This is part of a series of articles on non-Anglo/Celtic migration to the Canberra-Queanbeyan district in the 1824-61 period. We have limited the investigation to the early colonial period, prior to the implementation of the Robertson land reforms in January 1862, which brought an influx of free selectors into the Canberra-Queanbeyan district and throughout NSW, dramatically altering the migration story.
PART ONE: Plans to exploit Chinese labour in the district, 1830s-40s[1]
(a) The consideration and development of exploitive Asian labour schemes
In the late 1830s, with convict transportation finishing in 1841, the colonial authorities were considering schemes to recruit alternative labour. It was apparent that they could not rely on free migrants arriving in the colony under their own means, as few within this group were happy to take long-term work on the frontier, let alone under demanding conditions and working for tight-fisted squatters and squires.[2] So, they had to consider subsidised models. This continued to be discussed in the consultations and submissions leading up to the NSW Government’s Report from the Committee on Immigration in 1841, which ultimately delivered the successful assisted passage scheme loosely based on the ‘bounty’ scheme, which had seen so many Irish and British migrants arrive. The usual arrangement was to pay their passage but see them indentured for six months or so upon arrival, receiving rations and a low wage.
In Queensland, where it was harder to attract European workers, the vile practice of ‘blackbirding’ started in the 1840s. It is not so surprising when we consider that slavery had only been abolished by the British in the 1830s. In other colonies, so-called Chinese or Indian ‘Coolies’ were recruited to fill the consequent labour void (e.g., on the Atlantic island of St Helena).[3] Hence, the Asian labour model had proved successful elsewhere in the empire and so there was increasing interest in testing it in NSW.
It was in these circumstances that serious consideration was given to replace convict labour with indentured workers from India and/or China.[4] Of course, this was one form of exploitation being replaced by another and the low cost to the employer explains why so many of the pastoralists supported the idea. But the authorities seemed to be concerned about large scale non-European migration. They also preferred the bounty scheme and its successor as curing two evils: (i) helping alleviate pauperism in Britain; and (ii) helping balance the convict/emancipist core in Australia with more free migrants who also came with a strong motivation to succeed. Hence, the idea of importing cheap Indian and Chinese labour was not taken up by the Government.
Nevertheless, the idea still had appeal to some entrepreneurs, interested in raising funds to recruit Chinese workers themselves. The Coolie Association of NSW was established to advocate for this model.[5] The first large, contracted group of Chinese labourers to arrive in the colony seems to have emigrated from Xiamen in Fujian Province per Nimrod in 1848. They were deployed to Kyeamba, south of Wagga Wagga.[6] Even before this, throughout the 1840s and well before the gold rush, a number of Chinese labourers had arrived in smaller informal groups or as individuals signed up in lop-sided employment contracts with conditions not much better than an assigned convict could expect
(b) Davidson’s ill-fated Chinese migration scheme, 1837-38
A very early ambitious private scheme, which had direct relevance to the Canberra-Queanbeyan district was the plan advocated by Gordon Forbes Davidson in 1837, to recruit Chinese labourers as indentured workers to NSW. He was targeting single male ‘Chinese mechanics and labourers’.
Davidson wanted to recruit up to 500 workers arriving at Singapore in ‘junks’ from China and then transport them in a separate British vessel to NSW.[7] His brother – either John or Andrew Davidson – would act as the agent in Singapore, which was the obvious entrepôt as it was so close to Australia and Hong Kong was not yet a colony.
By June 1837, Davidson had 57 of the most senior pastoralists from NSW listed as ‘subscribers’ to his scheme. Each paid £5 per worker in advance to cover up-front costs. In Davidson’s advertisements, he said that he expected the total costs on landing per head not to exceed £11-12. Collectively, these pastoralists had sought 335 workers. This was an average of 5.9 Chinese workers per pastoralist.
Davidson’s plan had three prominent squires of the Canberra-Queanbeyan district sign up and pay their deposits. They were Charles Campbell (two workers), George Thomas Palmer (three workers), and Thomas McQuoid (five workers).[8] Although these three men’s main properties were in our district, it does not necessarily mean that they were hoping to fill positions on Canberra-Queanbeyan properties. They could have been recruited for elsewhere. The low numbers subscribed by Campbell and Palmer also suggest that these more established squires were hoping to test the model before committing to anything more substantial.
Under Davidson’s model, the Chinese workers in NSW in their first year would be expected to work on rations alone – which makes it a form of direct slavery – and only in the second year of indenture would they earn £1 per month with rations, which Davidson claimed was an amount twice as much as they would be earning in Singapore. After the two-year indenture, Davidson said that ‘they would expect wages something nearly equal to what free Europeans get here’, but he goes on to say that pastoralists could expect most of these workers to move on and to be replaced by further indentured workers at little cost and that his plan was to secure further groups of Chinese workers each year to sate demand.[9]
Another interesting feature in the model was the expectation that workers were matched with jobs suiting their skills which he described as follows.
Carpenters, Cabinetmakers, Wheelwrights, Millers, Blacksmiths, Bricklayers and Brickmakers, Gardeners, Cooks, growers of Maize, Sugar, and Tobacco, and general labourers, I can with perfect safety recommend them. As Shepherds, I doubt whether they would answer.[10]
The last line, predicting a reluctance of them to engage as shepherds, basically rules them out as suitable for work on the large estates of the Canberra-Queanbeyan district. It seems strange that he had so many pastoralists subscribed, when shepherds were precisely the kind of workers they were after.
