Baby/Lady Blackbirds

The colonial discourse of adult children and childish adults of the Western Pacific labour trade.

Levuka, Island of Ovalau, Fiji. 1864. (Image: State Library Victoria)

In June 1873 The Argus’ own special correspondent Henry Britton joined the crew and a special cargo of passengers upon the schooner Alacrity for a unique voyage amongst the Western Pacific Islands. The passage was commanded with a purpose entirely the antithesis of those who had used the route previously in fulfilment of colonial Fijian demands for cheap human labour. Committed to the “restoration to their homes of the natives stolen from Polynesian islands by the brig Carl and sold into slavery”, the voyage of the Alacrity undertook an act of both reparation and repatriation. The Australian government had finally agreed to bear the burden of the cost of returning kidnapped men, women and children to their various homes amongst what was then known as the Gilbert Islands, now Kiribati. Britton details his travels in a series of a dozen weekly letters published in the Argus as The Pacific Labour Trade. He preceded his embarkation with a ten-week stay in Fiji, interviewing planters and labourers. Amongst the myriad characters described by Britton are: ten-year-old Islander Embarlo, sent off to school in Albury by a planter; another ten-year-old and Alacrity crew favourite is Tom, being returned to his home; and finally the 17-year-old “Polynesian beauty” Margaret, also returning home and crew favourite. Missing from this tableau are the Islander men of the voyage. Which is not to say Britton does not speak of them. He does. Endlessly. And almost always framed in the trope of the treacherous – yet somehow also naively childish – savage. This paper seeks to interrogate the contradictory discourse of the role reversal that positions the Islander children as saviours of their race while the adults are portrayed as the hopelessly lost children - and juxtaposes it against the projected eroticism imposed upon Islander women working in Fiji under indentured labour arrangements - kidnapped or otherwise.

It should be noted that there appears to be a paucity of scholarship uncovered in this process, relating specifically to Pacific Islander women indentured to work in Fiji. Robert Nicole offers a valuable insight into the resistance of Fijian and Indian women in his book Disturbing History, devoting the last chapter to the topic, but there is little mention of indentured women workers from Pacific Islands.While Tracey Banivanua-Mar’s exploration of violence embedded within colonial structures in Violence and Colonial Dialogue focuses almost exclusively on the experiences of men, she does acknowledge the labour of women and children in mostly domestic settings and of those few working in the fields. Michael Moynagh fails to name indentured labour at all in his history of the Fiji sugar industry, tabling the population as Fijian, Indian and “other” with no mention of where the “other” arrived. Shaista Shameem also uncovers significant detail of the labour practices and brutality faced by Indian women indentured workers but again, the Islander women imported to Fiji are mentioned only in passing. This may be explained by the scarcity of details on the number of women who left their island homes and what information does exist indicates very low numbers. Doug Munro in his introductory chapter for Labour in the Pacific explains that while there were some single women from Kirabati who were “permitted to engage in labour migration” the numbers are not clear. In the main women were prevented from “enlisting” and the proportion of those who did is estimated at between 4 to 9 percent. Between 1865 and 1911 approximately 26,000 workers from the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), Kiribati, the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea arrived in Fijian harbours as indentured labour. Using these figures, it is possible to estimate that on average, approximately 23-52 each year were women, compared to 523-552 men. (See Appendix A). I have found no reference so far to the numbers of children which is indicative of the invisibility of children in the official record.

