No. 122 – Ungaru, Joannet Island, called and examined:
In what ship did you come? “Lizzie”
Why did you come in her? Boatswain came in boat ashore. He said “If you want anything from white man, you come along in ship; if you want tobacco and knife, by-and-by, work finish, you get gun, plenty box, tobacco and calico.”
How long did he tell you? “Two fellow moon be die, one fellow moon come up, then you go back.”
Who told you three yams [years]? He gammon [lie] altogether. In Townsville, captain said three yams altogether.
Are you married? No.
Suppose boatswain told you three yams, would you have come? I cried when I heard it.[i]
This passage is from a volume of printed evidence, given to an 1885 Royal Commission, which was tasked with investigating whether the South Sea Islanders – whose labour drove the Queensland sugar plantation frontier – had entered then-legitimate contracts of indenture, or were more properly to be considered slaves. I found that volume in the records of the Colonial Sugar Refining (CSR) Company at the Noel Butlin Centre, within the Australian National University. It is striking because in that particular extensive archive there are so few voices of Pacifica people recorded.
Abstract and theoretical debates around the status of whether ‘blackbirding’ was or was not slavery melt away when confronted with Ungaru’s tears. Told that he would go and work in Queensland for three months, he only found out that the contract was for three years when he was stranded in Townsville.
The tragedy and violence of the colonial Queensland sugar plantation commodity frontier begins with these lies, but does not end there. Other unfreedoms compounded kidnapping: Ungaru would be tied to work for only one plantation, would have strictly curtailed civil liberties, and work on the cane line disciplined by a white overseer. Back-breaking labour and racialised violence in the cane field often led to sickness and death.
More than a century later Ungaru’s tears were echoed by my own as I read the complaints of plantation-owner E. Drysdale, voiced in the Queensland parliament in 1887:
the class of Kanakas is not as good as it ought to be, nor can we get sufficient supply of them … A great many of our boys are of poor physique and under-age; the consequence is that a great many of them die. Out of one lot of seventy-eight boys that we got last year, twenty-three were dead within ten months after they came. That, of course, is a very heavy loss to us. We lost their labour and what we had to pay for them in the beginning.[ii]
As one reads this passage, one might think there was some warped humanity on display from Drysdale, saddened that the working conditions on his own plantation were leading to the deaths of his indentured South Sea Islander workers. But no: the ‘heavy loss’ to be lamented is the value their labour might have produced, and the lost capital expended to purchase these ‘Kanakas’ in the first place.[iii]
This passage from Drysdale is revealing, as it hints at the socio-ecological relations that drove the proliferation of plantations northward from Brisbane, in the second half of the nineteenth-century – specifically capitalist socio-ecological relations. That is the argument developed in my recent article, published in the Journal of Agrarian Change. This article emerges from my 2023 doctoral thesis, which placed sugar alongside histories of invasion, pastoralism, and fossil capital to develop an eco-Marxist account of the origins of capitalism in Australia.
I argue that through the categories of world-ecology, the history of Australian capitalism is rendered legible. Further, in this article I argue that by exploring the socioecology of the plantation, much is revealed about the character of capitalism more broadly. Here, we can see the commodity frontier at work, producing landscapes, crises and profits through relations of cheapness: cheap nature, cheap land, cheap work and cheap lives. We see how cheapness is constructed, through the efforts of the state and capital, especially via the vehicle of racialisation: racialising workers, placing them within ‘nature’, outside of the sphere of value.
The article seeks to contribute to both ‘urgent history’ and ‘truth-telling’, as plantation socioecologies of cheapness continue to (re)produce the crises of the racial Capitalocene. More specifically, contemporary Australian agriculture continues to rely on Pacific Islander labour in contradictory, unequal ways. Indeed, CSR – the Colonial Sugar Refining Company – has now dominated the Australian sugar market for more than one and a half centuries; its products are still on the shelves of all major supermarkets, and are quite likely in the pantries of many Australian readers. The politics of monuments and public space is rightly contested, but capitalist value continues, uninterrupted.
The Queensland sugar commodity frontier was a horrific example of the way the structuring power of the value form consumed whole islands—their peoples, cultures and lives. These exhaustive relations that define the totality of capitalist socioecology continued and are still with us. Extraction of life-energies would again fold the South Pacific in to ‘fix’ other Australian commodity frontiers, with the British-Australian imperialism of the phosphate trade. Crucially, as put by Lisa Tilley, ‘the plantation is still with us.’ It is these connections through time, space and politics that emerge when Queensland sugar plantations are viewed from the vantage point of eco-Marxism, from the relations of Cheap Nature.
As it had for centuries, across the world, the search for and production of Cheap Nature realized the possibility of capitalist sugar production in Queensland, where it demonstrated its rapacious qualities all over again. It demanded cheap lives and land to exist, showing the reinforcing co-existence of capitalist value and unfree labour. My article seeks to contribute to our understanding of how the racial Capitalocene emerged in Queensland – and in-so-doing hopes to contribute to a politics that might transcend the contradictory and crisis-prone socioecological relations of Cheap Nature. From ‘blackbirding’, to phosphate mining, to temporary agricultural visas, Australian capitalism ramifies through the Pacific. And today, as Australia continues its reproduction of fossil capital despite the rising tides, the Australian-Pacific relation may be entering its terminal phase – and must be contested.
***
[i] Queensland Government (1885) Report with evidence taken before the Royal Commission appointed to inquire into the circumstances under which labourers have been introduced to Queensland from New Guinea and other islands, etc., Brisbane: Queensland Government Printers, Noel Butlin Centre Archive, Colonial Sugar Refining Company’s records, N305/B2-1-4-2.
[ii] Parliamentary Debates. (1889, July 12). Number of Kanakas in Queensland. In Hansard, Legislative Assembly, Brisbane: Queensland Government Printers.
[iii] Originating from Hawaiian, meaning ‘person’, this term became a tool of racialisation, deployed in Australia by White settler-colonials to refer to South Sea Islanders in general. It is generally considered offensive today, although there have been Pasifika attempts to reclaim the word in some contexts.
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