regulations to cope with temptations to abuse’’. 89. Finnane and Moore, ‘‘Kanaka Slaves or Willing Workers?’’, 147. 90. Queensland State Archives: PRI/8 Queensland. Return Shewing [sic] Offences and Convictions of Polynesians in the Colony of Queensland. The figures for 1885 to 1893 are: Masters and Servants (386); drunk and disorderly (185); drunkenness (891); and disorderly characters (292).

222

Notes to Pages 143–151

91. Cited in Saunders, ‘‘Troublesome Servants’’, 179. 92. Jemmy was arrested on the following dates: 12 August 1889, lunacy, dismissed; 16 September, vagrancy, six months’ imprisonment; 20 August 1891, assault, six months’ imprisonment; 18 July 1892, larceny, six months’ imprisonment. Queensland State Archives: PRI/8 Roma. Return of Polynesians Convicted of Crimes in Roma. 93. John Douglas, in Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 24 (1877): 1399. 94. John Macfarlane and William Bailey, in Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 46 (1885): 672, 675. 95. ‘‘Report . . . to Inquire into the General Management of the Gaols’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1887): 696. 96. Boyd Dunlop Morehead, in Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 83 (1899): 820. 97. William Bailey, in Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 23 (1877): 40. 98. Queensland State Archvies: COL/A 238 in letter 2815 of 1877. Alfred Davidson to Colonial Secretary, 14 May 1877. 99. William Walsh and Samuel Griffith, in Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 23 (1877): 38. 100. Paton, Newspaper Cuttings. ‘‘Recent Murders Near Mackay’’, Brisbane Courier, 30 November 1894. 101. Robert Johnstone, police magistrate at Bundaberg, in ‘‘Report . . . to Inquire into the General Management of the Gaols’’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1887): 699, 888. 102. Ibid., 699–700. 103. William Hodgkinson, police magistrate at Gympie, in ibid., 882. 104. Ibid. 105. H. H. Romilly to Sir Peter Scratchley, 20 July 1885, ‘‘The Return of the New Guinea Islanders: Correspondence Respecting’’, Queensland Legislative Council Journals (1885): 1598. 6. Bulimen, Hardwork, and Muscular Tension 1. Prakash, ‘‘Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism’’, 1479. 2. Queensland State Archives: COL/A 364 in letter 3399 of 1883. Immigration Agent to Colonial Secretary’s Office, 15 June 1883. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. Marginal notes. 5. Ibid. 6. Brady, The King’s Caravan, 259.

Notes to Pages 151–156

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7. Henry Browne and Horace Tozer, in Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 74 (1895): 1652–1655. 8. Clarke, The ‘‘New Chum’’ in Australia, 292. 9. Ibid., 293. 10. Finch-Hatton, Advance Australia!, 163. 11. Clarke, The ‘‘New Chum’’ in Australia, 296. 12. Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation, 47–53, and ‘‘Perceptions of Protest’’, 642–658. 13. Guha, ‘‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency’’. 14. On fear and courage in relation to the politics of violence, see Stoler, ‘‘Perceptions of Protest’’. 15. Kelly, ‘‘Gaze and Grasp’’, 72–80, 90–91. 16. The reference to primary, secondary, and tertiary levels of repetition has been borrowed from Guha’s discussion of the prose of counterinsurgency due mainly to its foundational status in the methodological and conceptual questions of the subaltern studies collective. Guha, ‘‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency’’. 17. Douglas, ‘‘Doing Ethnographic History’’, 89. 18. Kelly, ‘‘Gaze and Grasp’’, 75. 19. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 236. See particularly sections on ‘‘Colonial War and Mental Disorders’’ and ‘‘Series D: Psycho-somatic disorders’’. 20. Ibid., 41. 21. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; on the unseen, see Hereniko, ‘‘Indigenous Knowledge and Academic Imperialism’’, 85. 22. Police commissioner’s annual reports for the years 1877–1893, in annual Queensland Votes and Proceedings from the years 1888–1894. Queensland State Archives: PRI/8. Queensland. Return Shewing [sic] Offences and Convictions of Polynesians in the Colony of Queensland; Queensland State Archives: PRE/88 in letter 12075 of 1901. Crimes Committed by Kanakas and Whites in Queensland between 1 January 1891 and 31 December 1900. 23. Police commissioner’s annual reports for the years 1877–1893, in Queensland Votes and Proceedings (1878–1894). In 1893, with no sentences for common assault (compared to 92 in the previous year), the sentences for drunkenness shot up to 210 (compared to 88 and 126 in 1891/1892), and obscene language climbed to 84 (compared to 10 and 20 for the years 1891/1892). These three were the only anomalies for 1893, with all other offenses showing no significant change. These figures are taken from Appendix IV, Incarceration Figures for Islanders as Compiled by Police Commisioners, 1877–85, 1886–93, in Banivanua-Mar, ‘‘Bulimaen and Hardwork’’. Although individually consulted for this study, the commissioners’ reports have not been listed in the bibliography unless directly referenced.

224

Notes to Pages 156–161

24. Queensland State Archvies: CPS 3A/P2. Walter Bradman v. Grog, Assault, 1877. Deposition of witnesses. Walter Bradman, testimony. 25. Queensland State Archives: CPS 3A/P4. John Brennan v. Joweeton a Polynesian, Assault, 1881. Deposition of witnesses. John Brennan, testimony. Joweeton was found guilty. 26. Queensland State Archives: CPS 3A/P4. W. Sheldon v. Billy South Sea Islanders, Refusal of Lawful Orders, 1882. Deposition of witnesses. Isaac Francis, testimony. Billy was found guilty. 27. Queensland State Archives: CCT 3A/N9. Regina v. Tommy and Charley, Assault, 1898. Deposition of witnesses. Frank Clark, testimony. 28. Ibid. Deposition of witnesses. Frank Clark, Arthur Easey, Hugh Flynn, and Frederick Challands, respectively, testimony. 29. Queensland State Archives: CPS 3A/S2 Register of Complaints, Bundaberg Court of Petty Sessions. Entry for 25 November 1887. Talla received fines and costs of court for each charge. 30. Ibid. Entry for 27 September 1887. Peter was found guilty on both counts and ordered to pay a fine and costs of court. 31. Ibid. Entry for 16 August 1889. 32. Queensland State Archives: CCT 3A/N9 Regina v. Tommy and Charley, Assault, 1898. Deposition of witnesses. Frank Clark and Arthur Easy, testimony. 33. Ibid. Deposition of witnesses. Robert Shepherd, testimony. 34. Queensland State Archives: HOM/A8 in letter 5175 of 1897. Inquiry into the . . . Polynesian Office for the District of Bundaberg,1897. Deposition of witnesses. Robert Shepherd, testimony. 35. Ibid. Deposition of witnesses. 36. Queensland State Archives: CPS 3A/P7. Morlay v. McSuigan, Assault, 1885. Deposition of witnesses. Corah, testimony. 37. Moore, ‘‘The Counterculture of Survival’’, 85, 89. 38. Queensland State Archives: HOM/A8 in letter 5175 of 1897. Inquiry into the . . . Polynesian Office for the District of Bundaberg,1897. Deposition of witnesses. Augustus Barton, testimony. 39. Women, too, were taking white men to court, and Islander men were taking white women to court. For example: Queensland State Archives: CPS 3A/S2. Register of Complaints, Bundaberg Court of Petty Sessions. Entry for 13 December 1889: Tanna South Sea Islander Woman v. John Goondiffe, Assault, Fine, and Costs; Queensland State Archives: CPS 3A/S3. Register of Complaints, Bundaberg Court of Petty Sessions. Entry for 9 December 1890: Annie South Sea Islander v. John Garland, Threatening Language requiring sureties of the Peace; Queensland State Archives: CPS 3A/S3. Register of Complaints, Bundaberg Court of Petty Sessions. Entry for 18 November 1892: Joe Api South Sea Islander v. Sarah Goldthorpe, Assault, Fines,

