Race and the making of the Australian working class 1

This is intended to be a multi-post series presenting a particular interpretation of Australia’s history, and specifically the history of the concept of whiteness shaped class relations. It is inspired by the strand of American labour history found in books such as Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White and David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. These works use critical race theory to explain how a ‘white’ section of the American working class has struck grand bargains with capital independently of, and to the detriment of, the black/non-white section. It seems that many of their ideas are applicable to Australia.

Part One: 1788 and All That

The story of the Australian working class begins in 1788, when boatloads of transported convicts arrived in Sydney. Among them were members of the black communities of urban Britain, products of the system of commerce (including the slave trade) which linked Britain with Africa and the Caribbean. At this early stage in Australian history, there were no racial distinctions: escaped convicts found refuge in Aboriginal communities, and those who remained rejected the name given by the British elites to their new hometown, ‘Rose Hill’, preferring its indigenous appellation, ‘Parramatta’. Black convicts such as Billy Blue were among Sydney’s most prominent people, and Irish convicts co-operated with Aboriginal rebels, such as Pemulwuy, who violently resisted British rule.

In the United States, the creation of race as a legal category is often dated to 1676, when a group of white and black unfree labourers rebelled against Virginia’s colonial authorities in what became known as Bacon’s Rebellion. In response, the colony’s rulers sought to divide their subjects: whites became ‘indentured servants’ and were to be emancipated and given land after their service, while blacks were recognised as slaves occupying an inferior legal status to whites. In Australia, this process didn’t really occur under the convict system – black convicts were never treated differently than whites in the eyes of the law. (For example, Billy Blue was appointed a water bailiff, and his illegal transportation of liquor across Sydney Harbour was consistently overlooked by the authorities.) The antipodean equivalent of the American colour line is probably to be found during the gold rushes, with the Chinese as its main targets.

Billy Blue: proof of the diversity of the convicts transported to Australia.

This period of Australian history was not, of course, without organised, official racism. The often violent dispossession of Aboriginal people from their traditional lands was fuelled by the British authorities’ greed for land, and by the desire of the squatter class for large landholdings on which to establish itself as the equivalent of the British landed gentry. Although the authorities claimed that English law was to be applied in a colour-blind fashion in the colonies, no white person was hanged for the murder of an Aboriginal until 1838.

In addition to the penal colonies on the eastern seaboard, a colony entirely populated by free settlers was established in South Australia. (Victoria was also not a penal colony, but was not explicitly founded as such.) The colonists who arranged for the settlement of the Festival State were motivated by a moralism typical of Victorian Britain – one of their bugbears was the settlement of equal numbers of men and woman in South Australia, so as to avoid the social problems which they saw as arising from a high ratio of males to females. They also recognised that the availability of cheap land would have a negative effect on labour discipline. Unlike the ‘free labor’ ideology which came dominate political thought in the northern United States in the run-up to the Civil War, with which it shares some similarities, the set of ideas that guided South Australia’s development sought to limit the supply of land to colonists. E. G. Wakefield, one of the architects of the colonisation of South Australia, wrote in his book View of the Art of Colonisation that available land would lead to “exorbitant wages which sometimes harass the capitalist.” He wanted the colony to be ensured of a supply of labour coupled with restrictions on land, in order to decrease workers’ bargaining power in the labour market, as the colony at that stage lacked a system of ‘white privilege’. When such a system was established, as in Virginia in the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion, the elites could trust poor whites with the possession of land.

On the eastern seaboard, competition from unfree (convict) labour led to one of the first working class political movements in Australian history: the Anti-Transportation League. The League achieved great success, and forced the British authorities to phase out the transportation of convicts in the early 1850s. (However, convicts were still sent to Western Australia, and the penalty of ‘transportation to Australia’ still survives as a possible penalty for some crimes in English law.) Outside of organised political agitation, workers used strikes and direct action to force the authorities’ hand. For the first time, Australian workers had successfully pressured the state to exclude from the continent those who they perceived as threatening their livelihoods. On this occasion, the move was directed at people generally of the same ethnicity and skin colour, but the groundwork had been laid for all sorts of immigration restriction, and once Australia’s self-identity was changed from ‘penal colony’ to something akin to nineteenth-century America’s ‘white republic’, similar moves would inevitably be directed against non-whites.