A Short History of Australia by Manning Clark

Author:Manning Clark
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742283258
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2009-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

Griffith added that Queensland had been discredited by the abuses that prevailed for some years in the South Sea Island trade. For these reasons he proposed to abolish the use of black labour in the Queensland sugar fields.

But economic changes were removing the need to use black labour more effectively than all the arguments of the missionaries, the philanthropists, and the evangelists for British civilization. The conditions forced on the planters by the kanakas labour acts had raised the cost of black labour to the planters by more than 50 per cent between 1883 and 1889. New methods of production were gradually displacing manual labour. By 1895 machines were used for all field work except the cutting of cane. As the Mackay Sugar Journal put it in 1896: ‘White men working for themselves and using the best labour saving implements are displacing the coloured workers rapidly. The large estates are rapidly becoming peopled with small farmers.’ By 1895 the white man was easing the kanakas off the canefields in central and southern Queensland, but the kanakas outnumbered the white worker on northern fields such as Bundaberg by 2,612 to 304. If the Queensland sugar fields were to dispense with the use of black labour, it would be necessary for the state to protect the industry against competition from the ‘black’ sugar of Fiji, Java, and South Africa.

Most of the planters in the north wanted to continue with coloured labour, but they realized that so long as the north remained part of the colony of Queensland their wishes and interests would be swept aside by the anti-black majority in the south of the colony. To preserve their plantations they were prepared to be separated from the south and made an independent colony. The majority in the south realized that if Queensland were to join with the other colonies to form a federation, that federation would be committed to a ‘white’ Australia. So Queensland could get white labour in return for a promise to protect its sugar industry against foreign competition. In this way the passions roused by the use of the kanakas converted the colonists in the south of Queensland into ardent supporters of federation. Once again economic developments had exposed the inadequacy of the existing political systems.

While ridding the colony of the ‘leprous curse’ of black labour, and proving the point in the quatrain:

It’s just as clear as figgers,

Sure as one and one make two,

Folks as make black slaves of niggers

Want to make white slaves of you

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