Lachlan Macquarie was a slave owner and he wasn't the only one. It's time to update the history books (original) (raw)

Many Australians accept that history is contested and constantly evolving.

A quick glance at a 1950s Australian history book shows how far we have come. Those books tended to say more about Britain's royal family than Australia's First Nations.

Today, the reverse is true in Australian schools.

In September 2021, then Federal Education Minister Alan Tudge declared curriculums were "downplaying modern Australia, downplaying Western civilisation, downplaying our liberal democracy, which has created so much wealth and opportunity". Proposed changes to the national curriculum reflect an "overly negative view of Australia".

But there are difficult stories that remain untold.

And it's likely our national story will continue to evolve in ways showing that wealth and opportunity for some was predicated on the same racial categories that took it from others.

Does airing these stories unfairly diminish Western civilisation or reflect a negative view of Australia? Once we know that some of those involved in the making of modern Australia enslaved others, does it change our view of those founders and the foundation of this country? Should it?

While we are only just beginning to understand the impact these histories had on Australia, it's time to ask these questions.

More connections emerging

Enslavement was part of many European and African societies before the mid-fifteenth century, but the scale, intensity and level of social disruption created by a new trade in people that began at this time – since known as the transatlantic slave trade – made it unique.

Over 400 years, roughly 12.5 million Africans were transported to the Americas, representing the world's largest trans-oceanic migration up until that point. The forced removal and dispersal of Africans led to violence and social breakdown in Africa, while new ideas about racial hierarchy helped justify the trade in Europe.

Britain entered the slave trade later than the Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch, but its century of dominance produced the trade's greatest intensification with roughly 6 million Africans transported between 1700 and 1808.

When Britain abolished slavery in 1833, many who had profited from it as slave owners, slave traders and merchants pivoted away from the Atlantic.

Researchers at the Universities of Melbourne and Western Australia have found that about 200 came to Australia, with more people with slavery connections emerging all the time.

Britain's dominance of the slave trade produced its greatest intensification, such as slaves working in Antigua. (British Library Creative Commons )

For these men and women, the Australian colonies represented the British empire's future.

While few managed to import enslaved people into Australia, after Captain Arthur Phillip's declaration that there could be "no slavery in a free land, and consequently no slaves", many carried British slavery's fundamental conceit in their minds: that the land and labour of those who were not Christian or white could be justifiably taken to enrich those that were.

For example, Western Australia's first governor, James Stirling, whose family had built wealth through Atlantic slavery, readily acknowledged that he had led a party of "invaders" into Australia's western third. The "invaded" he described as "savages" who could only be led "by degrees" towards civilisation.

And, in Western Australia, many First Nations people were kidnapped or entrapped to work for no wages in the pastoral and pearling industries, while around 62,000 South Sea Islanders were trafficked to work on Queensland sugar plantations, as Bundaberg's mayor has recognised in a recent apology for the practice of "blackbirding".

These stories, like Australia's connections to British slavery have long been buried, but it's time they were told. Here are some that some Australians may not be aware of.

The governor

When he arrived at Sydney Cove in 1809, New South Wales Governor Lachlan Macquarie was accompanied by an Indian man named George Jarvis. The "father of Australia" had purchased Jarvis when he was six years old, with another boy aged seven.

Lachlan Macquarie recorded in his diaries that he purchased two slaves for 170 rupees. (Wikimedia Commons: State Library of New South Wales)

Macquarie, who was then a captain in the British Army, described them as "very fine, well-looking healthy Black Boys", and paid 170 rupees. The older boy escaped; the younger one, George, would serve Macquarie for life.

These facts, documented in Macquarie's diaries, are not as well-known as the many positive stories about him.

Yet those positive stories alone reflect an inaccurate picture of Macquarie and the society from which he came.

Macquarie was also one of the beneficiaries of the enormous wealth generated by British-Caribbean slavery. His first wife, Jane Jarvis, was the daughter of slave-owner and the Chief Justice of the British colony of Antigua, Thomas Jarvis. George was probably given Jane's surname because the money to purchase him came from her family.

Macquarie's first wife, Jane Jarvis, was the daughter of slave-owner Thomas Jarvis. (State Library NSW )

When she died at the age of 23, Jarvis bequeathed to Macquarie £6,000, or around £460,000 in today's money, a small fortune that came from her father.

It allowed Macquarie to literally buy senior offices, or positions, in the British Army in India. These promotions helped him be appointed governor-in-chief of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land in 1809.

The founder

Western Australia's founding governor James Stirling came from a Glaswegian family made enormously wealthy through British slavery.