Notes to Pages 161–168

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and Costs; Queensland State Archives: CPS 3A/S3. Register of Complaints, Bundaberg Court of Petty Sessions. Entry for 2 July 1894: Marabah South Sea Islander v. William Johnstone, Assault, Costs. 40. Saunders, ‘‘The Black Scourge’’, 169–170. 41. Queensland State Archives: COL/A198 in letter1951 of1874.William Goodall to Police Magistrate, Rockhampton, 19 August 1874. 42. Thomas Givens, in Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 87 (1901): 862. 43. Queensland State Archives: DCT10/N5. Regina v. Malbonalla, Assault,1892. Deposition of witnesses. Tarra and George Tyndale Lloyd, respectively. 44. Ibid. Deposition of witnesses. Louie, testimony. 45. Queensland State Archives: DCT 10/N5. Regina v. Charlie, Assault, 1892. Deposition of witnesses. Harry and Tommy, testimony. 46. Queensland State Archives: CCT 3A/N3. Regina v. Howman et al., Assault, 1892. Deposition of witnesses. Tomato, testimony. 47. Ibid. Deposition of witnesses. Orrmay, testimony. 48. Ibid. Deposition of witnesses. Quioney, testimony. 49. Ibid. Deposition of witnesses. Johnny, testimony. 50. Ibid. Deposition of witnesses. Araali, testimony. 51. Moore, ‘‘The Counterculture of Survival’’, 88–89. 52. Moore, ‘‘Revising the Revisionists’’, 68–69. This was a reiteration of an earlier speculative claim about sorcery as the potential cause of high mortality rates in Moore, ‘‘The Counterculture of Survival’’, 88, 90. 53. Corris, Passage, Port and Plantation, 89–91; Shineberg, The People Trade, 208–217. 54. Queensland State Archives: CCT 3A/N2. Regina v. Pollyogomea et al., Murder, 1889. Deposition of witnesses. Carlis alias Dick, testimony. 55. Queensland State Archives: Criminal Files Case A/18307. Regina v. Tovara, Murder, 1891. Deposition of witnesses. Cow and Charley Canna, testimony. 56. Ibid. Deposition of witnesses. Cow, testimony. 57. Queensland State Archives: CPS 3A/S2. Register of Complaints, Bundaberg Court of Petty Sessions. Entry for 21 February 1889. All claims were successful, and each conviction received fines and costs; Queensland State Archives: CPS 3A/S3. Register of Complaints, Bundaberg Court of Petty Sessions. Entry for 28 November 1890. Tuart-mer-mer brought separate charges of assault against Harry and Sam Motlab, while Longa-rak-ka brought charges against both Harry and Sam and Fred Aoba. All convictions received fines and costs. 58. Queensland State Archives: CPS10B/G1. Police Station Letterbook.William Goodall, Police Magistrate, to Attorney General, Brisbane, 11 November 1878. 59. Queensland State Archives: DCT 10/N1. Regina v. Desopey, Assault, 1876. Deposition of witnesses. Multelly, testimony.

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Notes to Pages 168–177

60. Ibid. Deposition of witnesses. Multelly, testimony. 61. Ibid. Deposition of witnesses. Senior Constable Andrew Cahill,Walkerston; Mulltelly; Robert McBurney and Henry J. G. Robertson, respectively, testimonies. 62. Queensland State Archives: CPS 12E/6. Port Douglas Watch-House Book. Entry for 17 January 1898. No conviction was recorded. 63. Queensland State Archives: HOM/A8 in letter 5175 of 1897. Inquiry into the . . . Polynesian Office for the District of Bundaberg,1897. Deposition of witnesses. Angus Gibson, of the firm Gibson and Howes, and Henry Caulfield, testimonies. 64. Ibid. Deposition of witnesses. 65. Mercer and Moore, ‘‘Melanesians in North Queensland’’, 66–88. It is worth noting, too, that much of what I refer to as the unseen of this past was also private and remained unseen because of the conscious efforts of communities in Australia and the Pacific to maintain screens and confidentiality. The presence of some reluctance to share all was evident in some of the interviews recorded by Mercer and Moore. In JCUOHC: BOHC, 31B: Side A and B, 1976: the interviewee, when asked about practices of magic and sorcery, said he had heard stories but was not willing to talk about them. In JCUOHC: BOHC, 21B: Side A, 1975: after being asked the standard questions about tribes, evil spirits, items of magic and sorcery, and places of spiritual significance, the interviewee asked, with downward tones, ‘‘[W]ho told you all this?’’ Finally, in JCUOHC: BOHC MP R/R 11, 1977: when asked about sorcerers and magic, interviewee 1 stated, ‘‘I wouldn’t know anything about this, like I wouldn’t talk about that, it’s ah, it’s beyond me [pause] they used to do this, I know this, [pause] some of these fellas used to, like they’d go and, oh, I better not talk about this, I don’t want to talk about this now, it’s bad, I mean I wouldn’t talk about it, no’’. 66. On ‘‘subaltern pasts’’, see Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 100–112. On ‘‘unseen’’ dimensions of history, see Hereniko, ‘‘Indigenous Knowledge and Academic Imperialism’’, 85; and Ong, ‘‘Japanese Factories, Malay Workers’’, 385–422. 67. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 101. 68. Shineberg, The People Trade, 209. Conclusion: Structural Continuity and the Violence of Forgetting 1. For overviews of the industrial forms of exclusion and range of legislation introduced in the first half of the twentieth century, see Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, The Call for Recognition, 15–22, 73–90; and Berry, Refined White. 2. The Forgotten People, 44–48, 65–77. See also Fatnowna, Fragments of a Lost Heritage; Moore, Kanaka; and Downes, ‘‘South Sea Islander Material Culture’’. 3. The definition of a ‘‘half-caste’’ under the legislation included ‘‘any person of

