'Abusing the Horses and Exploiting the Labourer': The Victorian Agricultural and Pastoral Labourer, 1871-1911

Abstract

In July 1876, Joseph Jenkins, a Welsh born agricultural labourer, recorded a familiar lament in his journal: 'out of work again, and the beginning of winter too. Prospects of getting work are bleak/ The following February he wrote: 'finished the corn harvest, and I cannot see any prospect of more work.'1 In recording his tribulations in the rural labour market of nineteenth century Victoria, Jenkins was an unusual agricultural labourer. All that most labourers have left historians are tirades against them in the country press, and entries in station and farm journals. They were, nonetheless, an important sector of the Victorian labour force. Three years after Jenkins arrived in Victoria, the 1871 census recorded 18,599 agricultural and pastoral labourers. Over the next forty years Victoria witnessed substantial growth in its agricultural sector, and the ranks of agricultural labourers swelled accordingly. By 1911 almost forty thousand men were counted as working as agricultural and pastoral labourers (Table 1).