Caftan-wearing Gordonites existed even in 1788.
Australia is a human trafficking crime scene since 1788 and is still engaged.
https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/history/australia-has-a-history-of-aboriginal-slavery
Quote: Was there ever Aboriginal slavery in Australia?
Slavery is never a convenient topic. We easily associate countries like Africa and America with slavery, but Australia?
What is slavery?
If you read it up in the dictionaries, slavery is “the condition in which one person is owned as property by another” and the owner has "absolute power” over their "life, liberty, and fortune”. Such people are usually forced into work "in harsh conditions for low pay”. [1]
Australia’s slaves worked in all essential industries, from the 1840s through to the 1970s: [2][3]
The first slaves to reach Australia from the South Sea were used as shepherds on properties in southern New South Wales, but died from the cold.
When the American Civil War cut off the world's cotton supply, Australian slaves were used to establish cotton plantations in southern Queensland. A strong male would cost the modern equivalent of between $5 and $19, while women, particularly Tahitians, who were regarded as the most attractive, often fetched $32.
Between 1842 and 1904 more than 60,000 men and boys from the South Pacific islands, and an unknown number of women and girls, were kidnapped and brought to Australia to work as slaves on the sugar plantations that still dot the country's north-east coast. Many were also forced to work as pearl divers in the north.
Between the 1860s and the 1970s, Aboriginal people of all ages were taken from their homes and sent to work on cattle and sheep properties all across Australia. Several such schemes were run by colonial and state governments, theoretically to protect Aboriginal Australians from mistreatment.
And mistreatment was rife. Queensland government files and personal reports show that from the 1880s, and for at least 40 years, there were no limits on how many hours Aboriginal people worked, how hard their labour was, how bad their treatment or the provision of food and living quarters.
Reverend John Gribble, a keen observer of injustice in the 1880s, noted (my emphasis):
"I have seen numbers of natives brought in from the interior, and some of them had never before seen the face of a white man, and they were compelled to put their hand to a pen and make a cross which they never could understand, and having done this they were then slaves for life, or as long as they were good for pearl diving." [4]
Minimum conditions, introduced in 1919, were wildly ignored in the absence of any inspections. [5]
[Shelter for many Aboriginal workers was] worse than they would provide for their pet horse, motor-car or prize cattle.
— Chief Protector of Aborigines, Queensland, 1921 [5]
Low pay or no pay
The definition of slavery mentions 'low pay', and this was very true for Aboriginal slaves.
In the early 1900s in Queensland, despite regarded as more reliable than superior white stock riders, Aboriginal workers received only about 3% of the white wage rate. [5]
At the same time in Western Australia, recommendations for a minimum 5 shilling monthly wage were successfully opposed by pastoralists, leading one parliamentarian to describe the system as "another name for slavery". [6]
From 1919 the government claimed pastoral workers would get 66% of the white wage, but records show that in 1949 workers got only 31%. [3] In fact, Aboriginal people would never get the 66%. Every year between 1941 and 1956 the government sold Aboriginal labour for less than that. [3]
Whatever little money Aboriginal workers were able to save governments were keen to get their hands on. Evidence shows it intercepted federally-paid maternity allowances from 1912 and child endowments from 1941, and paid only a fraction through to the mothers. [3]Tens of millions of dollars were taken out of the Queensland trusts and never returned to Aboriginal workers. The 'stolen wages' is now a national problem governments try to sit out. Claimants need a lot of patience or die waiting, and compensation has been insufficient, bordering on insulting for a lifetime of work.
"When I got the first $4,000 [of a total of $7,000] I was told I had to sign a paper that I would not take the government to court and I signed because I thought it was better than nothing,' says Felicity Holt, a 77-year-old claimant from Queensland. [3] "I found out I couldn't get the money unless I signed the document." Stolen wages is, however, not just about the money. In the 2006 Stolen Wages report numerous statements by Aboriginal people described the conditions in which they had lived and worked in terms evoking the notion of slavery. In fact, until at least the 1950s, if not later, these conditions satisfy the legal definition of ‘slavery’ existing under Australian and international law at the time.[7]
[Slavery is] an elephant in the drawing-room of civilised debate.
— Stephen Gray [7]
While Aboriginal people have no difficulty thinking of their past treatment as slavery, many non-Aboriginal people – including judges and lawyers – find the notion of slavery in an Australian context confronting. [7] Worse, some prime ministers of Australia believe that there was no slavery in Australia. [8]
A look into history might bring clarity.
Source: Australia has a history of Aboriginal slavery - Creative Spirits, retrieved from
Forum
Pages: 1 
