Thieving hand of the law
There could have been a real Aboriginal working class, but government cruelled the chance.
The proud 80-year-old Aboriginal stockman finally saw justice done this week when the class action that bears his name as lead applicant, Pearson v Queensland, was settled out of court, with the state agreeing to pay $190 million in compensation for treating indigenous workers like “slaves”, in the words of one of their lawyers.
If you want to understand why the dispossession that flowed from European settlement still cuts raw for Australia’s first peoples, this saga opens a window into the grinding hurt, indignity and subjugation that was their lot under the law of the land.
We are not talking dusty colonial history here.
The acts of parliament that were used to plunder what should have been Pearson’s earnings for 10 years between 1953 and 1963, as he drove cattle from one end of Cape York to the other, remained in force in Queensland until 1972 and $10.8m in frozen proceeds of the “stolen wages” were still on the government’s books in 2008.
His celebrated nephew, Noel Pearson, the community leader and nationally ranked thinker who has championed welfare reform on the peninsula, insists there can be no true reconciliation between white and black Australia until there is “truth telling” about what happened on the frontier of settlement to Aborigines and islanders, and how the impact of this cascaded through subsequent generations. “For me, it’s really the third part of the formula put forward at Uluru — the voice, treaty and truth,” he tells Inquirer, citing the 2017 road map to reconciliation now at the centre of an intensifying political row over whether indigenous people should speak to parliament through a representative body enshrined in the Constitution.
“And the truth is that Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders contributed to the development of the state … my father and Uncle Hans, they went out in pursuit of work in the post-war period and they never got rewarded with an equal footing with everybody else. That’s the truth.
“We have become mired in the welfare problem over the past 40 years because rather than offering us a place in the economy, the accommodation was reached that we were given a place in the welfare system. There was a fork in the road when the discrimination of the past could have led to a new era … where people who worked hard could have enjoyed the same opportunities as other Queenslanders had.
“There could have been a real Aboriginal working class.”
Instead, a system hatched in the late 19th century to harness tribal labour for the emergent beef industry across the vast top end of Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia morphed into one to control and exploit the entire indigenous population when it was herded into missions, forerunners to the troubled remote communities of today.
Wages that were supposed to be paid to the state and held in trust were either pocketed by dishonest graziers and police or put to other use by the government.
When Canberra began to pay pensions and child endowment to Aboriginal and islander people, all too often the money never got past the state capital. It’s not as if the powers that be were blind to what was happening.
Consultant historian Ros Kidd, whose research on the stolen wages underpinned a 2016 Senate inquiry as well as the class action in Queensland run by Cairns solicitor John Bottoms, now set to be rolled out nationally by big-city firm Shine Lawyers, uncovered one government audit after another that called out the rorts. “For Aboriginal people, it was institutionalised poverty from the very first years of settlement that lasted to the late 1960s,” Kidd says.
Witness this scene described by the Cairns Argus in 1886, 10 years after the settlers belatedly arrived, a “kind of government function that certainly was not creditable to the authorities and should bring a blush of shame to the cheeks of every colonist”. A crowd of 150 tribal people is milling in the police paddock, where officers of the peace are busily tearing in half blankets to hand out. In the middle of this a telegram arrives from Brisbane. Hold on, there’s been a mistake! They should get a whole blanket each.
It was too much for the paper to stomach. “Astounding magnanimity,” the Argus noted sarcastically. “We have taken from the Queensland natives no less than 428,663,360 acres of land. Out of this vast and luxuriant area, about 10 million acres have been sold (for) six and a quarter million cash. Another 300 millions of acres have leased, from which the state derives an annual rental of £332,800. In return for this governments, past and present, give these black-skinned, patient, uncomplaining children of the soil one whole blue blanket per year, costing perhaps five shillings each. And yet we profess to call ourselves Christians.”
By Federation in 1901, Queensland had established a contract system for indigenous workers — covering pearlers in the Torres Strait, stockmen, labourers, female domestics — setting a notional minimum wage starting at five shillings, an eighth of the rate for whites. Notional, because enforcement was mainly left to the local “protector of natives”, typically a police sergeant.
After World War I, the state mandated that with the exception of “pocket money”, wages were to be paid into an “Aboriginal Provident Fund”, to hold the money in trust for the “relief of natives”.
Impressed by the Queensland scheme, WA set up similar arrangements, while the Northern Territory had a medical benefit fund and NSW withheld the pay of indigenous apprentices and some security entitlements.
Working the system, the Queensland government went on to establish a consolidated “Aboriginal Account” that would continue to operate in one form or another into the 1990s.
The trouble was, very little if any money ever ended up in the hands of those it was supposed to be benefit.
Like most of his contemporaries, Hans Pearson received only the sketchiest education before he was sent to work at 14 in Hope Vale, a one-time Lutheran mission outside Cooktown. But the woman he married in 1960, Anna May, a Palm Islander who was good with numbers, calculated that he was owed £7000 by 1963 — equivalent to $235,000 in today’s dollars. The couple had picked out a house in the picturesque sugar town of Innisfail and agreed a price with the seller.
But when he turned up to ask the local police sergeant for his cash, Pearson, who had never been paid in all the years he had worked, was cut a cheque for a risible £28. He couldn’t believe it.
“I said, ‘You’ve got to be joking’, but he wasn’t; he was dead serious. He told me, ‘that’s all you’ve got, mate. Off you go.’
“My missus had tears in her eyes,” Pearson remembers. “She said, ‘That can’t be right. You worked for 10 years.’ But that’s how it was … I know people who grew up on the cattle stations, worked there all their lives and came to Hope Vale with only their swags. No money, no nothing.”
He and Anna May never got to own a house. Widowed and alone — his wife died in 2009, two years after Bottoms took the case that now bears Pearson’s name — he lives in a housing commission rental in Townsville. As his nephew points out, the effect on the family has been lasting. “You know, he didn’t get to join that story of working, saving, putting a deposit down, owning your first home,” Noel Pearson says.
“It’s his great regret. Every Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander was like him and his wife — hard workers, engaged in the mainstream economy in whatever form of work that was available. But because of this system of managing wages, they were robbed. It went on because it was sanctioned by the state.
“If they had got to own their own home back in the 1960s, then their nine children would have had a chance to get into home ownership; they would have the role model of that, but also the assistance. Once your parents have a home, they can also help you with a loan. And a virtuous cycle continues after that. He’s now got scores of grandchildren, scores and scores of great-grandchildren. His tribe is massive now.”
Queensland’s move to settle the class action sets a precedent for similar cases in the works in WA, where Shine Lawyers has already signed up 400 potential claimants, plus the Territory and NSW.
The clock is ticking. About two-thirds of the 10,000 anticipated beneficiaries in Queensland are deceased, with their allocations set to be paid to next of kin. The litigation covered a three-decade period from 1939 to 1972, when the so-called control system was finally dismantled.
Hans Pearson, reasonably enough, hopes Deputy Premier and Treasurer Jackie Trad will deliver on her promise to expedite the process. He’s thinking of his old mate Eddie Mabo, the lead applicant in the landmark 1992 High Court case that created native title, changing the law of the land. Poor Koiki — he didn’t live to see his life’s work vindicated.
“I did for my mates what Mabo did for all of us,” Pearson says, savouring his victory. “I’m 80 years of age and I know an old lady in Rockhampton who’s nearly 100 and she’s waiting, like me, for them to come through. I can tell you … they’d better hurry up, eh.”
It’s bad enough that they stole a decade’s worth of Hans Pearson’s hard-earned wages; worse for him and his family that for so long Australian governments at state and federal levels regarded it, quite literally, as business as usual.