The role of children in Britton’s colonial narrative is restricted to their potential for transcending their own race, or pity when it becomes apparent that this is not possible. Britton positions two ten-year-old boys as fine examples of the benevolence it is possible to bestow upon those members of the inferior races un/fortunate enough to be kidnapped. Embarlo is a labourer boy accompanying the son of a planter to school in Albury, Australia. Britton was shown letters written by Embarlo to his patron, whilst staying with the planter. His assessment is congratulatory praise for the planter having sent the boy away for schooling: “If every planter could adopt the humane plan [he] has carried out... the degraded condition of the Polynesians would be revolutionised in a few years.” Just who or where Embarlo’s parents might be is never explained, although we are given a glimpse. The first letter is a simple one that describes Embarlo’s progress as a student and gratitude for being taught. His second letter however asks “How is Taberniki? Please tell her I big boy now, and play cricket. My clothes no grow with me, so I too big for them.” Margaret Jolly has used the private texts of missionaries to Vanuatu between 1848 and 1870 to decode the shift in colonial gender roles and relationships between European missionary women and local Islander women. Jolly notes that “public claims about mission success are often at variance with the daily experience.” Likewise, Embarlo’s letters are likely public expressions submitted for inspection by school masters and thus may be similarly at odds with his internal experience of having being twice removed from his home – his native Island home first and then the plantation. Yet these letters too may be decoded – who is Taberniki? The repeated emphasis on his growth and the domestic nature of having outgrown his clothes strongly suggests that Embarlo is addressing someone that would care about such things, such as his mother.

Brewer & Joske sugar plantation in Fiji, 1873. Briton visited the plantation in his 
travels. The planter William Brewer was responsible for sending Embarlo to 
Albury for schooling and it was Brewer's wife who Embarlo wrote to. Brewer killed
 himself not long after Briton's visit, following the failure of the plantation 
and consequent financial ruin. (Image; State Library of Victoria).

Tom is also ten years old. He is returning home with his father to the Gilbert Islands, having been kidnapped by when he was just 7. Tom is described by Britton as “the first favourite on board” who is:

…dressed up in a white shirt and blue sash, in which he looks magnificent, and... duly installed as assistant steward in the cabin. He is a very sharp boy, and remembers the name of every article after being told once... One of the quartermasters, who takes a special interest in him, has set about teaching him the alphabet. After three or four lessons he remembered nearly all the letters.

Tom is given a place at the table with the sailors and provided with wine and spirits, which “he likes well”. Britton returns to Tom regularly throughout the series and it may be that his fondness for the boy stems from Britton’s own childhood removal from his home, albeit in the company of his English parents. When he was 8 years old, Britton’s family emigrated from Derby in the United Kingdom to Castlemaine in Victoria, where his father established a newspaper, thus setting in motion Britton’s journalistic career. The moment of Tom’s return home is not a triumphant one but is rather imbued with sentiment framed in taxonomical ideology:

The sailors followed Tom over the ship's side with moist eyes, for he was their special pet. Poor Tom! We knew perfectly well that in 10 minutes he would be standing on his native shore as naked as on the day on which he was born. The scoundrels by whom he was surrounded no doubt robbed him before he got to land... Tom was very intelligent, and he would, no doubt, have become a respectable member of civilised society. But he missed the one great chance of his life, and he is now a hopeless savage for evermore.”

Repositioning Embarlo and Tom’s stories of kidnap from their homes as one of improvement and fits the teleological narrative of racial progression. As the child improves and grow, so too will the race itself. Just as photographs of cannibal feasts are “immediately recognisable as an image of primitive barbarity” so too does the discourse of child as saviour signify the future. Thus, whilst the adult men are routinely infantilised as either noble savages or treacherous cannibals, the children are considered agents of civilising potential, bound to raise up their race.

The proximity of the kidnapped women and their children to the internal, private lives of planters was a matter for public discourse only when couched in terms of racial superiority. Abuses were addressed by very specifically not mentioning them at all. Britton explains that the habit of placing the few women who arrive as “housekeepers to the planters” is one that “is a very objectionable feature of the traffic” and that “the Fijian Government has issued a Gazette regulation forbidding the transfer of women to bachelors' plantations, but the regulation cannot be enforced everywhere.” The implication is that planters are pursuing sexual relationships, voluntary or otherwise, with the Islander women brought into their homes. That it is only the bachelors who are regulated erases the possibility of extra-marital relations. Britton goes on to excuse the practise as “one of the results which always follow upon the contact of a superior with an inferior race”. That is, that the inferior uncivilised woman fails to control her natural beauty in the manner expected and so colonial men are bound to fall prey to their wild charms. The private reaction of planters’ wives to such “results” may be revealed in the experiences of the Islander women and children working as domestic labourers on plantations. Banivanua-Mar describes the feeling of isolation of the women and children separated from the larger Islander community working in the fields that “held its own hardships resulting particularly from the tensions that might arise from the more intimate proximity between families and labourers.” The imagery of brutalisation by mistresses flogging little girls may be illustrative of colonial women vengefully expressing control over a group more vulnerable than they and is certainly one that reinforces the trope of Islander women being without agency in their public lives.

