'Fallen among Thieves': Aboriginal Labour and State Control in Inter-War Queensland

Abstract

Early in his writing career, Aboriginal author Bill Rosser was admonished by a white critic for dwelling too exclusively upon the negative aspects of 'native administration' in Queensland and never reporting on 'the good things'. When Rosser in turn challenged this man to venture what some of these 'good things' were particularly in relation to the running of Palm Island the latter poked in the dust with his toe for some time before responding meekly, 'Well, Bill, I'm buggered if I know!' Although a consistently trenchant critic of Aboriginal policy throughout Australia, Charles Rowley in 1972 had laid claim to having a more substantial answer than this to Rosser's riposte. Even though Queensland's policies in relation to Murries were exploitative, authoritarian and oppressive, Rowley contended, its race relations record at least revealed higher expenditure per capita upon Aboriginal 'welfare' than elsewhere in Australia as well as the official insistence upon and policing of higher Aboriginal wage-rates overall. What Rowley's analysis failed to address, however, was the unspoken inter relationship between these two apparent blessings for Aboriginal remuneration, in return for services to both private employers and the State, was extensively channelled back into Government revenue rather than ever passing through the hands of the Aboriginal workers and their dependents. To a remarkable degree, these workers themselves, under strict guidance and duress, were increasingly supplying the official expenditure set aside for their own dismally imposed segregation and repression.2 The official establishment of basic wage rates and labour agreement forms for Aboriginal workers in Queensland at the time of Federation had been instituted originally to counter situations of widespread employer abuse. The ill-treatment and deprivation encountered on many pastoral stations, commented Southern Aboriginal Protector, Archibald Meston in July 1900, were 'a disgrace to Queensland'. Employment conditions for Aborigines were such as to 'excite the horror of the Nation'.3 State intervention in this regard was therefore calculated to provide a hedge of protection albeit a low one against white bosses who treated black workers 'more as a part of the stock or working plant than a