Page 255 Chapter 6 The politics of ‘coloured labour’ in Queensland, 1876-1882 THE CONFLICTS which led to the adoption of the White Australia policy were experienced most intensely in Queensland, and about Queensland, in the years from 1876 until the deportation of the majority of Pacific Islanders in 1906.1 It was the colony whose tropical industries were most advanced, and whose non- European, non-indigenous population was the largest. Here the ruling class found itself grappling with the question of who should comprise the labouring class in the tropics. While some focused purely on the profits they might make, others were troubled by the possible consequences of such decisions—for colonisation, continued “white” immigration, the structure of their economy and society, investor confidence and investment flows, military security, the structure of their ideology and the problems of social control. 1 In colonial discussion, Pacific Islanders and labourers brought from New Guinea were generically described as “Polynesians”, despite all being “Melanesian”. Indian labourers indentured for field work were commonly described as “coolies”. Page 256 Chapter 6: ‘Coloured labour’ in Queensland, 1876-82 The dilemmas were enormous. Queensland capitalists had organised a dynamic and fabulously profitable sugar industry, which in turn opened up the tropical coast of Queensland to wider capitalist development. However planter success was founded upon the exploitation of Pacific Island labourers, and when they proved too few in number, the planters employed Chinese people, labourers from other Asian countries, and campaigned for the right to indenture Indian “coolies”. In the minds of most liberals, townspeople, selectors and miners, these coloured labourers and wealthy capitalists were harbingers of a society more like the backward American South than the powerful industrial economy of Great Britain. Indentured labourers allowed Queensland’s pastoralists to survive the trials of drought, fluctuating prices and “unreliable” white labour during the late 1860s and 1870s, but employing them narrowed the white labour market in parts of the inland. Strategic safety, white colonisation, and modern economic development competed with the temptations and necessities of current profit in a devoutly capitalist society. As a result of the intensity and length of the struggle over coloured labour, Queensland had the most sharply party-divided parliamentary politics of all the Australian colonies. Then, when the majority of the Liberal party joined the Conservatives in 1890, opposition to coloured labour galvanised behind the new Labor Party. The issue also created divisions inside the rival parties, with many urban Liberals impatient with their party leadership’s tolerance of Pacific Island labour in the sugar industry; while the extreme squatters of the Conservative party caused trouble for their urban/commercial colleagues with their own demands for “cheap coloured labour” on pastoral properties. As McIlwraith’s deputy, John Murtagh Macrossan, put it in February 1884, in a debate on new laws to further restrict Chinese immigration: Chapter 6: ‘Coloured labour’ in Queensland, 1876-1882 Page 257 The colonies of Victoria and New South Wales are not in the same danger that we are. They have no large capitalists wishing to introduce Chinese in gangs to work on plantations or to do any other kind of work…2 White Australia mythology has Queensland as the “black labour” colony, but this is less than half the story. This chapter and the next illustrate the many important ways in which Queensland’s bourgeoisie led Australia into the White Australia policy, and how the dominant element of Queensland’s Conservative party, the urban commercial bourgeoisie, led by Sir Thomas McIlwraith, played a major role in that process. As Lyndon Megarrity has found, there was a conservative “vision of a ‘White Queensland’ in which non-whites would play a discreet (and unacknowledged) pioneering role.”3 Queensland passed the first post-gold rush legislation restricting Chinese immigration in 1877, and tightened it dramatically in 1884, well in advance of the other colonies. In 1885, Queensland legislated to end the recruitment of Pacific Island labourers, to take effect from the end of 1890; and in the 1888 election, the winner, McIlwraith, declared that the issues of Pacific Island labour and Indian “coolie” labour were dead. Thus, by the time colonial governments met in June 1888 to adopt a de facto White Australia policy and agree on harsh anti-Chinese legislation, Queensland had spent more than ten years constructing a series of legislative impediments to “coloured” labour and non- European immigration. While Islander indenture was revived in 1892 by Sir 2 ORDLA Qld, vol. XLI, 1883-4, p. 348. 