Notes to Pages 177–180

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aboriginal or Pacific Island extraction who lives or associates with aboriginals, or who lives as an aboriginal, or who in the opinion of the Chief Protector is in need of the control or protection of this Act’’. Protection of Aboriginals and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act Amendment Act, 1934. The definition of ‘‘half-caste’’ was for the explicit purpose of providing for the removal and/or institutionalization of Indigenous children as part of a national policy of biological and social assimilation. For a comprehensive overview of the national policy and its impact on indigenous people and communities, see Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home; and Bird, ed., The Stolen Children. 4. One thing that makes such an exploration difficult to quantify is that because of the interactions between Murri and South Sea communities and because of the frequency of white people seeing and treating South Sea, Murri, and Torres Strait Islanders as simply ‘‘black’’, the issue of identity makes such research problematic. This issue of identity was at the core of the recommendations made in 1992 in relation to the absence of a legal category available for South Sea Islanders. See, for their discussion, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Call for Recognition, 2; and Final Report of the Royal Commission into Human Relationships, 46–47. 5. For a succinct analysis of the actual and effective meanings of ‘‘aboriginal native’’ in commonwealth legislation, see Clarke and Galligan, ‘‘Protecting the Citizen Body’’, 452–468. 6. JCUOHC: BOHC MP R/R 21, 1977. This interviewee says that those left behind would have starved without the local indigenous community who took them down to the beaches and taught them what could be eaten; they took them to the mangroves and taught them what to eat there and showed them what plants to eat, which were poisonous, and how to hunt on their land. 7. For detail on the 1967 referendum, see Chesterman and Galligan, Citizens without Rights,156–192; Attwood and Markus, The1967 Referendum; and Lake, Faith. 8. This linking up with indigenous and anti-colonial interests in the western Pacific and Australia is characterised by publications like Seli-Hoo, the ‘‘official publication of the Australian South Sea Islanders United Council’’, borrowed from the slogan of the Vanua’aku Pati meaning ‘‘pull together’’. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales: Seli-Hoo 1, 1977. ML Q325.999/1; and Seli Hoo, 1. On returns to the islands, see the documentary Sugar Slaves. 9. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Call for Recognition. The 1977 Royal Commission into Human Relationships was a nonspecific precursor to this inquiry. 10. Queensland Government Action Plan,16. Appendix1. Recognition Statement. 11. At the time of writing, national apologies have been issued by governments to indigenous peoples with varying degrees of reservation in Canada; Aotearoa New

228

Notes to Pages 180–183

Zealand; Australia; and Hawai‘i; and from the Crowns of Britain to the Tainui people of Aotearoa New Zealand, and Norway to the Sami. Churches, too, have variously apologized in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Canada, while the pope of the Roman Catholic Church apologized in 2002 to the indigenous peoples of Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the islands of the South Pacific. Literature on the issuance of apologies is too extensive to list here. Of particular relevance, see Brooks, ed., When Sorry isn’t Enough; Barkun, The Guilt of Nations; Gooder and Jacobs, ‘‘On the Border of the Unsayable’’; Cunningham, ‘‘Prisoners of the Japanese and the Politics of Apology’’, 561–574. 12. Some of the most high profile examples here would include Nauru’s case against Australia in the International Court of Justice and the ongoing campaign for reparations for slavery in the United States. This long campaign has been rejuvenated in recent years by the recent World Conference Against Racism in 2001 and the establishment of the International Criminal Court. For more, see WallaceBruce, The Settlement of International Disputes, particularly chaps. 3 and 5; Robinson, Debt: What America Owes to Blacks; Marton and Yaquinto, ‘‘Reparations for ‘America’s Holocaust’ ’’; and Lyons, ‘‘World Conference against Racism’’. 13. Australia’s various protection acts and systematic removal of Aboriginal children until the 1970s fall neatly within legal definitions of genocide. Debate continues regarding the appropriateness of such a reference. See, for discussion, Tatz, With Intent to Destroy; Moses, ed., Genocide and Settler Society; Alison Palmer, Colonial Genocide; and for discussions relevant to settler-colonialism more generally, see Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the forthcoming ‘‘Structure and Event’’; and Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide. 14. A most immediate example of this process lies in Australia’s continued over-incarceration of indigenous peoples. When the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody findings were handed down in 1991, it revealed Australia’s most comprehensive and in-depth study of the myriad systemic causes of the over-representation of indigenous peoples in the jails. It accordingly made 339 recommendations that would begin to address the many levels at which change was required. In the decade that has lapsed since the report, over-representation has increased dramatically, and the wide range of systemic causes have intensified. See Elliot Johnston, Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody; and, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Social Justice Report for 2001, and the section on incarceration rates of indigenous women in, Social Justice Report 2002; Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, The Call for Recognition; and the Evatt Foundation, Australian South Sea Islanders. 15. See, e.g.,Windschuttle, ‘‘White Australia’s Myth’’, The White Australia Policy, and The Fabrication of Aboriginal History; and Manne, ed., Whitewash. Finally, for a particularly astute analysis of the political underpinnings of current debates, see

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Birch, ‘‘Black Armbands and White Veils’’, 8–16; and Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide, particularly chaps. 1 and 2. 16. Queensland State Archives: COL/A 154 in letter 870 of 1871. Immigration Agent to Colonial Secretary’s Office, 23 March 1871. Containing telegram, 11 March 1871, Maryborough, to Colonial Secretary’s Office. 17. Queensland State Archives: COL/A 154 in letter 870 of 1871. Immigration Agent to Colonial Secretary’s Office, 23 March 1871. Joseph Douglas Ridley. Deposition of witnesses. 18. Queensland State Archives: COL/A 154 in letter 870 of 1871. Immigration Agent to Colonial Secretary’s Office, 23 March 1871. Edward Palmer. Deposition of witnesses.