The savage cannibal male as a colonial signifier of the Western Pacific frontiers is reflected upon the reversed mirror image as a contradictory form of the “Polynesian beauty” that while embodying all that is physical perfection, is still never far from primitivism. Britton is smitten by Margaret, a 17-year-old kidnapped housekeeper being returned to her home in the Gilbert Islands. Whilst disregarding another Islander woman as “loathsome to the sight” he devotes columns of newspaper space to descriptions of Margaret, from her “perfect teeth of dazzling whiteness” right down to her “feet... of a Greek model”.[23] Britton takes his time, but eventually delivers the nineteenth century equivalent of the ‘money shot’:

We knew it would come to this at last. We had expected it all along, and are therefore not dismayed. Margaret had so far patiently borne the inconvenience of her long dress, sprawling about the deck in the luxurious attitudes of a well-fed kitten... but today she could stand it no longer, so casting to the winds her newly acquired notions of propriety, she flung off her unbecoming garments, and basked at ease in the sun preparatory to a bath. Like the Lady Christabel

“Her gentle limbs did she undress,

And lay down in her loveliness."

The use of Coleridge for romantic effect emphasises Margaret’s natural beauty but is quickly undermined by the next sentence, and the reader is soon reminded of her origin: “a large shark was caught this afternoon... It was somewhat disillusioning to see large lumps of raw shark rapidly disappearing behind the ivory portals of Margaret's well-shaped mouth.” The passage illustrates how easily the constructed public image of the “Polynesian beauty” is disrupted by the private act of needing to eat. We then discover that Margaret has a fiancé waiting for her at home. When she is finally safely delivered to her home shore she “saunter[s] on without staying to say a word of goodbye. This was unkind after all the attention she had received...” Britton is put out, and he and the crew seem to take pleasure in seeing that Margaret’s fiancé is as “an ugly lout of a savage”. The pleasure is quickly replaced by pity “...as we moved away from the island, we could hear for some time the savage shouts of its degraded inhabitants... this was the community to which we had surrendered our gentle Margaret.” Given the intensity of emotion present in these passages, it is reasonable to assume that Britton drew heavily upon his romantic impressions of Margaret a decade later, when he published the novel Loloma: Or Two Years in Cannibal-Land: A Story of Old Fiji. “Loloma was now sixteen years of age, and she was claimed in marriage by Bent-Axe, to whom she had been affianced almost from her birth. The man was repulsive; the girl had the greatest possible aversion to him...” Expanding on Thomas’ idea that the cannibal savage fills the frame of colonial imagery, likewise is the Islander woman only granted a position in the image if her appearance fulfils the notions of ‘Polynesian Beauty’. Any imagery otherwise renders her human and no longer worthy of mention beyond romanticised fictions.

Britton’s portrayal of children as vessels of civilising potential is juxtaposed against the infantilisation of the adults. Just as the Islander ‘race’ as a whole has only reached a juvenile stage of development, the next generation must bear the weight of colonial expectation and the responsibility for the progressive development of their race into a ‘civilised’ adulthood that will be fit to join the colonisers at the grown-ups table. Women, however are harmless objects of derision or desire, either unworthy of mention and erased from history or romantically pined for from afar as objects of erotic temptation. That these same women are the mothers of the children upon whom the burden of progress is placed is therefore not coincidental, given the colonial desire to remove them.

APPENDIX A

The annual averages of 23-52 women and 523-552 men were arrived at by isolating the 4-9% from the 26,442 total identified in the table below and dividing that by the time period of 46 years i.e.

