Indigenous Women and Work: From Labor to Activism

4. The Contours of Agency: Women's Work, Race, and Queensland's Indentured Labor Trade

chapter 4 The Contours of Agency Women’s Work, Race, and Queensland’s Indentured Labor Trade Tracey Banivanua Mar Introduction She stands in a freshly furrowed field at the end of a row of cane sets ready for planting. She is slightly bent over with a young baby at her feet, and in the background , out of focus and on the periphery of the viewer’s vision stands a figure in a horse and cart (figure 4.1). This image would be uninteresting and bleak if not for eye-catching detail. An invisible breeze has picked up and plays with Figure 4.1. Kanakas–Bundaberg District, circa 1897. Photographer unknown. Image #142325. With permission from John Oxley Collection, State Library of Queensland. her heavy, mud-laden skirts, creating a dynamic blur as she looks into the lens of a cumbersome nineteenth-century camera before her. The result is a candid image from which her smile radiates toward the viewer in a rare gaze in the history of colonial photography, where women of her color were more often gazed upon and rarely photographed looking back. The image is one of hundreds of photographs deposited in the anachronistically titled “kanaka” box held in the John Oxley Collection at the State Library of Queensland.1 Numbered 142325, it carries simply a functional and descriptive title, “Kanakas—Bundaberg District, ca: 1897,” and like the vast majority of images in the box, little to nothing is known of its origins, the photographer who produced it, or the anonymous figure in the image. Amid hundreds of these images it is this, number 142325, that may be said to have distilled the experiences and contributions of Pacific Island women in Queensland. Moreover, perhaps it is the romantic composition of the image with its passing similarity to the distant but ideologically connected tradition of peasant painters; or perhaps it is the rarity of the smile; or the movement that is captured, but the image also distills the delicacy with which we need to interpret the agency of women working in colonial situations where agency was shaped by contexts of colonization that reached deep into their lives. The anonymity of the woman in image 142325 reflects the discarded and largely forgotten history of South Sea Islanders, and particularly Islander women, whose predominant experience of colonization was molded by their work as bonded laborers in Queensland throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. Between 1868 and 1906, over 63,000 Pacific Islanders were taken from, or left, their homes in the western Pacific Islands to labor in the British settler colony of Queensland. Mostly they came from Vanuatu, the Solomons Islands, and the islands around the Torres Strait, and all came under varying conditions of coercion as laborers indentured for three years to white sugar growers. They were technically not slaves in the British Empire’s postabolition world. But the thriving trade in their bodies provided the cheap, bonded, and expendable labor that kept colonial sugar industries in Queensland and the western Pacific competitive in a transnational colonial market where slave labor continued to keep sugar production costs low.2 Outside of slavery, only the bonds of indenture could enable planters to forcefully extract labor the way they did, under physical conditions that produced consistently high rates of illness and fatality among Islander laborers . Throughout this period, Islanders’ mortality rates never dropped below five times the rate of white settlers in Queensland, and rose as high as fifteen times in the early 1880s (Banivanua Mar 2007: 131). For many of the descendants of both those who went to Queensland and those who were left behind in the islands, this working history has been remembered as one amounting to slavery irrespective of the token remuneration workers received , or the extent to which individuals acted with agency. To this extent the memory of the trade as a history of slavery captures the imbalance of power 74 tracey banivanua mar that defined it. This imbalance in turn is reflected in the relative memories of Queensland’s settler society, which actively forgot Islanders when the majority was deported from Queensland after 1906 and the Island communities that have remembered. In both the popular historical consciousness of settler Australia, as well as in much work that has theorized and explored settler-colonial histories, the indentured labor trade has been largely ignored. Subject to a double dose of forgetting, Islander women were for...