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Inquest into the Death of Vacon, Mackay, 20 July 1872. JUS/N 34 no. 200 of 1872. Inquest into the Death of Compan, 1874. JUS/N 41 no. 291 of 1874. Inquest into the Death of Hammangi, a Native of San Cristobal, Pleystowe Plantation, 28 September 1874. JUS/N 41 no. 258 of 1874. Inquest into the Death of Bobby, Springsure Police Court, 1 August 1878. JUS/N 59 no. 208 of 1878. Inquest into Death of Wandro, Wingarra, 21 February 1881. JUS/N 74 no. 56 of 1881. Inquest into Death of ‘‘Terani’’, Rockampton, 3 March 1886. JUS/N 129 no. 118 of 1886. Police Department, Bundaberg Station. Station duty diaries, 1876–1947

Bundaberg Police Station Duty Diary. 15 March 1882 to 14 June 1884. POL 3A/P2. Bundaberg Police Station Duty Diary. 2 April 1887 to 18 January 1890. POL 3A/P3. Bundaberg Police Station Duty Diary. 19 April 1890 to 15 October 1892. POL 3A/P4. Bundaberg Police Station Duty Diary. 16 October 1892 to 13 July 1895. POL 3A/P5. Bundaberg Police Station Duty Diary. 14 July 1895 to 12 March 1898. POL 3A/P6. Bundaberg Police Station Duty Diary.13 March1898 to 3 February1900. POL 3A/P7. Bundaberg Police Station Duty Diary. 22 November 1903 to 14 October 1905. POL 3A/P10.

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Return of Polynesians Convicted of Crimes in Roma between 1885–1896. PRI/8 Roma. Return of Polynesians Who Served Sentences in H.M. Prison, Brisbane, from 1 January 1886 to the 31 December 1895 (inclusive). PRI/8 Brisbane. Return Shewing [sic] Offences and Convictions of Polynesians in the Colony of Queensland during the 10 Years Ending 31 December 1895. PRI/8 Queensland. Return Shewing [sic] Number of Polynesian Prisoners Convicted of Crime for 10 Years from March 1886 to 18 March 1896. PRI/8 St. Helena. Supreme Court, Queensland

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Consul March to Earl Granville, Foreign Office, 7 May 1873. FO 58/135. Dr. Murray to Commodore Stirling in Admiralty to Foreign Office, 15 July 1873. FO 58/140. Vernan Lushington, Admiralty, to Foreign Office, 26 December 1873. FO 58/141. Mitchell Library, State Library Of New South Wales Seli-Hoo 1, 1977. ML Q325.999/1. National Library of Australia The First Mackay Planters Association Minute Book, 1878–1885. MS 1869. James Cook University North Queensland Collection and University Archives

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JCUOHC: BOHC MP R/R 2, 1977. JCUOHC: BOHC, MP R/R 3, 1977. JCUOHC: BOHC, MP R/R 8, 1977. JCUOHC: BOHC, MP R/R 10, 1977. JCUOHC: BOHC, MP R/R 11, 1977. JCUOHC: BOHC, MP R/R 15, 1977. JCUOHC: BOHC, MP R/R 17, 1977. JCUOHC: BOHC, MP R/R 18, 1977. JCUOHC: BOHC, MP R/R 20, 1977. JCUOHC: BOHC, MP R/R 21, 1977.

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Section B. Interviews conducted by Clive Moore and Patricia Mercer

JCUOHC: BOHC, 1B: Side A, 1974. JCUOHC: BOHC, 2B: Side A, 1974. JCUOHC: BOHC, 3B: Side A, 1974. JCUOHC: BOHC, 4B: Side A, 1974. JCUOHC: BOHC, 7B: Side B, 1974. JCUOHC: BOHC, 8B: Side A, 1974. JCUOHC: BOHC, 11B: Side A, 1974. JCUOHC: BOHC, 19B: Side A, 1975. JCUOHC: BOHC, 21B: Side A, 1975. JCUOHC: BOHC, 31B: Side A, 1976. JCUOHC: BOHC, 31B: Side B, 1976. JCUOHC: BOHC, 40B: Side A, 1977. JCUOHC: BOHC, 51B: Side A, 1977. JCUOHC: BOHC, 51B: Side B, 1977. Unpublished Theses Banivanua-Mar, T. ‘‘Bulimaen and Hard Work: Indenture, Identity and Complexity in Colonial North Queensland’’. PhD dissertation, University of Melbourne, 2000. Cryle, Mark. ‘‘Duncan McNab’s Mission to the Queensland Aborigines, 1875–1880’’. Bachelor’s honors thesis, University of Queensland, 1989. Downes, Elizabeth. ‘‘South Sea Islander Material Culture, 1920–50’’. Masters thesis, James Cook University, 1993. Hayes, Lincoln Todd. ‘‘Pacific Islanders on Queensland Plantations: Archaeological Landscapes of Power and Survival in the Nineteenth Century’’. PhD dissertation, James Cook University, 2000. Henningham, Nicola. ‘‘ ‘Perhaps if there had been more women in the North, the story would have been different’: Gender and the History of White Settlement in North Queensland, 1840–1930’’. PhD dissertation, University of Melbourne, 2000. Government Publications and Reports Queensland Votes and Proceedings, Queensland Legislative Council Journals, and Queensland Parliamentary Papers Note: Unless directly referenced, the reports of police commissioners, registrar generals, and comptroller generals for every year that have informed this study but have not been

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Index

Aoba (Ambae) Islanders, 109, 162, 166 Aoba, Willie, case of, 159 apologies, in the international context, 180. See also regret, statements of APRSOA. See Aboriginal Protection and the Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act archival records, 19, 105, 150 Argus, 46 Arthur, Governor George, 126 articulation, 18, 103–104, 109, 172 assault, charges of, 3, 96, 99, 123–128, 143, 155–156, 158–161, 163–167, 169, 172 Asterisk, 3, 24–25 attorney general, 130, 167 Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, 26 Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 179 Australian South Sea Islanders, 103, 119, 175, 179, 183 Australian South Sea Islanders United Council, 179 Avoka Plantation, 156

abolition, 1, 11, 21, 101, 135 abolitionists, 140 Aboriginal children, state custody of, 93, 99 Aboriginal peoples: dispossession of, 8, 71, 84, 92, 137; labor of, 54, 76, 82. See also Indigenous peoples Aboriginal prisoners, convictions of, 89, 98–99 Aboriginal Protection and the Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act, 83, 91–93, 97, 100, 177 Aboriginal protection legislation. See Aboriginal Protection and the Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act Aboriginal remnant, 9, 82–83 Aboriginal reserve, Mackay, 82 Aboriginal reserves, 83, 92–93, 117; as a model, 117–118 Aborigines Protection Society, 2, 82, 92, 140 absconding, 49–51, 54, 99, 119, 128, 129, 161, 170 agency debate. See kidnapping alcohol: concern over Islander abuse of, 15, 85, 96–97, 165; consumption of, 8, 66, 68, 164; racial associations with, 96–97, 165, 169 anti-Islander sentiments, 76, 81–82, 85–87, 89, 90–91, 101, 144 anxiety: colonial, 9, 28–31, 79–81, 85– 87, 100, 116; racial, 87–88, 89, 97, 115–116; settler and planter, 78, 80, 100, 112, 125 Aoba (Ambae) Island community, 106

Bandler, Faith, 14, 45, 47, 177, 178 bêche-de-mer, 27 bêche-de-mer trade, 20 Bingera Plantation, 59, 65, 124, 164, 169 Blackman’s Leap, 82 blackness. See race Black Oral History Collection, 14, 19, 44, 171, 177 261