Women:

0.04 x 26,442 = 1057.68 ÷ 46 = 22.99 i.e. 23 per year

0.09 x 26442 = 2379.68 ÷ 46 = 51.73 i.e. 52

Men:

26442 – 2379.68 = 24062.32 = 523.09

26442 – 1057.8 = 25384 ÷ 46 = 551.83

ORIGIN	PERIOD	TOTALS
Vanuatu	1865-1907	14,198
Solomon Island	1870-1911	8,228
New Guinea	1882-1884	1,618
Gilbert Islands	1868-1895	2,398
Collated	1865-1911	26,442

Bibliography

Newspaper articles:

Britton, Henry, ‘THE PACIFIC LABOUR TRADE I’, Argus, Sep 6 1873, 6. Retrieved June 4, 2016, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article5871042.

———, ‘THE PACIFIC LABOUR TRADE V’, Argus, Oct 15 1873, 1. Retrieved June 4, 2016, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article5873686.

———, ‘THE PACIFIC LABOUR TRADE VII’, Argus, Nov 1 1873. 1. Retrieved June 4, 2016, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article5874631.

———, ‘THE PACIFIC LABOUR TRADE X’, Argus, Dec 2 1873. 5. Retrieved June 4, 2016, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article5876632.

Published Works:

Banivanua-Mar, T, Violence and Colonial Dialogue. (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007).

Jolly, Margaret, "‘To save the girls for brighter and better lives’: Presbyterian Missions and Women in the South of Vanuatu: 1848–1870”, The Journal of Pacific History, 26 (1991), 27-48.

Moore, C, J Leckie, & D Munro, Labour in the South Pacific. (Townsville, James Cook University of Northern Queensland, 1990).

Moynagh, M, Brown or White? (Canberra, Australian National University, 1981).

Nicole, R, Disturbing History: Resistance in Early Colonial Fiji. (Honolulu, University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2011.

Further reading:

Britton, Henry, ‘THE PACIFIC LABOUR TRADE II’, Argus, Sep 20 1873, 6. Retrieved June 4, 2016, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article5871969.

———, ‘THE PACIFIC LABOUR TRADE III’, Argus, Sep 27 1873, 6. Retrieved June 4, 2016, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article5872477.

———, ‘THE PACIFIC LABOUR TRADE IV’, Argus, Oct 6 1873, 1. Retrieved June 4, 2016, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article5873054.

———, ‘THE PACIFIC LABOUR TRADE VI’, Argus, Oct 25 1873. 1. Retrieved June 4, 2016, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article5874368.

———, ‘THE PACIFIC LABOUR TRADE VIII’, Argus, Nov 10 1873. 6. Retrieved June 4, 2016, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article5875091.

———,  ‘THE PACIFIC LABOUR TRADE IX’, Argus, Nov 22 1873. 10. Retrieved June 4, 2016, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article5876068.

———, ‘THE PACIFIC LABOUR TRADE XI’, Argus, Dec 9 1873. 4. Retrieved June 4, 2016, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article5877083.

———, ‘THE PACIFIC LABOUR TRADE XII’, Argus, Dec 20 1873. 5. Retrieved June 4, 2016, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article5877960.

———, Fiji in 1870. (Melbourne: S.Mullen, 1870).

Bowden, B., Work and strife in paradise. (Annandale, N.S.W: Federation Press, 2009).

Corris, P, "‘Blackbirding’ in New Guinea waters, 1883–34: An episode in the Queensland labour trade", The Journal of Pacific History, 3, 1968, 85-105.

Kelly, J., "‘Coolie’ as a labour commodity: Race, sex, and European dignity in colonial Fiji", Journal of Peasant Studies, 19, 1992, 246-267.

Price, C. & Baker, E., "Origins of Pacific Island labourers in Queensland, 1863–1904: A research note", The Journal of Pacific History, 11, 1976, 106-121.

Singh, S., "Alienated coolie-boy/alien language: Reading the subaltern adolescent in Mulk Raj Anand's Coolie", Contemporary South Asia, 20, 2012, 511-523.

Thomas, A., "Songs as history: A preliminary assessment of two songs of the recruiting era recently recorded in West Futuna, Vanuatu", The Journal of Pacific History, 27, 1992, 229-236.

Thomas, Nicholas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994)