How do we reckon with past wrongs that we are implicated in?
Public debates about history are divisive: the desire to celebrate the past clashes with calls to acknowledge the darker significance of histories of colonisation and imperialism, and their damaging consequences for us in the present. New collaborative investigation of the Australian legacies of British slavery has shown that previously overlooked drivers of Australian colonisation include slavery wealth and ideology. The imperial reorganisation of industrial, mercantile and financial capital that occurred when Britain abolished slavery in the 1830s fuelled investment and settler colonialism in the new colonies of Australia and New Zealand. Since our research project began in 2020, we have come to understand that these seemingly distinct imperial regions and economies were connected by individuals and families who received compensation when Britain abolished slavery for the loss of their human ‘property’. Many re-invested in the new settler colonies – Western Australia, South Australia, Victoria and New Zealand – established in that era, while many emigrants from the Caribbean modelled their exploitation of First Nations peoples on slavery precedents. The expansion of the Australasian colonies during the 1830s was not coincidental but both enabled and benefitted from abolition.
Among the implications of this history is that slavery did not end after 1833: many practices and attitudes continued. In the Australian context we see this in a few ways. First Nations peoples were forced, for example, into domestic servitude, exploitative pastoral work and the hazardous pearling industry. South Sea Islanders were often coerced into taking up unfair indenture contracts on Queensland’s sugar plantations. Our new edited collection, Legacies of British Slavery in Australia and New Zealand , brings together diverse threads linking the histories of chattel slavery in the Caribbean – to the newer Australasian settler colonies. It demonstrates the many afterlives of slavery: although the English language offers only the binary categories of slavery vs freedom, we know that the post-abolition world simply developed new forms of forced labour and exploitation under different names.
What impact might this new understanding have upon public discourse? How does knowing about this global and imperial framework change Australian understandings of the past – and the present?
Public responses
The idea that chattel slavery formed a concrete aspect of Australian history is still new to many non-Indigenous people. We have found that public audiences are fascinated by this revelation. Most recently, for example, on 8 May we convened a well-attended panel as part of the History Festival of South Australia, in the State Library of South Australia. We examined some of the economic, familial and ideological ways that the slavery business shaped the post-abolition colonies of South Australia and Victoria, and were asked questions such as ‘did slavery wealth fund the South Australian Company?’ (Answer: Yes, it was part of the mix).
Our biographical method has been a powerful means of instantiating abstract global processes. We have worked with the National Centre for Biography to create entries for those who embody connections between slavery and Australia. Such life stories are a compelling and effective means of tracing links and mobility. However, this approach has also prompted mixed responses from descendants: some have accepted their family’s involvement in the slavery economy as part of a complex history; others have been defensive, seeking to minimise or erase such evidence.
Despite the value of individual life stories, we have also argued that a narrow focus on historical individuals as perpetrators risks allowing us to feel both comfortingly distant from troubling historical practices, as well as morally superior to the past. There is a need to acknowledge collective responsibility for the persistent inequalities produced by historical wrongs : non-Indigenous Australians today are implicated in this history.
By contrast, First Nations responses to this research have been extremely positive: descendants immediately recognise that colonial mistreatment was shaped by ideas about race which were based in slavery. Many First Nations Australians have stories of the enslavement of their ancestors – such as Badimia woman Carol Dowling who wrote a powerful foreword to our collection, and her sister Julie Dowling’, whose beautiful portrait of their great-great-grandmother Melbin, who had been subjected to domestic servitude during the 1870s, features on the book’s cover. This research confirms their lived experience.
Chains of Empire
These diverse and evolving views were captured by responses to an exhibition based on the project team’s research titled Chains of Empire, hosted by the Australian National Maritime Museum from August 2024 to June 2025, curated by Isobel Smith and Paul Arthur. The Museum’s Head of Knowledge, Dr Peter Hobbins, reflected that ‘Chains of Empire was a bold move for the Australian National Maritime Museum. … this was the first time we addressed outright the question of slavery in Australia. Nevertheless, the exhibition had support throughout the museum, including strong engagement from our Indigenous Programs team. The history was new to many staff but all were convinced of its potent messages and the undeniable empirical evidence provided by the ARC-funded research team.’ The exhibition told stories about slavery as a source of settler wealth in colonised Australia, and an important centrepiece was Dowling’s arresting portrait of Melbin. Hobbins concluded that ‘despite its provocative messages, Chains of Empire was welcomed as a way of starting conversations that the museum will continue to encourage.’
A popular interactive asked visitors to respond to three questions, with 67% agreeing that ‘The conditions endured by some workers in Australia in the past were a form of slavery’. Notably, one third do not agree. This snapshot captures views which are still evolving. Indeed, as researchers, our own views have changed over the course of the project- from initially emphasising discontinuities between these two seemingly distinct imperial histories – to recognising the continuities, especially from the perspective of First Nations people and other exploited groups.
The Inferred Slight: Australian history and hierarchies of victimhood
More recently, in April, when the publication of our new collection was announced on a history department Facebook page, the many resulting comments provided us with an opportunity to survey some ‘public’ responses to the idea of slavery in Australia. No one who posted had read the book: at most, these were reactions to an image of the book’s front cover, including title and artwork, and the back cover blurb.
Most responded to the part of the book’s title which read ‘Slavery in Australia and New Zealand’, overlooking the full title’s reference to the ‘Legacies of British Slavery’. Several wrote that they knew about slavery in Australia, referencing the enslavement of Indigenous peoples and /or South Sea Islanders; a subset added that these histories needed to be better known. One wrote that ‘Surely it is slavery when ‘slaves’ have no control over themselves, are not paid, provided with sub standard accommodation and food. They cannot travel or marry without permission and decisions about their children are often taken out of their hands!’ This was the life of many Australians, First Nations people. ‘They were slaves and it is about time that First Nations slavery was recognised!’
