Exclusivism and Unionism

Throughout the late nineteenth century the Australian labour movement agitated against the presence of non-European labour in the country. In Queensland a major facet of this campaign was opposition to the continued immigration and employment of Pacific islanders and Asians in the sugar industry. 'Kanaka' labour in particular was believed not only to deny white Australians an avenue of employment but also to degrade community standards and endanger even the safety of Europeans in the sugar districts. A section of Queensland labour, led by William Lane, couched their argu ments in virulent denunciations of islanders and all non-Europeans as a threat to both racial and moral purity. Agitation against the employers and supporters of coloured labour was apparently successful in 1885 when the Queensland government declared that no more indentured islanders would be introduced after 1890. But in response to a financial crisis in the sugar industry the government in 1892 reversed its decision, allowing an indefinite extension of time for the labour trade. Alleging betrayal by Sir Samuel Griffith, the then premier, the incipient Labor Party stepped up its campaign against the employment of non-Europeans: during the 1890s the question of coloured labour was a central, bitterly fought issue in Queensland politics.1 The struggle against Pacific island labour illustrated a persistent phenomenon of the labour movement as it developed in Queensland: brotherhood, solidarity, and the right to work were the exclusive preserve of an homogeneous group of white, predominantly British, workers. Most trade unions had rigidly applied rules forbidding membership to Asians and Melanesians. The attempts by indentured labourers on the sugar fields to form unions or to strike against harsh conditions were either ridiculed, or elicited as proof of the unruliness of the 'Kanakas' and therefore as further justification for their exclusion from Queensland.2 Anyone with different skin colour or cultural habits was barred from the 'mateship' of the Aus tralian worker. To rationalise the exclusion of supposedly inferior racial groups from a movement which in theory preached the equality of man, it was necessary to deny Melanesians, Chinese, Japanese, Indians?indeed even Greeks and Italians?the requisite standard of humanity. Such an attitude was, of course, an ingredient in the thought of all white Australians

Economics · Law and economics · Political science · Australian History and Society · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Philosophy

• From Race to Ethnicity

  Open Access•Marie De Lepervanche•Journal of Sociology•1980

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• Denis Murphy, the University of Queensland and Labour History, 1966-83

  Open Access•Bradley Bowden, Bradley Bowden Bradley Bowden•Labour History•2016

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• The Backward Stock of the South

  C A Martins•Journal of Intercultural Studies•2021

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