 |
| Margaret Slocomb and her mother, Lorna, now deceased. |
Margaret Slocomb holds a PhD in history from the University of Queensland. An education specialist, she spent most of her professional career in China and several countries in Southeast Asia, particulary Cambodia. She has written a fascinating history of Chinese Indentured Pastoral Workers in the Wide Bay. Copies of her book Among Australia's pioneers : Chinese indentured pastoral workers on the Northern Frontier 1848 to C.1880 / Margaret Slocomb can be found in Fraser Coast Libraries local history collection. More recently she has contributed an article to the Journal Labour History - Preserving the contract: The experience of indentured labourers in the Wide Bay and Burnett districts in the nineteenth century. When asked about her comprehensive and unique research, the following is Margaret's reflection:
In 1981, I was posted to Shanghai on an exchange lecturer
programme run by the Australia-China Council.
Before I left, an aunt told me
that my great-grandfather had been a shepherd from Amoy. It seemed implausible.
Sheep? My grandmother, I knew, was born on Yarrol Station in the North Burnett,
but surely that was cattle country.
About twenty years later, my mother had a stroke that forced her into a nursing home. I decided to return permanently to Australia, if only to help ease her boredom. I needed a project that we could share, so I returned to the story of the Amoy shepherd.
Approximately half of those men (no women) were indentured to squatters
in the Northern Districts, i.e. New England and points north to the Wide Bay
and Burnett that formed the northern frontier of European settlement at that
time. Their contracts were for five years on a static wage with rations. Given
that their indentures coincided with the great gold rushes in the south that
made pastoral labour scarce and expensive, especially in the most northern
districts where labour was always in short supply, this scheme represented a
huge saving for the squatters.
As you might anticipate, some of these men prospered, married well (i.e. European wives), earned the respect of their communities and had good lives. At the other end of the scale, some took their own lives in despair, some were committed to institutions for the mentally deranged, one was hanged outside Brisbane gaol. Some of them lived simply in loving arrangements with local Aboriginal women and raised their children responsibly. Some remained bachelors and became local characters. In the main, they were typical pioneers of the time. They were foreigners, of course, but in the days before the White Australia policy, they were allowed full participation in the settler society of the Wide Bay and Burnett.
Fraser Coast Libraries are excited to have Margaret present a talk in 2019 as part of the Heritage Festival. Please see a recording of her talk here.
Published with consent from Margaret Slocomb
Tags #chinese #indentured #widebay #localhistory
 |
| Overseas Chinese Museum in Xiamen (Amoy). |
About twenty years later, my mother had a stroke that forced her into a nursing home. I decided to return permanently to Australia, if only to help ease her boredom. I needed a project that we could share, so I returned to the story of the Amoy shepherd.
By then,
the groundwork had been done into researching the indentured labour scheme
based in Amoy (now Xiamen), a harbour city in Fujian Province on the south
China coast that between 1848 and 1854 brought about three thousand men, aged
between 18 and 30, to work in the pastoral industry of the colony of New South
Wales.
 |
| Photo of a Chinese labourer destined for foreign ports. (Taken in the OCM, Xiamen) source Margaret Slocomb. |
Because the
basics had already been researched and critiqued, I was able to focus my own
study on the men themselves: their experiences under indenture, the
opportunities that awaited them post-indenture, their love lives, their run-ins
with the law, their fates. I did my best to maintain an historian’s objectivity
and did not dwell on my great-grandfather’s progress. However, he remained
chief among the two hundred or so ghosts that I carried around with me for
the five or six years that I concentrated on this particular project.
 |
| Jim Channer, eldest son of Tan Chan, the Margaret Slocomb's great-grandfather. |
As you might anticipate, some of these men prospered, married well (i.e. European wives), earned the respect of their communities and had good lives. At the other end of the scale, some took their own lives in despair, some were committed to institutions for the mentally deranged, one was hanged outside Brisbane gaol. Some of them lived simply in loving arrangements with local Aboriginal women and raised their children responsibly. Some remained bachelors and became local characters. In the main, they were typical pioneers of the time. They were foreigners, of course, but in the days before the White Australia policy, they were allowed full participation in the settler society of the Wide Bay and Burnett.
Fraser Coast Libraries are excited to have Margaret present a talk in 2019 as part of the Heritage Festival. Please see a recording of her talk here.
Published with consent from Margaret Slocomb
Tags #chinese #indentured #widebay #localhistory
No comments:
Post a Comment