Others disputed slavery’s existence in Australia, often by emphasising either that slavery was an ‘anti-slavery’ colony or that slavery had been illegal in the Australian colonies: one asked, ‘please enlighten everyone when Slavery was legal in Australia? … It’s not obvious because Australia was settled as an Anti-Slavery colony. … Slavery was never legal.’
Interestingly, these kinds of remarks were taken up and disputed by others in the comments, who emphasised that slavery being illegal did not necessarily mean an absence of slavery, and pointed out that slavery was legal in the British Empire until the 1833 Abolition Act. Some, adopting a defensive tone, emphasised the convict experience and implied that it was being overlooked, for example stating ‘I hope they acknowledge that the convict system that settled and built Australia, was itself slavery pure and simple. We seem to ignore this…’
What do these responses reveal? First, very few of the people who posted a lengthy comment had any real sense of what the book is about. Our project’s research has sought to answer complex historical questions about the relationship between chattel slavery in the Atlantic and Australian colonisation. Yet the Facebook posts revolve around whether or not we should understand the historical status of certain groups in Australian history as enslavement, whether those groups be Indigenous, South Sea Islanders, or convicts. They reflect our tendency to view Australia’s history within national bounds – even when we are explicitly invited to put that history in an imperial or global framework.
Yet there were others whose comments connected their claims about the past to the present, which we think does reflect the findings of our research. Some of these noted how historic Indigenous experiences of colonialism continue to reverberate today.
But some of these denied that colonial practices were as bad as slavery. They did not necessarily deny historical wrongs against Indigenous peoples – but rather they asserted that the difficult experiences of other groups such as white convicts should receive equivalent recognition (there were echoes here too of other national contexts – such as the defensive slogan, ‘#AllLivesMatter’ reaction to #BLM [Black Lives Matter]). For example it was argued that while Indigenous Australians’ ‘truth holds much validity’ it ‘pales to insignificance when compared to the surrogate form implemented here – white slavery of 175,000 convicts.’ It was asserted that ‘We tend to overlook the fact that after slavery was abolished the convicts were exploited for labour.’
However, this neglects the vast amount of information available about convicts. The claim therefore seems to be that convict suffering is not adequately recognised, and that the descendants of convicts today should be aggrieved. Yet again, this idea is hard to sustain given that the many narratives centring upon the violence, alienation, isolation, brutality and injustice of convict transportation – even as there is also evidence of convicts whose life chances were improved by their transportation.
It is evident that it is not easy for many non-Indigenous Australians (and especially for many non-Indigenous ‘White’ Australians), to recognise that they are implicated in the historical process of colonisation, whatever their personal circumstances, or the personal experiences of their direct ancestors. They belong to a group which, on average, has benefitted from the colonisation of Australia. Conversely Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have been and continue to be disadvantaged. But many non-Indigenous Australians find this too difficult to acknowledge.
What does this mean for the chances of a shared Australian understanding of our history, even if only since 1788?
Historical Responsibility
Crucially, the history of the legacies of British slavery in Australia speaks to the imperative of Truth Telling- the acknowledgement of the impact of colonisation on First Nations people, and associated processes of reconciliation. By placing colonial histories of invasion and exploitation into a longer historical trajectory we think this new research makes a significant contribution to this goal. The history of chattel slavery has enormous cultural power and we see First Nations people increasingly cast their ancestors’ experience in terms of slavery.
Many acknowledge that past actions have lasting consequences that require present-day acknowledgement and accountability. The global movement for historical justice, aiming to acknowledge and redress historic wrongs – including acts of genocide, slavery, colonialism, and the oppression of ethnic or religious minorities, constitutes one of the most significant moral and social developments of our times. Citizens are subject to intergenerational requirements of justice: binding our successors through treaty-making and other agreements is essential to the business of political community, but also incurs the corollary obligation of honouring the (just) treaties, promises and contracts of our predecessors.
Acknowledging and responding to the past is therefore a key form of civic engagement. Non-Indigenous Australians can be construed as ‘implicated subjects’: neither guilty of, nor to blame for, historical crimes but, as beneficiaries of colonisation’s legacies, responsible for recognising and addressing their historical and enduring impact.
Responses to historical wrongs vary across scale: in Britain some individuals and families have chosen to acknowledge complicity and address its continuing consequences, such as the ‘Heirs of Slavery’ group or journalist Alex Renton’s account of his own family’s complicity, Blood Legacy: reckoning with a family’s story of slavery. In Australia too, responses to past injustice range from individuals who wish to acknowledge and examine their ancestors’ complicity in colonisation and slavery, to government apologies for official failures such as the Stolen Generations and institutional child abuse. Forms of public reflection such as Justice Commissions seek national learning, or institutional truth-telling (Jones et al. 2024. ).
Key to this process and to building relationships across groups is the creation of shared histories, even if these are perceived from divergent perspectives. Historical dialogue is a core tool of political reconciliation. Such narratives are fundamental to strengthening social relationships, building trust and a shared sense of belonging among members of a society. The unsystematic and often crude ways public debate around imperialism and colonisation has been conducted points toward the imperative to develop more inclusive narratives, which can accommodate diverse and even dissonant views. Crude interpretations of these histories – which seek to judge them as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, for example- have real consequences. This ‘balance sheet’ approach was first introduced to Australia by historian Geoffrey Blainey in 1993, sparking the ‘history wars’. By contrast, we see historical processes such as imperialism as complex and multi-faceted. We hope that our research offers historical resources for more nuanced, factual, and inclusive public debates.
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