Journal of Chinese Australia, Issue 01, Month 2005

Labouring in the Territory's past

Paul Jones

My one visit to the Northern Territory was all too short. Employed by a Victorian University to gather up materials on the heritage of Chinese from 1880 to 1920, I passed a hectic seven days at Darwin's archives, libraries and museum, with side trips to the genealogical society's rooms and to the small and wonderful museum of the Chung Wah Society. A kind of saturation had set in by the week's end, of records and indexes, stories and historic events, and of the overwhelming generosity of people whose interests crossed over mine. The visit yielded great riches from personal contacts and the discovery of the wealth of the written record on Chinese in the north.

Two impressions that surfaced during the visit provide the inspiration for this essay. First, among the breadth of stories and official accounts of settler experiences is the sheer extent of physical effort expended by Chinese and other settlers in the Territory, and the relative shortfall of surviving physical markers of their labours. This was work in some of the toughest of occupations, from the reef mines to the pearling vessels, and under the weight of physical conditions and seasonal climatic shifts that could slow a work project, or erase it from the face of the earth. A second remaining impression is the number of times my enquiries about the textures of Chinese settlement - of the social bases and politics that underlay its labouring history, for example - met with a similar response, that 'the north is just different'! This was no mere caution to an outsider to abide by the terms of local historical frames, to properly represent local experiences in all their complexity. Rather, well, the north was 'just different'. This was an invitation to explore, as well as a challenge to the historical imagination, as much as a claim to be subjected to the regimens of inter-regional contrasts with other Chinese communities.

The labour history of Chinese in the north may seem an ambitious topic. Much has been written on the exclusionary ambit of colonial and national laws and of worker organisations' denial of membership to 'the coloured'. The implications were obvious to Chinese as early as the 1870s, when Chinese seamen were effectively excluded from Australia's major coastal shipping enterprises. The prejudice is not unique to Australian experiences, though it is central to the home-grown discipline of labour history. I want to explore some of the ways that a focus on labour may serve to expand both our historical knowledge of Chinese in the north and our awareness of the boundaries historians work within and that, wittingly or unwittingly, we police and enforce on behalf of past generations.

Chinese-Australian histories and labour histories share critical points of interest. First, a concern with social justice, in all its dimensions, and improvement to the conditions of life in the face of adversity. Can we talk, for example, of Chinese' work without mention of racialised limits on their settlement? Would any study of labour organisations discount struggles over wages or conditions? Second and relatedly is the focus on the evolving institutional arrangements that bore on individuals, communities and associations (White Australia policy; formal structures of state for resolving workplace differences). And third, they variously share a concern with 'ground-up' story-telling - of personal accounts and, more and more, dynamic interconnections of gender, race and work life.

These broad similarities are, of course, just that - a gloss over diverse historical experiences of groups and individuals and their relationships to local and national realms. Or are they? I want to suggest that there is, indeed, a shared historical ground that largely has been overlooked. After all, 19th century Chinese workers in Melbourne factories and then newspaper workers at Sydney unionised to campaign for better conditions. By the 1920s, Chinese in the furniture factories of Melbourne were party to industrial awards, long after the dust had settled on the attempts of parliaments and employer groups to curtail their engagement in factories across the land. In 1942 Chinese merchant seamen effectively won for themselves the best wages and working conditions for Chinese crews on British ships around the globe, and the gains were won within the formal industrial relations system and with the assistance of Australian unionists. Moreover, the seamen had established the first transnational industrial agreement in the history of Australian unionism. These successes have largely passed unnoticed in the histories of Chinese in Australia and in the histories of Australian labour.[1]

We lose much if we take these engagements with the formalities of industrial relations as exceptions that somehow prove the rule of the more general exclusionary dynamics at play. The specificities of localised organisation in the face of globalised patterns of action against them disappear from sight. We dignify a 'mainstream' of historical progress with a completeness that it neither seeks nor needs. At the least, the unionised Chinese of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries dispense with the myth of a Chinese inability to organise in any identifiable way beyond a mysterious tradition knowable only to themselves. That claim should be dispatched to where it belongs - to the realm of nineteenth century mythology on which racial exclusion rested. To pass over the improbable successes in gaining support within structures that often were designed to do the opposite is to engage in an historical sleight of hand.

