Australia’s history is fascinating, and the more you look into it, you find how common are the themes.
People often throw around the phrase “economic zone” to describe the current state of Australia, a powerless, servile nation that is essentially being extorted and robbed blind by International finance capital which has through lobbying and pressure power conquered our Federal Parliament.
This idea of an “Economic Zone” is far from a new one, in the old days this was described as being a “plantation economy”, similar to Brazil or the American southland, where a slave-class of desperate coloured labourers would pick fruit, cotton and work hard labour to enrich their slave masters who would be enjoying their wealth and vanity, usually in another Continent.
Australia narrowly avoided becoming another Brazil; as was noted by Sir James F. Stephen on the 17th of July 1841:
“To expedite augmentation of wealth in New South Wales by introducing the black race there from India, would, in my mind, be one of the most unreasonable preferences to the present and to the future, which it would be possible to make.
There is not on the globe a social interest more momentous, if we look forward for five or six generations, than that of reserving the continent of New Holland as a place where the English race shall be spread from sea to sea unmixed with any lower caste. As we now regret the folly of our ancestors in colonizing North America from Africa, so should our posterity have to censure us if we should colonise Australia from India.”
Stephen, in his letter to Lord Russell asserted his high ideals of establishing a new civilisation in the Southern hemisphere, and not merely a for-profit plantation economy. This letter was written after business interests in NSW proposed the introduction of Indian labour to the Colony by Petition to the Crown. Stephen’s notable work before writing this letter as the head of the Colonial Office was the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 which brought an end to slavery across the empire.
The Early colonies, led by benevolent men of good conscience like Bligh and Macquarie averted the introduction of coloured labourers to the continent despite the financial interests of MacArthur and later Wentworth.
In October 1847, The local land baron Benjamin Boyd attempted to introduce a ship-load of pacific islanders to use as servile labour, as the Maitland Mercury reported:
As our demands for labour increase, and those who have raised a clamorous opposition to the introduction of British convicts into this colony once more, must be content hereafter to see our pastures filled, not with European Christians, but with cannibals, from their last disgusting banquet—with the flesh of their fellow-creatures hardly digested within them—and almost carrying about with them the repulsive odour of this unnatural food, which they have recently devoured. Then shall we find our fears excited, not for our properties, nor our morals, but for our lives
In response to this, the New South Wales Parliament amended the Masters and Servants Act 1847 to reduce the incentives to employ pacific island labourers and later the missionary ship Arch D’Alliance was reported as landing ‘the whole of the natives taken from Sydney (known as Boyd’s blacks)’ on one of the ‘Royalty Islands’ (presumably Loyalty Islands, present-day New Caledonia) in October 1848 bringing an end to one of the most prominent first attempts at establishing a coloured plantation economy.
During the Gold Rush Period, this same enticing financial interest struck again famously across the nation, at Syndicated and Corporate mining sites Chinese scab labourers were introduced to undermine collective bargaining efforts by Australia’s earliest unions. Most famously, as noted by W. G. Spence in his book “Australia’s Awakening”, the whole town of Clunes in Victoria rose up in arms to prevent the introduction of Chinese scab labourers to the Gold Mines operating in the district. Separately to this, Australian gold miners in Buckland River and Young NSW drove foreign miners off the fields by violent force in the face of Government inaction on the matter as the meeting in Young 1861 was started with the question to the audience: “Burrangong was to be ‘white or yellow territory’.”
The racial violence and chaos that followed in this period was immense: Chinese furniture factories taking over Victorian manufacturing, Pacific Islanders were being used on Sugar Cane fields in Queensland as near slave labour and the Australiasian Steam Navigation Company tried to replace their whole Australian workforce with Chinese crews in 1878 – something had to give, and it did in the great shearers Strike of 1891 which saw a nation-shifting event of shearers from Bourke to Barcaldine on a drawn out strike against “Freedom of Contract”, which was the barons euphemism for being free to reduce wages and introduce Chinese labour.
1891 saw the great William G. Spence lead the foundation of the Australian Workers Union and the Australian Labor Party which both had as their first plank the maintenance of a White Australia; this foundational period provided sufficient political force and pressure that was supported by the Australian Natives’ Association across the colonies to create a single federation: “One Nation. One Destiny” as expressed, a single border, a single army and most sacred of all, a dignified, White Australia and not a plantation economy.
We see, that this nation has slipped backwards since Liberalisation in the 1980s. Amongst a tidal wave of Hollywood propaganda undermining out national culture and purpose, our proud manufacturing swapped for cheap consumer goods and a ‘gig economy’, the Nationalist cause must be instrumental in the coming years in pressuring trade unions to adopt a Nationalist position that is in the interests of Australian Workers, to stop prostituting themselves to foreign scabs and media opinion. We must end the foreign tidal wave, as our forebears did, before we are completely drowned.
Let us remember the words of William G. Spence:
“The stand made by the shearers and shed employees in 1891 was not only against a reduction of wages and an attempt to introduce “freedom of contract,” but was principally against the introduction of Chinese labor.
The squatters had cut wages. This was bad enough, but when they were going to fill white men’s places with Chinese, and further insisted on “freedom of contract,” shearers and shed hands had no alternative but to go on strike.
Every effort at conciliation was made by the workers without avail. It has become clear since that the ruling authorities had never intended to give fair play. They laid their plans to crush the men, and it stands to the credit of the workers that in spite of all the powers of State, of suffering and imprisonment, they stood true to the cause they fought for, and proved themselves worthy sons of the great white race.”
M. K. Grant
National Governor
February 2025