262

Index

bloodthirstiness, discourses on, 18, 23–24, 33, 86 Bob, Jemmy, 143 borderlands: colonial, 69, 70–72, 81–82, 84, 100, 121–122; definition of, 72 Bourbon Street, 91 Bowen, Sir George, 75 Brisbane Courier, 142–143, 145 British Pacific Islanders Protection Act, 141 bulimæn, 6 Bunyah Black, 70–72, 81, 90, 92, 95, 143 Bunyah Mountain, 70 Call for Recognition report, 179 Cannibal Isles, 24, 26. See also Fiji cannibalism, discourses on, 18, 21–26, 29, 38, 77, 88, 99, 101, 124–125, 152. See also Melanesianism Canny, William, 53, 106, 107 capital punishment, discussions of, 1, 2, 97, 144–145 Carl, massacre on, 3, 20, 21, 29–34, 35, 41, 43, 70, 140, 147 Carrington, George, 8 categorization: legal system appropriating role of, 82–91, 94, 100; of race, 72–73, 96; of race, processes of, 41–42, 81, 143, 183 Caulfield Inquiry, 122–124, 128, 131– 132, 161 Ceara, 51 census data, 86, 89 chain gangs, 122 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 16, 171 characterization, racial, 96 children’s labor, 57, 76 Chinatown, 9, 68, 109. See also Kanakatown Churches, influences of, in Queensland, 62–63, 64–65, 107, 178 civilizing mission, 14, 39, 42, 120, 122,

135, 136, 146, 152, 182. See also violence Clark, Frank, 157 Coath, John, trial of, 140–142 Cockle, Justice James, 141 colonial/colonialism, 7–11, 14, 36–37, 70–73, 121–122, 145–148, 182– 183 (see also settler-colonialism); archives, 1, 3 (see also archival records); context, 14, 32, 36, 104, 105, 107, 109, 118–120, 153, 160, 166, 170–171, 182 (see also vertical); courts, 97, 127–128, 142–143, 147, 150, 153–154, 158, 161–162, 165; discourse, 8, 16, 19, 22–26, 30–31, 41–42, 99–100, 155–156 (see also Melanesianism); ‘‘experience,’’ 132, 162; frontiers, 11, 36, 41, 74, 90, 182 (see also frontier); gaze, 7, 153, 167, 171; imagination, 22, 28–29; imaginings, 10, 22–23, 26, 41, 167; impact, 13, 19, 153, 167, 168–169, 170, 174; intrusion, 12, 21, 23, 26– 28, 36, 42, 69, 142; invasion, 8, 72, 136–137; legacy, 4, 176; project, 3, 11, 21–22, 28, 36, 41, 76, 88–89, 94, 104, 120, 121, 136, 147, 152, 154, 160; record, 3, 4, 7, 17, 18, 105, 108, 149, 150, 152, 167, 168, 170, 181 (see also archival records); structures, 131, 162, 170, 173, 176; violence, 10, 14, 21, 35–37, 40, 41, 81, 140, 148, 173–174, 181, 183 (see also violence); world, vertical, 14 (see also vertical) colonial secretary, 73, 75, 79, 80, 121, 130, 133 colonial secretary’s offices, 2, 130, 132, 151, 183 Colonial Sugar Refining Company, 13 communications, nonlinguistic, 6 compulsory deportation. See deportation, forced/compulsory

Index

Cook, Captain James, voyages of discovery, 24 corporal punishment, 81, 136, 144–145 Corris, Peter, 12, 14, 45, 165 court records, 14, 35, 108, 122, 150, 153–154, 165–166 courtroom, context of, 158 Courts of Petty Sessions, Queensland, 158, 172–173 crankiness/cranky, 49, 129, 151, 155, 167, 168, 170 Criminal Code Bill, 91, 144 criminal statistics, 89–90, 143, 155; racial categories of, 89–90, 97–98, 143–144, 151. See also race Cromar, John, 22, 25, 28 crying, 46, 52, 69, 95, 168, 184 cultural retention, 18, 103, 119–120. See also articulation Davidson, Alfred, 2, 18 Dayanammo, testimony of, 43. See also Hopeful Deakin, Alfred, 102, 115, 119 decivilization, notions of, 21, 22, 34. See also ‘‘going native’’ deportation, 11, 14, 19, 67–69, 101, 102, 103, 111, 115, 116, 175, 176, 178; forced/compulsory, 67, 68, 101, 113, 115, 118, 175; implications of, 68, 116, 118; life after, 177; resisted/opposed, 101, 116–118 Deportation Royal Commission. See Royal Commission, on Deportation depression, 5, 19 dictation test, 176–177. See also White Australia Policy Diper, James, 83 discipline, 34, 35, 49, 53, 122–128, 133, 136, 146, 158, 162, 183. See also Islander, laborers, disciplining of disobedience, 124; charges of, 156, 158, 159

263

dispersal, 8–9, 71, 73, 139, 182. See also massacre; Morinish diggings massacre, 73–74 displacement, of people, 1, 48, 104, 106, 149, 167, 173, 180 Donald McLean, 38 doomed race theory. See fatal impact, doctrine of Duff, 1796 voyage, 25 economic depression, 9, 134, 137 economic histories, 12, 13, 15 economic independence, of Islander laborers, 65–66, 69, 87, 113–114, 176–177, 179 Eden, Charles, 58, 59, 61, 77, 81, 106 Edmond, Mabel, 14, 45 emotional volatility, 150. See also crankiness/cranky Exeter-Hallism/Exeter-Hall philanthropy, 39 Fanny, 27, 38 Fanon, Frantz, 7, 10, 149, 154, 155, 172, 173 fatal impact, doctrine of, 10, 35, 82, 83, 152, 173 Fatnowna, Noel, 14, 45, 177 fear, 5, 10, 11, 22, 25, 29, 34, 35, 36, 70, 75, 86, 115, 121, 144, 185; settler, 9, 79–81, 87, 107, 116, 147. See also anxiety federation, of Australian colonies, 91, 94 feudalism, intertribal, discussions of, 102, 104 Fiji, 23, 24, 26, 27, 31, 141; as Cannibal Isles, 24–26; labor recruited from, 1, 20; labor recruited to, 43, 112, 153–154, 165, 172 Fletcher, Robert. See Asterisk floggings, 122, 144, 145. See also corporal punishment Forest King, 51

