May 6.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Exploitation and Two Cultures
The exploitation of Indigenous workers
A variation of this theme of robbing Aboriginal recruits of their rightful wages was simple and long standing. Just before the end of the cruise the skipper would anchor close to land and manufacture an excuse to quarrel violently with recruits until they deserted the ship in fear of their lives. If the boat waited for two days and the Aborigines did not return, the captain would charge them with desertion and confiscate any unpaid wages. There were also captains who simply discarded such tribal Aborigines at the end of a voyage before putting into port and claimed desertion. Thus, Government Resident at Thursday Island, John Douglas, noted: ‘Desertions often take place not long before the expired of agreements and the wages due thus become forfeited to the employer…’. There is no satisfactory way of calculating how often such stratagems were used: but [Walter Roth, Protector of Aborigines] felt the question important enough to warrant a special clause in legislation then being drafted, and was supported by Douglas and the shipping master at Thursday Island. [1]
Roth to Pol. Com., 4 February 1898, Q.S.A. COL/139, ‘Roth’s 1898 Reports’ [copy]; ‘Report of the Govt. Res. at Thursday Island for 1894-95’, 1896 V. & P., p. 506; Roth to Pol. Com., 6 May 1898, Q.S.A. COL/142, 6944 of 1898 [Pol. Com. Registration].
Acknowledgment: Noel Loos, Invasion and Resistance, pp. 146, 284 n.70.
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ABORIGINAL PEOPLE AND EXPLORERS
Back at the camp on 6 May [1861] William Wills' optimism was faltering...Their own supplies of food were pitifully small. They were, in fact, living on the edge of starvation...The Yandruwandha were their only hope; but for proud white gentlemen, such as Mr Wills and Mr Burke, that was a demeaning prospect. We can hear the shame in Wills' conclusion: 'I suppose this will end in our having to live like the blacks for a few months'. [1]
...On Tuesday, 7 May, [Wills} wrote: 'Mr Burke and I started down the Creek to reconnoitre. At about eleven miles we came to some Blacks fishing, they gave us some half a dozen fish each for luncheon and intimated that if we could go to their Camp we should have some more and some bread'. [2]
The extent of the role that Aboriginal people played in helping early [white] explorers is not easy to determine. Prevailing negative attitudes meant that the explorers do not necessarily credit the assistance of Indigenous people, focussing more on scientific and geographical observations. Contact with local people was not always recorded in expedition journals, and Aboriginal people left no written records of their own.
On the Burke and Wills expedition, two Aboriginal guides took the lead party to Torowotto. Aboriginal guides were further enlisted by William Wright to take the party to Bulloo River, and still others guided the party nearly to Cooper's Creek. In addition the party sought assistance from Aboriginal communities to help find water sources. When Burke, Wills and King returned to the depot at Cooper's Creek, after their trek north, they came to rely heavily on the hospitality of the Yandruwandha people to supplement their meagre supplies. They initially accepted simple offerings of food, but, by the end of the exhibition, Wills was accepting offers of shelter – sharing the Yandruwandha people's bark 'gunyah'...Until the point of desperation, however, it is apparent that the explorers made little effort to learn about the Aboriginal way of life or to understand their culture.
W.J. Wills, Journal of Trip from Cooper's Creek Towards Adelaide, diary entry, Monday 6 May 1861.
Ibid.
Acknowledgment: Michael Cathcart, Starvation in a Land of Plenty: Wills' diary of the fateful Burke and Wills Expedition, NLA Publishing, Canberra, 2013, pp. 121-122, 127, n.130, n.132.
Cited with permission from the National Library of Australia Publishing.