Troublesome servants’

Abstract

IN 1884 SAMUEL GRIFFITH, QUEENSLAND'S COLONIAL SECRETARY, CLAIMED THAT 'it is recognised in practice that inferior and weaker races . . . require, in many cases, special legislation for their protection'.1 More specifically, he was concerned that the many thousands of Melanesians brought to labour in the colony should be legally protected from abuse and ill-usage. In all major sugar-producing areas, Inspectors of Pacific Islanders had been officially installed to safeguard the limited rights of Melanesian indentured servants and to initiate proceedings in a magisterial court when any case of maltreatment or other irregularity was detected. But this system of official protection was largely haphazard and ineffective,2 and consequently ser vants resorted to a variety of informal methods to counteract or to minimize their exploitation. Simultaneously, the planters, or more pertinently their overseers, had at their disposal a number of tactics to enforce commands and to ensure that servants remained as subservient and subordinate as possible. They could bring official charges in the local Court of Petty Sessions for breaches of the Masters and Servants Act (1861). Normally, however, they would use direct and immediate illegal methods.3 On the other hand, the servant too might attempt either surreptitiously or overtly to sabotage the regimen by a variety of devices. For both parties these mechanisms operated beyond the realm of government regulation and supervision and, ultimately, they proved far more essential and fundamental fn the daily face-to-face management of both service and authority on the plantations. Certainly, Queensland in the 19th century possessed a fully mature plan tation system, but, unlike the AnteBellum South, it did not produce to the same extent those forces of mutual accommodation on the part of both masters and slaves which formed its ambiguous paternalism.4 The very