Journey 4: The Spectre of Slavery? Neave and Robson’s visit to Queensland and the Pacific, 1866–1868

After visiting New South Wales, Neave and Robson made their way to Queensland, a colony that had gained notoriety for blackbirding and harsh treatment of Pacific labourers. Reports of ill-treatment in cane fields and aboard ships were topics of public concern. In the year of the Quaker’s arrival, the 1868 Polynesian Labourers Act had passed in the Queensland legislature. This important first piece of legislation aimed to regulate the violence of labour recruitment in the Western Pacific, both at sea and upon the colony’s many plantations.⁷ The Friends were curious and troubled by this new form of harsh Pacific labour and the arguments around whether the recently passed 1868 Act was effective. Their notes and journals offer insights into the political tensions at the time, and their attempts to make sense of the situation.

Was this a new form of slavery occurring in the colony of Queensland? Lengthy disputes about this appeared in the Queensland colonial press, and increasingly in the British humanitarian press. ‘Every week furnishes fresh evidence of the inadequacy of the Polynesian Laborers Act … to secure anything like just treatment of these people by their employers’ declared the Queenslander in August 1868.⁸ The newspaper reported that twelve men from the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) fled Lawson and Stewart’s Boondooma property after they ‘were beaten and half starved’. They walked over sixty miles to Brisbane to lodge an official complaint. The case was unusual for they were returned home to Vanuatu when it was ascertained they had been duped by an unscrupulous recruiter.⁹ Twenty-eight New Hebrideans, shipped to the remote Sweer’s Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria where the conservative politician, A.H. Palmer sought to set up a cotton plantation, ran away after being ‘struck with fists, rope’s end and horsewhips.’¹⁰

Three decades after the abolition slavery in British settlements in 1833, the spectre of slavery and its various guides of indenture and bondage, had again emerged in Queensland. In the wake of the American Civil War and the resultant emancipation of enslaved peoples the export of slave-cultivated cotton from the Confederate States were greatly reduced. A dramatic rise in cotton prices occurred and planters, and the many small and larger enterprises that funded them, moved their capital from North America seeking cheap labour across multiple sites around the Pacific. Tropical Queensland became a new frontier of cotton and sugar. Neave and Robson attempted to weigh up the evidence of this labour ‘traffic’ and were confronted with passionate remonstrations from humanitarians and missionaries who objected to the trade and planters who hotly defended it.

In 1868, one correspondent wrote to the Catholic Freeman’s journal of Sydney on the lack of regulation of the trade: this ‘evil’ traffic was not only a ‘blot upon the policy of Queensland’ it threatened to become a ‘reproach to all the Australian colonies.’ The author hoped that the ‘Home Government would … put a stop to the infamous traffic in human beings’ but this had not occurred.

“The scale of operations is rather small at present, but it promises to grow great within a brief space of time if permitted to develop itself. Nevertheless … the importation of South Sea Islanders into Queensland, and their treatment in that country, exhibits all the horrors of the now happily ended African slave trade.”¹²

Had the men of Maré and Lifou of New Caledonia, that Neave and Robson met on the Tolerance, been blackbirded? It is difficult to say; however, the Quaker’s journey on the Tolerance occurred around six months after the passing of the Polynesian Labourers Act, on 4th March 1868, in the Queensland legislature, which was then sent on to London for approval.¹³ The legislation, once approved in London, took time to be implemented and was often poorly or duplicitously fulfilled.

Brookes, it is said, modelled himself on the great British Quaker John Bright, renowned for this oratory skills. In 1867 Brookes delivered a lecture titled ‘The Life and Character of Joseph Sturge’ on the 7th August at the Wesleyan Church in Brisbane, so the Quaker influence on his thinking is notable.¹⁶ Quaker Joseph Sturge had been a contemporary of Friends Backhouse and Walker in the 1830s. Sturge toured Jamaica in the 1830s and witnessed first-hand the system of slavery and examined the apprenticeship system that would take its place. He sought out African-Caribbean apprentices, planters and others and recorded their testimony. Later he published the narrative of the eighteen-year-old Jamaican apprentice and former slave James Williams in Events Since the First of August 1834, which was central to ending the apprentice system.¹⁷