What focuses might a Chinese labour history of the north adopt? A few examples highlight the possibilities. What of the demands during the World Wars for Chinese labour by pastoralists that included groups such as Vesteys? It is scandalous that Australia has no major account of earlier, mass labours in the north, beyond Timothy Jones' foundational introduction to the topic.[2] Many thousands of Chinese were employed to move the earth and lay out the lines for the Darwin to Pine Creek railway, a beginning to a link from the north to the south that only now is complete. Smaller numbers were engaged on the construction of the overland telegraph line. The fruits of these labours were landmarks on a national, historical landscape and, as Timothy Jones notes, industrial actions to improve working conditions were part and parcel of their engagement.

Another group in the Territory can be added to the national list of Chinese who campaigned for better work conditions - the indentured phosphate miners of Nauru and Ocean Island who were evacuated to Australia in March 1942. Some 557 men were deployed to revive the wolfram mines at Hatches Creek and Wauchope, south of Tennant Creek. There they remained until November of the following year. Before WWI, the field had supplied half of the world demand for wolfram but with a post-war fall in prices, the operation had closed down by the early 1920s.

Notwithstanding the indentured employment arrangements the men had left, they negotiated on their wages and conditions, which delayed their posting by six weeks. This workforce included boilermakers, blacksmiths and coppersmiths, carpenters, electricians, and other industrial tradesmen, as well as tailors and laundrymen. The wage scale they struck - some £7 to £15 pounds per month - reflected different skill levels, with overtime for work beyond a six-day, 48 hour week; board and lodging at the mines; and repatriation direct to China at the war's end. The agreement had replaced a proposed piece-rate contract. Set wages were added to by clauses that recognised Chinese festival days and holidays; and particular dietary requirements, including rice and oils and sauces.[3] This was a good agreement, or so it seemed at the time it was struck. In comparison, five years after the war, Chinese workers on Nauru were paid a flat £6/10 per month. However, Australian taxation was not factored into their contracts and nor were the men accustomed to paying tax on their wages and keep. [4]

Wendy Rankine has described the arduous working and living conditions at the mines. One half of the complement required medical attention in the first month of their posting, and tensions quickly emerged around the issue of the quality of accommodation and general living conditions, which fell far short of the standard promised when the agreement was made.[5]

Unravelling details of the disputation and the elaboration of the clauses of the formal agreement is illuminating. While the agreement included a clause that any dispute would refer to the English-language version of the agreement, and not the Chinese, the negotiations went beyond matters of interpretation. At an early point it became clear that production levels were far lower than had been planned. To quicken the output, various systems of bonuses were put forward. Truck drivers - 'two first class ones' - had their bonus tripled to 30/- per month. Labourers were taken on as winch drivers and other trade positions; they had the skill and were 'teachable'. A system of bonuses for the three-man mining crews divided the incentives proportionately among them.[6]

When disputes arose, the men adopted conventional tactics of strikes and go slows. However, these were given a distinctive transnational render when some of the men working a shift chose to start and end according to Hong Kong Time, while others worked to Central Australian Time. The variances were a great inconvenience for time keepers and shift managers alike.[7] The disputes escalated when disciplinary measures were imposed, for example, a requirement on the men to pay for their food during periods of non-work.

