Table of Contents
The remote interior of northern Australia represented a site of transgression for both pastoral colonisers and Aborigines alike. From the northern frontier period in the late nineteenth century until the 1966 Equal Pay decision, a unique relationship existed on cattle stations in which pastoralists and their Aboriginal workers deviated from government control. Despite Aboriginal protection legislation that prevailed elsewhere in northern Australia, pastoralists created their own jurisdiction over Aboriginal people. This jurisdiction bypassed the assimilationist tendencies of government policy, by allowing Aboriginal people to practice customs and ceremonies, and retain connections to country.[1] At the same time, it maximised the capacity for pastoralists to exploit Aboriginal labour. Therefore, both pastoralists and Aboriginal people benefited from transgressing official ‘Aboriginal Acts’.
However, this source of transgression was at the mercy of the pastoralist. Accordingly, it came to a sudden halt in the late 1960s with the introduction of labour-saving machines and the 1966 Equal Pay decision. These developments rendered Aboriginal workers redundant. They were transferred from the cattle station to the government sphere of welfare and criminal justice.[2] They were subsequently denied connections to country, and their historic labour contribution went largely unrecognised.
This paper suggests that the pastoralists’ jurisdiction represented a repository of feudal power. The term ‘feudal’ is used to refer to an interdependent labour relationship between the landed and the landless, but one that is ultimately controlled by the landholder. The landless are answerable to the proprietor, rather than the state. The state is mostly complicit in this decentralised power exercised by those who produce an economic surplus from their land.[3] In northern Australia, the state recognised the economic value of the cattle industry, and its complicity manifested through regulations as well as negligent oversight of pastoralists’ power over Aboriginal workers. The consequences were twofold. On the one hand it resulted in impoverished conditions for Aboriginal workers and their dependants. On the other hand it enabled Aboriginal workers to transgress the intransigent nature of protection policies. While the interdependent relationship with pastoralists also involved assimilation, its effect was retrained due to the rights afforded to Aboriginal people on stations.
Transgression from state powers operated on cattle stations across northern Queensland, Northern Territory and Western Australia. These stations north of ‘Capricorn’ employed Aboriginal people on an unprecedented scale in Australia. Despite the fact that each station was autonomous and geographically isolated, there was a distinct pattern of feudal relationships. This was because the mutual dependence between pastoralists and Aboriginal workers provided a stable means of labour exploitation. This is discerned from oral histories of Aboriginal people, pastoralists and protectors; government reports, and official correspondence. When pastoralists’ dependence ceased in the late 1960s, so did its jurisdiction for transgression. As Peter Yu describes, Aboriginal people were forced into ‘severely overcrowded native welfare reserves’ or ‘hastily gazetted refugee camps’.[4] This paper considers the growth of the pastoralists’ jurisdiction (including the underpinning colonial land system) and the capacity for Aboriginal transgression within this jurisdiction, and concludes with the consequences of the demise of Aboriginal employment on cattle stations and possibilities for the future.
Traditionally, relationships on northern cattle stations have been classified in terms of ‘free or forced’ employment. Both sides of the debate ground their arguments in notions of power. The proponents of the ‘forced labour’ argument suggest that cattle station managers exercised power brutally over Aboriginal workers.[5] In turn, the workers were powerless to resist. In the 1980s Raymond Evans drew attention to ‘striking parallels across time and space between the condition of the slave and the unfree Aboriginal worker’.[6] Both were denied economic rights of pay and freedom of movement in the labour market.
By contrast, from the late 1980s cultural historians such as Ann McGrath and Henry Reynolds emphasised the Aborigines’ ‘creative adaptation’ to stations that afforded them agency.[7] This ‘accommodationist’ school highlights the cultural leverage granted to Aboriginal workers to stay on their land and maintain kinship ties. McGrath summarises this cultural revisionist position as follows: ‘Aboriginal station dwellers co-operated with the white people, but they were never truly colonised’.[8]
The traditional focus on the degree of power exercised between cattle station managers and their workers does not appreciate the context of the cattle station as a land jurisdiction. Possession of land gave pastoralists rights over Aboriginal workers. At the same time, Aboriginal workers who conformed acquired rights over the station land. By making the feudal notion of land jurisdiction a central issue, it explains how Aboriginal workers benefited from the relations — by retaining ties to their land but at the same time being exploited — by pastoralists making residence contingent on Aborigines’ labour contribution. Therefore, labour was neither free nor forced, but dependent on the land jurisdiction of the pastoralist.