264

Index

fright lines, 29. See also fear frontier, 8–9, 10, 11, 20, 21, 27, 30, 34, 36, 37, 39, 41, 44, 45, 46, 72, 80, 90, 121, 155, 182; internal (see borderlands); and the law, 21, 41, 72–73, 73–75, 140–142, 147; Melanesia, 22–31, 34, 37, 40–41; morality, 10, 39, 40, 41; narratives of violence, 34–36; New South Wales’, 11; Queensland’s, 7–10, 73–75, 82– 83, 122, 139; as ‘‘space of death’’, 10–11, 21, 36, 146; violence, 31, 34, 36, 41–43, 73–75, 81–84, 94, 122, 136, 146–147 gang violence, 166 Ghepara, Charles Diper, 83 Giles, W. E., 20, 46, 47 going native, 3, 34, 35, 37, 41 going troppo. See going native Goodall, Magistrate William, 80–81, 167 good behavior, 126, 143. See also discipline; disobedience Goondi estate, 13, 64 Government Savings Bank, 113 Grog, case of, 156, 160 grog. See alcohol Guha, Ranajit, 16, 153 ‘‘gunboat diplomacy,’’ 37, 146 Hamleigh Plantation, 50, 60 harvesting, 55, 110 head-hunting, discourses on, 18, 23, 40 Heath, 48–50, 51, 170 Helena, 30, 67 historical memory. See memory Hopeful, 3, 35, 43–45, 51, 146 horizontal: analogy, 6–7, 19; histories, 7, 44, 19, 181; worlds, 14, 18–19, 100, 150. See also vertical house, 44, 52, 53, 59–62, 113, 157; contents of, 59; generic, 59; as homes,

60; meeting, 62; plantation owner’s, 60; public, 66. See also plantations houseboy, 56, 57 housegirl, 56 HREOC. See Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission humpies, 59–60, 157 identity: articulation, 103–104, 147, 182; Australian, 8 (see also federation, of Australian colonies); Australian South Sea Islanders, 101, 103, 116, 179; communities of the nineteenth century, 6, 10, 103, 116–118, 119, 181; island-based, 105–109, 119; legal categories of, 87, 104, 147 (see also categorization); nineteenthcentury processes of building, 8, 104, 125, 118 immigration agent, 2, 52, 77, 128, 130, 132, 182 incarceration, 93, 97, 145; rates of, 99, 143, 183. See also criminal statistics indentured labor. See labor trade Indigenous peoples, 8, 41, 90; administration of, 73, 91–94; categorization of, 72, 81, 94–95, 99–100; claim land, 83; criminalization of, 72–73, 93–94, 97–100; discourses defining, 73–75, 84, 92, 94, 99; incarceration of, 93, 97–99, 145, 183; lands, 8, 71, 73, 83, 93; protective legislation for, 71–72, 82–84, 147 (see also Aboriginal Protection and the Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act); relations with non-indigenous, 95–96, 97, 115, 177, 178–179; sovereignties, 145; violence against, 7–10, 11, 41, 73–75, 83–84, 139. See also Aboriginal peoples informants, 25, 89

Index

insanity, 34, 144, 151, 155, 167–170. See also crankiness/cranky, 37 inspector: of Native Police, 124; of nuisances, 86; of Pacific Islanders, 158, 161; of Polynesians, 59, 123, 124, 126, 128, 130, 159, 161, 164, 173, 182; sub-, of police, 108–109 interpreter, 2, 50, 167 intertribal fighting. See tribalism Ipi, Willy, 68, 113 Islander: communities, 2, 6, 28, 85, 97, 102–103, 109, 116, 119, 149, 153, 165, 171, 177–178; communities, political activity in, 103, 116–119, 178–179; communities, violence in, 155, 163, 170, 171–173 (see also tribalism); ‘‘domiciled,’’ 113, 115, 118; kidnapped, 4, 12–14, 27, 32– 33, 36, 44, 45, 48, 52, 53, 140–146, 181, 185 (see also kidnapping; Royal Commission, on Kidnapping); labor, 54–57; labor, diversification of, 57, 112–114; labor, opposition to, 76, 87 (see also anti-Islander sentiments); labor, protection of, 71 (see also Pacific Islanders Protection Act); labor, restrictions of, 82, 87; labor, unions of, 110–111; laborers, disciplining of, 124– 130, 161, 173 (see also overseers); laborers, suicides of, 128 (see also crankiness/cranky); laborers, ticket holders, 85, 87, 94; laborers, timeexpired, 12, 67, 73, 87–90, 110, 111; legal categories of, 71, 104, 147 (see also categorization); mortality of, 13, 47, 51–53, 131–132, 153, 182; newly indentured, 53–54, 106; population, 6, 12, 86–90, 97, 112, 114, 149, 175; prisoners, 98–100, 145 (see also criminal statistics); rations of, 60, 124, 128, 132, 134

265

(see also ‘‘Kanaka,’’ standards); recruits, 3, 12, 27, 28, 33, 35, 45–49, 67, 110, 140, 179, 185; representations of, 3, 17, 23, 24, 152–153, 155; reserves and missions, plan for, 117, 177; white public opinion towards, 85 (see also anti-Islander sentiments) island homes, 7, 67, 105–106 Jason, 3, 38, 140–142 Kalamia Plantation, 49, 50, 60 ‘‘Kanaka’’: as ‘‘boy,’’ 79–80, 88, 106, 111, 124; childlike disposition, 51, 77, 88, 102, 151–152, 154; compulsory passes, 81, 89, 91; curfews, 81, 89, 91, 153; distinctions from Aborigines, 71 (see also categorization); experts, 128; as ‘‘Mary,’’ 70; ‘‘menace,’’ 3, 9, 41, 81, 86–87, 89, 108, 165; squads and squadrons, 86, 89, 153; standards, 122, 131, 132–135, 147 (see also, Islander, rations of ); standards, economic justification of, 134–135; tribalism (see tribalism); violence, discourses on, 3, 151, 152–153, 155; walkabout, 87, 90, 94 Kanakatown, 9, 68, 88, 97. See also Chinatown Kanaky/New Caledonia, 1, 66, 172 Kelah’s case, 1–4, 7, 13, 18–19, 150, 168, 183–185 kidnapping, 4, 32, 33, 44, 48, 52, 53, 140–142, 146; debates regarding, 11–14, 27–28, 45–46, 110, 180–181, 182–185. See also recruitment Kidnapping Act. See Pacific Islanders Protection Act Kidnapping Royal Commission. See Royal Commission, on Kidnapping Kwaisulia, 45, 142