From the official accounts of the progress of the mines, managers clearly were shocked at the determination of the men to win improvements to their conditions and at their defiance when ordered to assemble to receive 'orders'. Yet, the close contact of the mine managers with the men took them beyond stereotypical understandings of Chinese group behaviour, to a focus on 'trouble makers' and 'ring leaders', and the 'sensible' men who could settle down large, agitated groups. Nonetheless managers were divided on the source of agitation - whether this emanated from men with the experience of long-term contact with Europeans such as 'house boys', or others, such as the engine mechanics.[8]

Chinese consular officials had inspected the field and supported the men's claims; Chinese were a 'highly sentimental people', and the managers could and should understand the men's perspective, if a settlement were to be reached.[9] Group behaviour manifested in rather more concrete ways, however, including a collective provision to support several of their number hospitalised with long term illnesses, and collections for Chinese patriotic and war funds, and support for Chinese savings bonds.

For the Territory's longer-term Chinese, with their history of some seven decades of work on the gold fields, the endeavours at Wauchope and Hatches Creek must have seemed a shambles of missed opportunities - of men inexperienced in underground operations, and of misjudgements by the managers. Most of the men voluntarily enlisted with the US forces in Queensland in November 1943, and at some three to four times the prevailing wage rates. Chinese consular officials concluded that the formulations of pay, bonuses, and overtime at the mine effectively had left the men at below award rates, a breach of the war-time policy of wages equality.[10]

The few examples of labour activism raised here are, indeed, 'just different'. Taken together, they indicate the length and breadth of the traditions of labour activism among Chinese in the north. Exploring this tradition can also cast light on wider historical dynamics. To take one example, among the men who worked on the Pine Creek Railway and who remained in the Territory were those who in the 1920s and 1930s were effectively destitute. These were seventy and eighty year olds, 'bowed and wizened' by a life of manual labour, of years on the goldfields alternating with work in the towns, as the seasons and their luck dictated. Also among them were fishermen, denied licences to continue with their trade. Whereas the local administration had set about requiring them to leave Australia, the Commonwealth intervened; only those who volunteered would receive the fare to their native village.[11] A strange quirk, indeed, in the history of the White Australia policy. Here, perhaps the researcher needs to look again, as much as the hard-nosed administrator should have, to fully incorporate these men into the life stories of the Territory. That requires some relaxations to the historical convention that the self-employed are outside of the scope of labour histories. The boundaries of both Chinese-Australian and labour histories could each do with some stretching.

Notes

[1] See P. Jones, '"A Consequent Gain in the Tempo of Effort": Chinese Labour and Chinese Industrial Activism in Australia, 1941-45', in G Patmore & G Shields (eds), The Past is Before Us, ASSLH, Sydney, July 2005.
[2] See T. Jones, The Chinese in the Northern Territory, Northern Territory University Press, Darwin, 1997.
[3] National Archives of Australia (Hereafter NAA:): F388, NN.
[4] NAA: F320, 1943/6, Chinese Legation to Director of Mines, 14 May 1943.
[5] W Rankine, 'From Nauru to Nowhere . . . Pacific Island Chinese Evacuee Workers in Central Australian Wolfram Mines, 1942-43', P McGregor (ed), Histories of the Chinese in Australasia and the South Pacific, MCAH, Melbourne, 1995, p 155-6.
[6] NAA: F388, NN. Wolfram Mine Management to Director of Mines, Alice Springs, 6 September 1942. Director of Mines, Alice Springs to Superintendent, Wauchope, 4 June 1942.
[7] NAA: F320, 1943/239, Director of Mines to Department of Supply and Shipping, 27 April 1943.
[8] NAA: F388, NN. Wolfram Mine Management to Director of Mines, Alice Springs, 6 September 1942.
[9] NAA: F320, 1943/6, Chinese Legation to Director of Mines, 14 May 1943.
[10] West Australian, 26 March 1944.
[11] Sydney Morning Herald, 12 December 1934. NAA: A659, 1941/1/3100.

About the author

Paul Jones is an Associate of the Department of History at the University of Melbourne. He visited the Northern Territory as Project Officer with the Chinese Heritage of Australian Federation Project. Paul has also worked as Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow (2000-2003) and in various research and teaching positions in Australia, China and Europe.

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