Pastoral Stations and Reserves in South and Central Australia, 1850s-1950s

Abstract

The colonisation of South and Central Australia had a huge impact on the pre existing Aboriginal economy, with an inevitable movement from full Aboriginal involvement in their own economy to increasing participation in the non Aboriginal economy. These changes, which occurred in different parts of the region over more than a century, moved through three broad phases. First was the imposition of colonial control over Aboriginal lands and labour. Second was the utilisation of Aboriginal labour in the rural, and to a much lesser extent, urban economy. Finally, in the latter part of the twentieth century there was a movement from Aboriginal under-employment to high rates of unemployment.1 This chapter chiefly concerns the second of these phases. It is argued that while Aboriginal people participated in the Australian labour market, particularly the rural sector, they were generally treated as a labour reserve which could be drawn on for seasonal and casual work. When not employed, Aboriginal workers and their families were expected to return to segregated communities on pastoral stations or reserves. Before discussing the pastoral and reserve system, I will briefly put that period of Aboriginal employment into its historical context. Donald Denoon in his study Settler Capitalism suggests that regions such as Australia, which were sparsely populated by peoples without centralised, coercive polities in precolonial times, were subjected to new kinds of production by colonial powers. He contrasts these settler economies with colonies in the tropics where Europeans extracted trade goods produced by the labour of local indigenous peoples. Denoon argues that in settler societies farming could not co-exist with indigenous economic activities. European settlers did not build on or exploit pre-existing modes of production, but introduced new modes which responded to the needs of export production. These modes of production were largely rural-based stock production and agriculture. Settlers could not depend on an indigenous labour force for their main source of labour, so convicts, indentured, or other forms of 'unfree' labour were initially recruited. But by the mid-nineteenth century, labour had become a commodity to be bought with wages. Some indigenous peoples were absorbed into these new economies, but generally indigenous peoples in settler societies have been regarded as marginal to settler economies, or even an impediment to them.2 South and Central Australia, unlike many of the settler societies surveyed by Denoon, did not utilise convict or indentured non-indigenous labour. In the mid-nineteenth century, free, non-indigenous labour was plentiful enough to establish the urban centre of Adelaide and agriculture on the Adelaide Plains and beyond. Pastoralism was also established in the south-east, along the Murray