On the topic of convict labour, something I wonder about sometimes is why Australians never seem to conceptualise our country as one with a history of slavery. A significant amount of the population have ancestors who were shipped, in chains, to be forced labour, but I have never met anyone who called this slavery or imagines themself to be a descendant of slaves. Is it just because everyone's mental image is overridden by US race-based chattel slavery?
you sent this after I had made the second poll but before it was posted (I schedule a lot of posts for yank hours) so I let this hang until now.
Firstly I want to say that my own thoughts are evolving on this. we use slavery to referr to two related but seperate phenomenon - first is compelled labour, and the second is ownership of human beings. This can cause a bit of muddling when you have one without the other, and despite the horrors of the former it is the latter which is the source of the greatest evils. In Australia, we did not have the latter in convict labour.
secondly, convicts in Australia faced a very wide range of outcomes when they landed here, based on their conviction, when they arrived, their behaviour after arrival, their skillset and the whims of the governor of the day. For example, in Newcastle many toiled in horrendous conditions in coal mines, dying anonymously to fuel the industrial revolution in Britain, some in the same area were chosen by the governor to build for him a personal pool, carved into the bottom of 20 meter ocean cliffs with hand tools. Famously, convicts built a number of highways, some up mountains, hauling their own stockades for hundreds of kilometres with their own muscles up the road as they completed it.
then you have many more lucky cunts who were given conditional pardons basically the moment they landed, and lived fairly charmed lives and opened businesses. And many convicts sat in the middle - their compelled labour was essentially to grow food to eat along the Parramatta river, and otherwise given much latitude, which they used to abuse and chase off and torment the aboriginal peoples who had previously lived thereupon. in some cases, the colonial government were the ones intervening to save aboriginal populations from the deprivations of casually-violent convicts.
this all without getting into the later periods of indentures, of course.
Thirdly, and I want to be precise in saying this, Australians simply do not have the same grievances with our past as African Americans. We're fine. Have I suffered because one of my great-great grandparents may have toiled in forced labour? Did their children and children's children, and sometimes even they themselves, not have great opportunity, and a basically immediate end to discrimination based on this convict history? Despite being forced to come here, were they not then free to live as they liked, love as they liked, die as they liked? It is simply incomparable between even the forced convict labourers and African chattel slaves.
Even the forced journeys across the oceans were different! the first fleet was a goddamn pleasure cruise compared to slave ships. This is frankly an understatement. And we were not bought and sold. Yes, many of our convict ancestors were themselves victims of ethnic discrimination as Irish in England, displaced or ripped from their homes by British colonial violence in Ireland. Some even were political prisoners, exiled for sedition. But where does that show in the colour of our society?
Partially this is because the worst convict labour was relegated to a minority, over all, of convicts (and in Newcastle's case, I believe that minority mostly just died out young and anonymous, but I may be wrong.) for most convicts, they were dumped here, told to have a go of it, and left to their own devices. those are the majority of our ancestors. contrast this to African Americans, for whom essentially all of their ancestors were slaves up until a point in time.
This constitutes both a psychological difference, but also and mainly an economic/political difference. our convict ancestors were abused, yes. forced across the ocean, yes. but they were, largely, their own people, free to live as they saw fit and have and raise children as they saw fit. Their economic and political reality rapidly transformed into that of a settler, so rapidly in fact that even many who were technically still serving their sentences were essentially homestead farmers!
So while I think one could call something like the great north road or the early newy coal mines slave labour, I think it would be somewhat of a distortion to call the Australian convict labourers slaves generally. This is to say nothing of the fact that, for example, Melbourne and Vic are entirely free of this convict history - colonies founded to be independent of and free from convict labourers which would have devalued their own, a colony built on a gold rush.
