The non-payment of wages was endemic on northern Australian cattle stations well into the twentieth century. This phenomenon emerged as part of a broad system of pastoral lords’ rights and obligations. Low labour costs not only assisted in maximising pastoralists’ surplus, but also made possible a large-scale and dependent workforce. Inducements other than wages, such as rights of Aboriginal communities to live on their country, more effectively enforced ties of the Aboriginal worker to the pastoralists’ jurisdiction.

In addition, pastoralists perceived it as their right to extract labour from Aboriginal workers without pay. Aborigines, as they saw, had an obligation to work for the pastoralist. According to Aboriginal spokesperson, Noel Pearson, Aboriginal work ‘for slave labour rates of pay, or no pay at all’, was perceived by pastoralists as ‘an exaction of responsibility from Aboriginal people’.^[102] Like feudal lords, pastoralists’ surplus extraction from workers was a matter of ‘dues’ rather than commodity relations. The feudal lord’s use of its superior land claim was the means of labour exploitation, as the landless could only stay on the lord’s land in exchange for their labour.^[103]

Some workers were aware that they were short-changed, particularly in later station years, but did not have the power to stand up to management and demand wages. John Watson articulates the situation of non-waged dependence accordingly, ‘The Aboriginal people knew they were being exploited but they didn’t have any choice.’^[104] Stockworker Barney Barnes emphatically compared the lack of money on stations in the 1940s to being kept in a prison.^[105] Moreover, Northern Territory Administrator, AR Driver, was forthright in conveying that non-payment of wages fostered ‘a system of serfdom’ in which employers ‘were able to maintain strict control of a subject people’.^[106]

Where legislation provided for Aboriginal wages, there were government regulations that allowed pastoralists to bypass this requirement, aside from the frequent illegal employment of Aboriginal workers without employment permits. Notably, wages did not have to be paid where the pastoralist provided for Aboriginal workers’ dependants on stations. Under Regulation 14 of The Aboriginals Ordinance 1918-43, the Chief Protector had the power to exempt an employer from the ‘payment of wages’ to an Aboriginal person maintaining ‘relatives and dependants’.^[107] However, in reality, the relatives and dependants were themselves workers, contributing to the upkeep of the homestead and station property.^[108] A stockworker at Fitzroy Downs, Jock Shandley, claimed that the managers ‘really made [the dependants] work for their tucker, for their bread and beef’.^[109] In addition, dependants were relegated to ‘black camps’, where accommodation usually comprised ‘scrap’ material, if anything at all,^[110] and their food rations were of the lowest standard in the station hierarchy.^[111]

After World War II, the Federal government increasingly ‘maintained’ Aboriginal children as part of its assimilation policy.^[112] Consequently, pastoralists no longer had financial responsibility for Aboriginal children (or the elderly^[113] ), and were therefore required to pay wages to Aboriginal workers. However, they continued to bypass this requirement through the ‘booking down system’. This involved crediting Aboriginal wages on the station store books and then charging excessive prices at the store. Through this common mechanism, pastoralists avoided cash payment of wages.^[114]

This maintenance of worker communities typifies the feudal process of exploitation. It is not simply that Aboriginal workers were not paid, but they were rendered dependent on pastoralists for rations and access to land in lieu of wages.^[115] However, the relationship of dependence between pastoralists and Aboriginal workers provided Aboriginal people with an opportunity to command rights that they would have otherwise been denied under the protection of the government, particularly rights to their land and customs. Aboriginal workers, by asserting their connections to country, transgressed many controls imposed on Aboriginal people on the ‘outside’.