Unfree Labour and Australia’s Obscured Pacific Histories: Towards a New Genealogy of Modern Slavery

Abstract

The passage of Australia’s Modern Slavery Act 2018 received bipartisan support and was heralded within both Houses of Parliament as a significant step towards addressing Australia’s complicity in modern slavery. Political discourse surrounding the legislation, however, exhibits a profound and disconcerting dehistoricisation, emphasising particularities of global supply chains and contemporary transnational capitalism. Australia’s own histories of slavery, slavery-like conditions and unfree labour are overwhelmingly absent from these narratives, which are framed instead by occasional references to the transatlantic slave trade. Attending particularly to histories of coerced Pacific labour within Australia, we analyse these absences as reflective of deeply rooted fissures of memory and power within Australia’s national imaginaries, and of the exercise of colonial power both within the settler state and in its entanglements with the region. Through reference to two threads of Pacific labour history in Australia—the struggle for recognition of the 19th-century Pacific labour trade, and the labour patterns of 20th-century Papuan and New Guinean domestic workers—we argue for an alternate genealogy of modern slavery, one that re-centres attention to race and coloniality, and attends more fully to the presence of the past in the exploitations of the present.