266

Index

labor agreements, 52, 122. See also kidnapping labor, conditions of, 13, 53–59, 76, 109, 120, 132–133 (see also wages); working in gangs, 53–55, 57–58, 76, 78, 125 labor, plantation, 53–54, 60, 63, 78, 168. See also plantations labor contract, 27, 41, 65, 84, 109, 110, 119, 124, 127, 129, 131, 133, 159– 160, 170 Labor party, 137 labor trade, 3, 6, 7, 11–13, 20, 21, 27, 28, 32, 38, 46, 48, 52, 59, 69, 82, 104–105, 108, 140, 146, 168, 180; economic justification of, 76, 133– 135; impact of, 35, 46, 110, 67–69; reactions to (see anti-Islander sentiments) Land Alienation Act (1868), 83 language, vertical and horizontal social properties of, 7. See also Pidgin language larrikinism, 8, 48 Lifu, Peter, trial of, 95–97 Lizzie, 30, 46, 51 Lugard, Mary, 59–60 Lutwyche, Justice Alfred, 141 Mackay Pacific Islanders’ Association, 103 Mackay racecourse incident, 84–85, 86–87, 110 Macknade Plantation, 60, 63 Malaita, 68, 109, 142 Malaita Islanders, 109, 119, 162–163 Mani, Lata, 16 Manichean world, 10 Mareegee, case of, 78–80, 185 Markham, Albert, 37–39, 41, 146 martial law, 137. See also Peace Preservation Act ‘‘Mary.’’ See ‘‘Kanaka’’

massacre, 9, 12, 13, 34, 35, 101; Carl, 20–22, 29–30, 32–33, 35, 41, 43, 140, 142, 147; Hopeful, 35, 45; Morinish diggings (see Morinish diggings massacre) master/servant relationship, 6, 124, 126 Masters and Servants Act, 49, 80, 126, 143, 155–156 May, Thomas, 95–97 McDonnel, John, 77 Melanesia, 3, 15, 21, 23, 24, 26, 30, 34, 38, 41–42, 89, 143; cannibalism (see cannibalism, discourses on); discourses on, 16–17, 22–26, 41–42; idea of, 15, 21, 23–24, 26, 28, 41– 42, 80; savagery, discourses on, 17, 22–24, 26, 34, 38–40, 41; violence, discourses on, 2–3, 15–16, 28–29, 151, 153, 154, 160–161 (see also tribalism) Melanesianism, 3–4, 15–17, 22, 171–172, 182 Melanesians, 3, 15, 17, 21, 23–24, 39, 41, 80, 102–103, 142, 163, 165, 172. See also ‘‘Kanaka’’ ‘‘Melanesian Way,’’ 15 memory, 44, 104, 185 Mercer, Patricia, 14, 19, 44–45, 60, 105, 171, 177 Meston, Archibald, 71, 92–93 Mien, Charles, 71–72 Minister, Nicholas, 40 miscegenation, fears of, 9, 87–88, 89, 97, 115–116 Moore, Clive, 12, 14–17, 19, 44–45, 53, 60, 85, 103, 105, 109, 143, 165, 171, 177 Morinish diggings massacre, 73–74, 81, 132, 134, 182 mortality rates, 13, 47, 51, 53, 131; excessive, 132 Mount Bunyah, 70–71 Mounted Rifles and Native Mounted

Index

Police force. See Native Mounted Police force Mulgrave Central Mill Company, 161 muscular tension, 149, 154, 172–173 Nambour district, 113, 116–117 Nambour South Sea Island Cane Growers, 103 Narbrook, 54 Native Mounted Police force, 9, 40, 71, 73–74, 89, 93, 108, 136–137, 182 nativeness, 71–72, 169 New Guinea, 1, 21, 39, 40, 45 New Guinea Islanders, 40, 50 New Hebrides, 101. See also Vanuatu Nilepi, William Watiman, 83 Nindaroo Planters Association, 66, 134 Northern District Court, 162 Obedience. See good behavior Oral History Collection. See Black Oral History Collection orientalism, 3, 22 overseer, 15, 54, 62, 65, 122–126, 128, 130, 135, 154, 156–158, 160–162, 172–173, 182 Pacific Islander hospitals, 133; centralized, 133; Mackay, 86, 152 Pacific Islanders Protection Act, 32, 140–142 Pacific island inspector. See inspector of Pacific Islanders Pacific Island Labourers Act, 71, 87, 100, 126, 133; amendment, 87 Palmer, Arthur, 37, 73–74, 83, 84, 121 Papua New Guinea. See New Guinea Peace Preservation Act, 89, 137, 143–144 Peacock, Matthew, 19, 44, 105 Pidgin language, 4–7, 52–53, 105–106, 167 pioneer, 8, 9, 82, 147

267

Pioneer Plantation, 49, 54, 68, 78, 131, 170 Pioneer River, 51, 66, 109, 151, 178 plantations: conditions on, 15, 50–51, 53–54, 59–61, 63–65, 131–132; layout of, 60–62; sizes, 54. See also Avoka Plantation; Bingera Plantation; Goondi estate; Hamleigh Plantation; Kalamia Plantation; Macknade Plantation; Pioneer Plantation; Ripple Creek, plantation at; Rubyanna Plantation; Victoria Plantation, violence on planters, 132, 152; authority and power of, 65–66, 75, 121, 123–125, 126, 156, 158–159, 182; confidence and fears, 77, 78–79, 124–125; economic concerns of, 76, 110–111, 134–135; Islander, 112–113, 117; protests to Queensland government by, 39, 101, 123, 126, 133; relations with Islander laborers, 50, 59–63, 100, 106, 107, 123, 156, 182 police commissioner, 130, 137, 182 police court register, Bundaberg, 161 police magistrate, 65, 80, 89, 112, 128, 130, 161, 163 policing, 97, 136, 137 Polynesia, discourses on, 23–24 Polynesian. See ‘‘Kanaka,’’ Melanesian Polynesian Labourer’s Act, 11, 73, 77, 132 primitivism, 17, 23, 26, 89 Public Service Board Inquiry. See Caulfield Inquiry Queenslander, 83, 176 race, 183; -based legislation, 85, 91–94, 100, 126, 175–178; categorization of, 41, 71–72, 76–77, 81, 91, 96 (see also categorization); criminalization of, 89–90, 97–100, 143–144, 151– 152 (see also criminal statistics);

268

Index

race (continued) discourses of, 41, 71–72, 88, 100, 183; mediation by, 122, 133–135, 140–142, 144; purity (see miscegenation); surveillance (see miscegenation); violence, 74, 84–85, 86, 144 (see also frontier; massacre) Rannie, Douglas, 110 recruiters, 27–28, 30, 37, 45–46 recruiting vessels, 5, 38, 41, 46, 140, 158, 185. See also Carl, massacre on; Ceara; Donald McLean; Duff; Fanny; Forest King; Heath; Helena; Hopeful; Jason; Lizzie; Queenslander; Rosario; Sybil; William Manson recruitment: atrocities, 38, 131; conditions of, 12; consent to, 46; experiences of, 6–7, 45, 52; forced, 12, 142; lack of consent, 27, procedures of, 35; semi-legal methods of, 27, 48; voluntary, 13, 46. See also kidnapping recruits, 3, 12, 27–28, 33, 35, 45–49, 53, 67, 110, 140, 179, 185 regret, statements of, 179–180 resistance, 7, 12, 15, 22, 181, 183, 185; cultural, 15, 63, 103–104, 119–120; political mobilization, 103, 109–112, 116–118; portrayals of, 15, 28, 102– 103, 152–153, 173; reactions to, 39, 45, 110, 159. See also shamming Ripple Creek, plantation at, 74 Rosario, 37 Royal Commission: on Deportation (1906), 68, 114, 117, 118; on Kidnapping (1885), 5, 44, 45, 48, 49–51, 52; into the Sugar Industry (1889), 110, 112 Rubyanna Plantation, 157, 159 rule of law, 136, 140, 147 Sadlier, Thomas, 128 sandalwood, 5, 20, 27

