Indigenous Slaves Single
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When Barack Obama first ran for president, he gave a speech on race and slavery on a spring day in Philadelphia in 2008. At its center, he placed a quote from William Faulkner who said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

Hey, that's my mate Matt Andrews. And in addition to being my long time friend, for a white guy, he's the keenest student of local Aboriginal history that I know. And I've asked him to talk about Australian Indigenous slavery. Australia's past with slavery was made present when the Prime Minister Scott Morrison gave a radio interview in the winter of 2020.

He claimed Australia, when it was founded as a settlement as New South Wales, was on the basis that there'd be no slavery. And while slave ships continued to travel around the world, when Australia was established, yes, sure, it was a pretty brutal settlement. My forefathers and foremothers were on the first and second fleets. It was a pretty brutal place.

But there was no slavery in Australia. The yelling on Twitter began. Lies! Ever heard of the practice of blackbirding? My mind went to the cane fields of Queensland, where Kabi Kabi man Ray Minican knows his grandfather slaved for the sugar industry.

Then to one arm point in Western Australia, where Arnie Francine Ritchie's people, the Dbadijawi, were forced to dive for pearls. Many drowned. Did the Prime Minister deny history? At the core of his statement were two words: "No slavery." And that's an echo from Governor Arthur Phillip.

In a letter he wrote to the Secretary for Home Affairs in 1786, Philip says that all the rights afforded to the British person would be given to people in Australia, including Indigenous people. But there would be one thing given to Australians that no British land had until that point.

"The laws of this country will, of course, be introduced in New South Wales," Philip wrote, "and there is one that I would wish to take place from the moment His Majesty's forces take possession of the country: that there can be no slavery in a free land, and consequently no slaves." That language also has an echo.

to the British MP William Wilberforce, a belligerent evangelical reformer. One of Wilberforce's life goals was the suppression of the slave trade. But the place he first found success wasn't in the UK, or the West Indies, or the United States, which Britain had lost of course, but on the other side of the world.

The human rights lawyer Jeffrey Robertson QC says as a result of Phillips' proclamation, Australia had abolished slavery in Governor Phillips' first law 20 years before Britain. Music

So what of my Indigenous friends and their experience? That's when I think of another Wilberforce. Not from Hull, in the north of the UK, but an Indigenous Wilberforce. My mind heads south, down the mighty Murray River, the land of the Bangarang, where they speak Yorta Yorta.

It was here in 1881, 42 men from the Maloga Mission signed a petition. They wanted their land and they wanted to be free to farm it. And some of them had taken the name Wilberforce. It was a signal to the Governor of New South Wales. They knew who Wilberforce was, what his name meant. They also knew slavery.

The Yorta Yorta have one song they still sing in language, and it's about being rescued from slavery. These are people who had been driven off their land by pastoralists and woodcutters working without pay. But the most egregious slavery they knew happened to their women.

The Maloga Mission Annual Report of 1883 explains how the missionary Daniel Matthews would walk into the woodcutter's camps and find women and girls living as sex slaves and demand their release. Even today, local people talk about Matthews marching into a camp with an axe and breaking the chains that held a girl to a bed.

Has there been slavery in Australia? There's been a double deception here. And it's probably time, for all our sakes, we were undeceived. Make no mistake, in the cane fields of Queensland, the oyster beds of the West Kimberley, in the forests of the Murray River, whitefellas forced blackfellas into labour. And the worst kind of abuse. And sometimes it was suit and tie wearing churchgoers who held the guns.

But there's something else we've hidden. Philip's proclamation against slavery. So hidden, we can't believe he made it. When the national broadcaster, the ABC, did a fact check on Scott Morrison, they said, "Actually, it checks out." Philip, echoing Wilberforce, had made a proclamation of emancipation before slavery even began.

Those Yorta Yorta men, with the name Wilberforce, later took the surname Atkinson or Cooper. The greatest among them was William Cooper, whose work led to the watershed 1967 referendum for Indigenous people. As he worked on his justice campaigns, he felt let down many times, but about the missionaries, he said, "We feel they have been and are our best friends."

And his grandson, Uncle Boydie, tells me there's one song they used to sing before their meetings called Burrafera. Ready?

Womriga Moses Yin and Wala, Wala Yuma nayay Puch, Naraburra Phera Yuma nayay Yala Naraburra Phera Yuma nayay Yala Yala Naraburra Phera Yuma nayay Yala Yala

It's the song about being rescued from slavery, of escaping from Pharaoh, of passing through the water to take their own land where there would be no slavery.

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