Tea at the house of William Brookes

The Quakers spoke with gentlemen planters, some of whom were religious and connected to parliament. These men told them that ‘cotton and sugar plantations are essential to the prosperity of the colony… White labour is very expensive and cannot be relied upon…The S.S.I’.s [South Sea Islanders] come readily for much lower pay, and are generally treated by their masters well in every respect, and in several instances with Christian care and kindness, and as one gentleman told me are “indispensable.”²¹ ‘On the other hand’ wrote Neave, ‘one case has come to light in which an overseer was seen to hunt one of them for some distance and belabour him with a stock-whip… We must try and get more information on this subject; as yet my fears are great, that, with all this candour and good intentions of the supporters of the scheme, there is danger in it; but this we shall, I hope, see.’²² Seeking to deliberate on this question, and influenced by tense debates and various factions, Neave would write, ‘With such diversity of opinion amongst good men, it needs care in coming to any settled judgment; still, if this be the seed of slavery, the sooner it is destroyed the better.’²³

‘We must try and get more information on this subject; as yet my fears are great … With such diversity of opinion amongst good men, it needs care in coming to any settled judgment; still, if this be the seed of slavery, the sooner it is destroyed the better.’

Brookes’ concern was not only for the South Sea Islanders – he pursued a campaign for the total abolition of any non-white immigration and labour in Queensland, and he drew heavily on the cruelties of the South Sea Islander labour trade in his arguments, regarding it as ‘a horrible infringement of human rights and contrary to all the best traditions of the British people’. Brookes’ attempts to form humanitarian networks to aid his campaign and to draw British attention to the issue (sometimes in vain) made the visit of the two young British Quakers, Robson and Neave, to Brisbane in 1868 an rare opportunity.²⁴

Brookes saw great potential in Robson and Neave, given the Quaker reputation for philanthropy and the many connections they held to the Society of Friends in England. He attempted to enlist their sympathies, but was largely unsuccessful. Brookes, as my forthcoming article reveals, became impatient with their slowness to pass definitive judgement upon the South Sea Islander trade, one that he deemed to as nefarious as the enslavement of Africans. He complained that Robson and Neave were ‘as blind as bats’ and refused to judge the labour trade as a clear cut case of slavery. Brookes wrote, ‘They listened to me as they would listen to one who played fairly well on a musical instrument.’ Yet, he observed:

‘… they had the Quaker acuteness in seeing how money was to be made, and the Quaker aptitude in turning corners and walking in bye-paths, so that objectionable ways of making money might be made for presentable, and less likely to run counter to tender consciences. To my pre-eminent reasons why coloured labour should not be allowed to obtain a footing in Queensland, these Quakers were as blind as bats. I was amazed and grieved to find them so, but that they were so, and contentedly so, was indisputable.’²⁵

Brookes believed that the Quakers were unable to see the true nature of the trade, given its regulation by government, and the milder form it took when compared to ‘the horrors of slavery in its old-fashioned guise’.²⁶

The travelling Friends had been warned of Brookes’ zealous ‘anti-kanaka’ ideas by planters and indeed by other Quaker planters. For not all Quaker brethren in Queensland were in agreement that the South Sea Islander trade was a repugnant species of slavery, and a form of plantation commerce which should be abolished.

In the same year of Neave and Robson’s arrival in Queensland, another Quaker group would move there to take up land, which had only recently had been stolen during violent frontier wars from traditional Indigenous owners by the colonial state. Known locally as ‘Friends Farm’, this group of entrepreneurial Quakers accommodated themselves well to using ‘imported’ South Sea Islander labour and often framed their endeavours within the language of uplift and humane benevolence, claiming to educate and protect Pacific workers. Quaker Joseph Dixon set up Friends Farm at Buderim with others, and later became a holder of major sugar plantations that depended on South Sea Islander labour. These were the same men that Neave and Robson had met in Sydney, part of the schism there. Joseph Dixon, Alfred Allen, Arthur Wood, Marshall Mitchell and a Hungarian, Gustaphus Reibe, were members of this community, the break-away group that moved to Queensland. They were well known to Neave and Robson.²⁷

Ideas of moral commerce had long been debated by Friends, notably around Quakers owning slaves in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in North America and the Caribbean. As Brycchan Carey and Geoffrey Plank remark, ‘far from having monolithic beliefs, Quakers embraced such diverse approaches as benevolent slaveholding, both gradual and comprehensive abolition…’.²⁸ Quakers in North American gradually moved to abolish slavery between the 1750s and the 1770s.

So, was this Queensland labour trade using South Sea Islanders a form of moral commerce? During the mid nineteenth century in the new colonies of Australia and in New Zealand Quakers often became enthusiastic settlers and like others immigrants were eager to take up land and build farms and plantations. As my paper shows, the Society of Friends influential role in the abolition of the trade in enslaved Africans over a century earlier, did not deter these Friends new to the colony of Queensland from setting up farms and sugar plantations using cheap or blackbirded labour in the 1860s. Yet, there would be trouble at Friends Farm.