WA's first governor Sir James Stirling came from a family made wealthy by slavery. (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales)

Stirling's rise to captain in the Britain's Royal Navy in Jamaica was predicated on this wealth and standing. It was as a captain that Stirling petitioned the Colonial Office to set up a new colony in Australia's western third.

Stirling's campaign for colonisation was driven by his father-in-law, James Mangles, a wealthy Atlantic ocean slaver whose ships were transporting convicts to New South Wales by the 1820s.

Mangles, like many investors in the East India Company, saw commercial advantages in a British settlement on the western coast of the Australian continent.

Stirling's two grandfathers and four great-grandfathers all made serious money from the trade in slave-produced goods and some through enslavement itself.

Stirling's father traded textiles with the slave-owners of Jamaica. To give a sense of the scale of his wealth: in one year he lost the equivalent of £7 million yet continued trading.

In his proposals for the Western Australia settlement, Governor James Stirling worked with the pro-slavery advocate Thomas Moody to recommend to the Colonial office a three-tiered, racially segregated society made up of white, privately funded settlers, Irish paupers and labourers fromIndia and China.

People from this last category were to be put to work on cotton plantations, "in the hotter climates of the territory", under a different form of labour governed by long-term contracts of indenture and very low wages.

Though Stirling's large-scale proposals never eventuated, hundreds of indentured workers from Asia came to nineteenth century Western Australia to work for minimal wages in the agricultural, pastoral and pearling industries. Many suffered appalling conditions not experienced by white workers.

The judge

Como House was built by Edward Eyre Williams, a slave-owner and son of a Trinidad planter. (Supplied: National Trust, Image by Anthony Basheer.)

One of the National Trust's most spectacular Victorian properties, Como House, was built by a slave owner and son of a Trinidad planter. Edward Eyre Williams became a Supreme Court judge in 1852, ten years after arriving in Port Phillip from England, but this was not how he accrued enough wealth to build Como House.

Edward Eyre Williams and his brother received "compensation" from the British government after abolition. (Supplied: Photography by Batchelder & O'Neill )

With his brother, he owned 64 enslaved people in Trinidad. In the decade leading up to abolition, Williams, his brothers and father owned at least 450 enslaved people in the Bahamas.

When slavery was abolished, Williams and his brother were awarded the equivalent of roughly £210,000 by the British government for the loss of their "human property".

British taxpayers finally paid off the loan the government took out for these compensation payments in 2015.

The enslaved received nothing.

Whether the racial narratives that led Williams to enslave Africans in Trinidad were also present in his judgements over First Nations people in the early colony is something we are now investigating.

The reverend

Between 1840 and 1884, Reverend Robert Allwood was vicar of Sydney's St James Church and, between 1869 and 1883, the University of Sydney Vice-Chancellor.

Reverend Robert Allwood received a vast inheritance from his slave-owning father. (Wikimedia Commons: St James' Church, Sydney, NSW)

He was born in Jamaica and, before leaving for Sydney, he received an inheritance of £135,000 from his slave-owning father. He also unsuccessfully claimed compensation for 202 enslaved people in British Guiana.

Allwood came to Australia with his wife, Anna Rebecca Bush, daughter of slave-owner Joseph Bush. This inspired his sister Anne to emigrate to Hobart with her husband Francis Henslowe. His sister had also received a slavery inheritance of £135,000, which helped her and Henslowe, private secretary to Sir John Franklin and first clerk of the colony's House of Assembly, get established in Tasmania.

The scale of Allwood's father's slave-holdings explains these inheritance payments. At the point of abolition, Allwood senior owned 309 enslaved people on three separate plantations in Jamaica, co-owned 227 people on another plantation and had a stake in 73 people on another. At the point of abolition, Allwood senior received more than £500,000 in today's money in compensation.

Reverend Allwood was a leading religious and educational figure in modern Sydney – the question is: what impact did his views on race have on the city?

Confronting difficult histories

Plenty of questions remain. How did these former slave-owners and children of slave-owners shape the burgeoning Australian colonies, especially on matters of race and labour?

How were relations between colonists and First Nations people influenced by the mass enslavement of Africans that some colonists had perpetuated and benefited from?

And did the money from slavery and compensation payments find its way to Australia?

That we are just beginning to ask these questions – that only now are links between Australia and Atlantic slavery emerging – indicates not that we have been too negative about our past, but that we have been too trepidatious in confronting difficult histories.

Dr Georgina Arnott is a postdoctoral research associate at the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne and an ABC Top 5 Humanities scholar for 2021.

References

Herbert S Klein's The Atlantic Slave Trade (OUP, 1999)

Jane Lydon's Anti-Slavery and Australia: No Slavery in a Free Land (Routledge, 2021)

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