3 Lyndon Megarrity, “‘White Queensland’: The Queensland government’s ideological position on the use of Pacific Island labourers in the sugar sector 1880-1901”, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 52, no. 1, March 2006, pp. 1-12. Page 258 Chapter 6: ‘Coloured labour’ in Queensland, 1876-82 Samuel Griffith in perhaps the greatest political about-face of nineteenth- century politics, Griffith refused to join with South Australia, which was trying to find a way to recruit indentured Indian labourers, in a conference to discuss the labour problems of the tropical colonies. For Griffith, renewing indenture was a limited measure to aid a specific industry; the general principles of White Australia remained. For their part, a majority of Conservative party politicians supported anti- Chinese laws when introduced by the Liberals in 1877 and 1884, and they legislated in 1880 to deny indentured Pacific Island labourers to a significant group of their supporters, the inland pastoralists. While he attempted to set up a scheme of indentured Indian labour, McIlwraith insisted—under pressure— that the labourers be returned home, forcibly if necessary, at the end of their indentures. When the sugar planters campaigned for northern separation as a result of Griffith’s coloured labour legislation, all the southern Conservative politicians voted against it in parliament, thus inflicting a major defeat on what most saw as the movement for a “black north”. Having decided against Chinese immigration, the Conservatives put themselves at the head of a series of vicious anti-Chinese agitations—in support of the 1878 seamen’s strike, in the agitation that started in North Queensland in 1886, and in the bitter election campaign of 1888, where they set out to paint the Liberal Premier Griffith as pro-Chinese. The conflict over coloured labour saw political principle and self-interest both intersect and collide. In the Conservative party there were those like WH Walsh who opposed all attempts to restrict coloured labour, while the Liberal party boasted those like WH Brookes who resisted the pragmatism of their leaders Chapter 6: ‘Coloured labour’ in Queensland, 1876-1882 Page 259 and fought to eliminate all coloured labour from the sugar industry.4 But it was more normal for the tension between principles and capitalist development to dog the major parties and individual politicians. The leading Liberals wanted to get rid of coloured labour, but they also wanted profits and economic development. To cripple the profitable sugar industry would have led to both immediate disinvestment in that industry, and to investor caution more widely. Capitalist expansion was as much a liberal principle as free labour. On the conservative side, British and white control of the colony was the principle challenged by coloured immigration. For their part, the sugar planters were willing to cut a deal over any legislation that left their industry intact and profitable; while the shopkeepers and businessmen mostly fought to ensure that the labouring population was white, free, growing, and able to spend their wages in the town on the beer, clothes, shoes and flour they manufactured or sold. So the shopkeepers and publicans of the Darling Downs were more concerned to deprive squatters rather than sugar planters of indentured labour, a move the squatters resisted in their own self-interest. The tensions between principle and capitalist development led to charges of hypocrisy. Sir Samuel Griffith in particular was charged with inconsistency on the issue of coloured labour and no doubt there was an element of truth in this, fuelled by extravagant comments on the campaign trail. However Griffith was a largely consistent politician, balancing partially contradictory principles and rival capitalist interests. He wanted a modern, free-labour, industrial capitalist 4 This polarisation is discussed by the Brisbane Courier, 19 May, 1880, p. 2 cols. 5-6. Page 260 Chapter 6: ‘Coloured labour’ in Queensland, 1876-82 economy and he also wanted a profitable sugar industry. His various policy lurches were all responses to the particular challenges and opportunities of the moment, as he saw them. He could not have maintained his leadership of the Liberal party over two decades had there not been substance and underlying continuity in his positions on this central issue. It is for the historian to uncover the substance and continuity. All these cross-currents led to a series of policy distinctions; over who should be allowed coloured labour, over the conditions under which coloured labourers might be introduced and indentured, over the ethnicities which were tolerable or not. Sugar planters were treated most sympathetically because their