Slavery. It was a bad thing that happened somewhere else, in the
United States or elsewhere. Or so we are told. We don’t often
think of Australia as being similarly constructed on the
exploitation of unfree labour, and yet the history of the
development of local capitalism is exactly that. In their
history of Australia, No Paradise for Workers, Ken Buckley and
Ted Wheelright rightly call convict labour a ‘second cousin’ of
slavery. The early years of the colonies were dominated by our
version of slavery, as well as indentured labour. Australia was
not just a gaol, but a land where modern development had at its
core coerced work. While wage labour emerged soon after
invasion, it was not predominant over convict labour until the
mid 1800s. Convicts, along with indentured labourers from India,
China and, most particularly, the South Pacific, remained
important to capitalist development until the latter part of the
nineteenth century. The unfree labour of people from the South
Pacific was particularly important i