‘‘Sandy Camp,’’ 64 Saunders, Kay, 12, 14–15, 17, 45, 102, 122 Scarr, Derryck, 45 Seaforth Plantation, 61, 118 segregation, informal, 54, 60, 165, 173, 175–176 Select Committee: (1866) on the Defense of the Colony, 136; (1869) Polynesian Labourers Act, 76–77, 79–80, 128; (1876), question of the labor trade, 52, 82, 128 settler-colonialism, 2, 8, 41, 71–73, 76, 84, 93–94, 100, 183 shamming, 66 shearers’ strike, 136, 137 Sheridan, Richard, 52, 128, 130–131 Shineberg, Dorothy, 27, 46, 166, 172 sing-sings, 47, 63, 79, 107, 119, 165 slavery, comparisons with, 27, 122, 134–135, 181 sly-grog dealers, 68 solitary confinement, 2, 4, 129. See also incarceration Solomon, Billy, 169–170 Solomon Islanders, 109, 164, 165 Solomon Islands, 1, 23, 39, 45, 108, 110, 119. See also Malaita South Sea Islanders, 2, 7, 17, 61, 101, 119; campaign for recognition as a cultural group, 103, 116–118, 178– 179; communities, 19, 103, 107, 119, 175, 176–181; government recognition of, 179; population, 90, 110. See also Australian South Sea Islanders special service boys. See informants Spiller, John, 16, 78–80 state of emergency (1891), 137 sugar industry, 1, 73, 87, 104, 109, 111– 112, 124, 133–134, 145, 176 Sugar Industry Royal Commission. See Royal Commission, into the Sugar Industry (1889)

Index

sugar towns, 8, 41, 65–66, 72, 85, 89, 114, 155, 171 surveillance, 13, 60, 72, 73, 75, 97, 152– 153, 178; of Aboriginal people, 92–97; avoidance of, 104, 112, 160; social, 75, 80, 81, 85, 89–90 Sybil, 51 Taussig, Michael, 10–11, 14, 146 tea meetings, 107 temporary settlements, 114 testimony, 20, 43, 44, 95–96, 105, 114, 124, 129, 150, 158, 160, 167, 170, 184–185. See also Royal Commission, on Kidnapping (1885) Thomas, Julian, 46–47 Thomas, William, 26 ticket holders. See Islander, laborers time-expired. See Islander, laborers Tomato, case of, 163–164 Towns, Sir Robert, 11, 75 Tozer, Premier Horace, 138 trade box, 45, 67–68 trade jargons, 5. See also Pidgin language tribalism: constructions of, in Queensland, 102, 104, 106, 107–108, 109, 143, 167; discourses of, 3, 16–18, 23, 25, 38–41, 45, 48, 150, 152, 172 (see also cannibalism, discourses on); in historiography, 16–18, 102– 103, 165–166; and ‘‘intertribal’’ violence, 18, 96, 104, 151, 154, 162–167, 172; and irrationality, 16, 102–103, 106, 145, 151, 169, 170, 172 tribalizing effect of colonialism, 104, 106, 107–109, 119, 172–174 unnamed Islander, 183–185 Vanuatu, 1, 13, 24, 38, 39, 45, 109, 110. See also New Hebrides vertical: analogy, 6–7, 19; context, 14, 19,

269

140, 181; pressure, 173; structures, 6, 7. See also horizontal Victoria Plantation, violence on, 150, 153, 158 vigilante groups, 86. See also ‘‘Kanaka,’’ squads and squadrons violence, 7–10, 14, 35–36, 146–148, 182–185; as catharsis, 22, 80–82, 85, 121, 127; colonial monopolization of, 135–137, 139, 146–148; defining race, 29–31, 41–42, 70– 73, 80, 81, 84, 139–142; intertribal (see tribalism); legal sanctions for, 70–71, 73–75, 80, 84, 128–132, 135–137, 139–142, 147, 154, 165; operating as civilizing force, 39– 42, 86–87, 120, 122–128, 135, 136, 144–145, 146, 152; operating as moral force, 39–42, 138–139, 145– 146, 152; as structurally embedded, 13, 91, 100, 122, 131, 134–135, 146–148, 182–185; systemic, 10– 11, 12–13, 84, 91, 93–94, 121–122, 131–134. See also assault, charges of; colonial, violence; corporal punishment; discipline; frontier; kidnapping; massacre; muscular tension; race, violence; tribalism wages, 44, 101, 134, 169; negotiated increases in, 110–111, 118, 161; purchases with, 66–68, 113; significance of, 68–69 walkabout kanaka. See ‘‘Kanaka’’ Wandro, story of, 13, 185 warfare, intertribal, 16, 40, 102 Wawn, William, 27–28 Wessel, Harry, 123–126, 146 Wessel, Martin, 123–125, 170 Western Pacific, 1, 3–4, 12, 14, 20–23, 25–28, 30–32, 39, 41, 69, 74, 76, 87, 122, 146–147, 165, 173, 188. See also Melanesia

270

Index

Western Pacific Islanders, 3, 21, 76, 188. See also Melanesia white Australia, 73, 93, 94, 115–116, 177, 178, 179 White Australia Policy, 19, 68, 72 white female virtue, protection of, 74 white man’s vices, doctrine of, 88–89 ‘‘white native,’’ 36. See also nativeness whiteness, 8, 72–73, 89, 139, 177

William Manson, 142 Williams, Bernard, trial of, 35, 43 Williams, Thomas, 28 women: Aboriginal, surveillance of, 92, 93, 115; Islanders, 3, 29 (see also ‘‘Kanaka,’’ as ‘‘Mary’’); labor, 56–57, 87, 112; white, fears for the protection of, 74, 87, 96–97, 112, 115–116, 144

About the Author TRACEY BANIVANUA-MAR has degrees in history and

teaches colonial and human rights history in the Department of History at the University of Melbourne. She is coeditor of a collection of essays, Writing Colonial Histories: Comparative Perspectives (2000).