Julia T Martinez

The End of Indenture? Asian workers in the Australian Pearling Industry, 1901–1972

The historical circumstances which led to the end of the indentured labor trade suggest that its abolition was only partially the result of humanitarian concern for the welfare of workers. It was the development of nationalism, both in sending and receiving countries, that prompted a rethinking of the racialized labor organization of indenture. In Australia, the introduction of the White Australia policy in 1901, with its restrictions on non-white immigration and employment, is usually thought to coincide with the abolition of the indentured labor trade. But the Australian pearl-shelling industry continued to employ indentured Asian workers up until the 1970s. This case study extends the historical analysis of indenture well beyond its supposed international abolition. In doing so, it demonstrates a degree of continuity of colonial thought and practice which persisted in the face of global decolonization. The international debate over the abolition of the indenture system began in the nineteenth century and reached its peak in the early twentieth century. Despite protests that indenture was little better than a new system of slavery, indenture was only gradually phased out over a period of several decades. By the 1930s, the International Labor Organisation (ILO) had expressed its determination to abolish all forms of unfree labor and by 1940 it appeared that indenture was at an end. But some countries saw fit to continue the practice. Australia, a supposed leader in the international labor reform movement, continued to import indentured Asian labor for the pearl-shelling industry until the early 1970s. The case of the Australian pearling industry is one which will undoubtedly revise current understandings of the history of indenture. The general literature on indenture seems to suggest that the indenture system did not survive past the first two decades of the twentieth century. David Northrup’s study of indentured labor covers the period from 1834 to 1922 as does Kay Saunders’ edited collection on indentured labor in the British Empire.1 Neither book claims that indenture was abolished within this period, but the dearth of studies which reach beyond the 1920s would suggest that it did. A 1994 ILO publication states that indentured labor survived the longest “in the Dutch colonies where the Coolie Ordinance remained in force until 1941”.2 As this paper demonstrates, however, even this ILO publication has seriously underestimated the duration of indenture. It is not possible to set a single date for the abolition of indenture because the indenture system was dismantled in a piecemeal fashion. In British Malaya, for example, indentured labor was abolished for Indians in 1910 and for Chinese International Labor and Working-Class History No. 67, Spring 2005, pp. 125–147

Indonesians overseas - deep histories and the view from below

Indonesian mobility is often regarded as a present-day fact. In 2007 the number of Indonesians reported working abroad had reached 4.3 million, bringing in an income of US

Asian Servants for the Imperial Telegraph: Imagining North Australia as an Indian Ocean Colony before 1914

6 billion in remittances (Widodo et al. 2009). By 2010 the numbers working abroad would have well passed 5 million, especially considering the numbers ‘smuggled’ across the Indonesian-Malaysian maritime borders (Ford & Lyons 2011). In recent years attention to Indonesian migration has seen important studies of workers, particularly women workers. Beginning with studies of Indonesians working in Malaysia (Jones 2000), attention has now spread to the wider movement of workers throughout the Middle East and East Asia (Loveband 2004). One of the major publications on labour migration points out that it is often women from eastern Indonesia, from the poor Province of Nusa Tenggara Timor, who form a significant number of these mobile workers (Williams 2007). While the scale of movement may be significantly larger, the nature of Indonesian mobility is not at all new. The largest proportion of people have moved to find work, although others have moved for religious, social, educational and political reasons. Mobility is built into deep cultural patterns and is a norm of social life. In our research on the movement of peoples from present-day Indonesia to Australia, we have found that patterns of moving overseas began in societies where movement between islands and sub-regions within current Indonesian borders was well established before those borders came into being. Compared with the literature on the Chinese, Japanese and Indian diasporas, there has been little recognition of Indonesians as a migrant people. More than 40 years ago Craig A. Lockard (1971) published a survey of Javanese emigration calling for further research into this neglected aspect of Indonesia’s history. Since then there has been a number of specific country studies, but little work has been done to link the different forms of mobility to find common patterns. Up until recently there were only a few

INDONESIANS CHALLENGING WHITE AUSTRALIA

In the late nineteenth century, the officers of the Eastern Extension Australasia and China Telegraph Company provided north Australia with a cable connection to London via Java, Singapore, and India. The telegraph project prompted a new era of colonisation in tropical north Australia and the officers of the company sought to ensure that the north would be shaped according to their notions of Indian Ocean colonial culture. They insisted on employing Asian domestic servants in opposition to White Australian nationalists who advocated restrictions on Asian migration. Like the pearling industry, which was permitted ongoing access to Asian labour, the telegraph company drew on the support of liberal parliamentarians, and leveraged their privileged position as providers of imperial telecommunications to develop an elite colonial counter-culture in north Australia.

Colonial constructions of masculinity: transforming Aboriginal Australian men into 'houseboys'

Between the 1870s and the 1950s the north Australian pearl-shell industry relied on the labour of thousands of Indonesians who were employed as divers and crew on pearling luggers. While these men were referred to as Malays or Koepangers they were drawn from many different locations in eastern Indonesia, including Nusa Tenggara Timur, Maluku and southern Sulawesi. As indentured labourers, they were supposed to be temporary residents in Australia. Their migration was permitted as a rare exemption from the White Australia policy, based on the presumption that as maritime workers they would spend most of their time in the waters that connected Australia and the Dutch East Indies. During the limited time they spent in Australian ports they were to be strictly monitored. Despite these intended restrictions, a number of Indonesians were able to build lives in Australia by renewing their contracts for a period of 20 years or more. By the late 1950s those that remained successfully lobbied to be granted Australian citizenship. The pearl-shell industry, though notorious for its exploitation of labour, was responsible for developing and maintaining a long-term connection between eastern Indonesia and Australia and challenging the isolationism of White Australia.