As it happened, the money for the advance payments was somehow lost in transit from Sydney to Singapore and the scheme died. Davidson had to reimburse the subscribers. In September 1838, all he managed to salvage was a cargo of sugar and a ‘sample’ of four Chinese workers, which seem to have been used by himself along with ‘six Bengal Coolies’ at the Maitland estate he was managing.[11] He did his best to restart the scheme but had no takers after the disaster that was his first attempt.[12] In his memoir of 1846, Davidson conveniently fails to mention the fiasco but cannot help to exhort his readers with the potential of a planned Chinese migration program, which he says could be administered out of the new colony of Hong Kong.[13]
(c) Report from the Committee on Immigration (1841) and its aftermath
Charles Campbell’s response to questions for the NSW Government’s Report from the Committee on Immigration has survived.[14] He described to the Committee in July 1841, what he thought was the best economic model and why his family had pursued a bounty model targeting British workers. The Campbells understood the lure and impact on tenure of good wages and were prepared to invest about £105 per two-years for a couple.[15] When questioned about cheap foreign labour from India and China, Campbell did not argue against it, but he was hardly enthusiastic, which is a little surprising given his reliance on Indian lascars on his own ships.[16] He was even less excited about the prospect of recruiting Aboriginal workers. He said, cynically that ‘it would not be found impossible gradually to convert the Aborigines of this country, a tribe of indolent hunters, into indolent shepherds’.[17] So, it seems that the Campbells preferred a model in which they were prepared to pay for what they considered high quality British workers whom they would encourage to settle. They had very few Irish and no non-Europeans employed. Their workforce was predominantly English with a large minority of Scots recruited from 1835.[18] In 1841, Charles Campbell knew that the financial crisis, was still not over, as he himself experienced when he was unable to meet the payments on Palmerville, but he was unwilling to cut costs by using Chinese labour.
Interestingly, the main point that Campbell wanted to bring to the attention of the Committee on Immigration – which he repeats a few times in his evidence – was that the real economic impediment was not the cost of labour, but the price of land. He said labour shortages drove up the wages and an over-supply of land undermined lot values, yet the government was wasting effort in trying to dampen wages and making matters worse by inflating the price of the land it released, especially when land prices had plummeted during the last years of the 1838-42 drought and recession. Campbell’s criticism made sense, but it may also have seemed a little disingenuous to the Committee, as the Campbells had managed to accumulate a virtual ‘dukedom’ with little difficulty, and there was never any serious dearth of buyers in the good years.[19]
Endnotes
1. Please note that offensive racist terms used in the period are included in this article. This study builds on what I have already written in J. McDonald, Canberra: II. Colonisation (1824-1861), second edition, Sorley Boy, Melbourne, 2025, pp. 255-6, 290, 319-22; J. McDonald, J. Canberra: III. Pastoral Plutocracy (1862-1906). Sorley Boy, Melbourne, 2025, pp. 200-5. That original work benefited from information generously shared by Monica Tankey in 2022-23. I also appreciate the detailed feedback of Ann Tündern-Smith, who is editing the series. Information was also shared by Joanne Maples and Tony Maple on a number of Chinese residents in the Goulburn and Braidwood areas, even though these towns are outside what we have defined as the Canberra-Queanbeyan district.↩
2. M. Darnell, ‘Indentured Chinese Labour: Squatters’ Salvation or Society’s Ruination?’, Queensland History Journal, vol. 25.4, 2023, p. 327 (re: G. F. Davidson, Trade and Travel in the Far East: or, Recollections of Twenty-one Years Passed in Java, Singapore, Australia, and China, Madden, London, 1846, p. 200).↩
3. T. H. Brooke, T. H. History of the Island of St. Helena: From Its Discovery by the Portuguese to the Year 1823, Kingsbury, Parbury, and Allen, London, 1824, pp. 377, 381-2↩.>↩
4. See G. Wilson, Murray of Yarralumla, Tabletop Press, Canberra, 1968 (revised edition, 2001), pp. 258-9.↩
5. Australasian Chronicle, 27 September 1842, p. 2. Also note the Australian Association of Bengal, which supported the recruitment of Indian ‘native servants’.↩
6. M. E. Tankey, ‘Chinese Part of Canberra-Queanbeyan Scene Since 1863’, Canberra Historical Journal, vol. 8 (September), 1981, p. 43.↩
7. There were other British colonial administrators with similar ideas who were using their personal connections with Singapore to advocate for Chinese labour in the empire (e.g., John Crawfurd, James Alexander Steward-Mackenzie). See A. Datta, Review of ‘Stan Neal, Singapore, Chinese Migration and the Making of the British Empire, 1819-67’, Britain and the World, vol. 14:2, 2021, p. 192. ↩
8. I was first made aware of their involvement by Tony Maple and thank him for this lead. ↩
9. All these conditions are set out in Sydney Herald, 19 June 1837, p. 4; 22 June 1837, p. 4; 26 June 1837, p. 4. Cf. Sydney Gazette and NSW Advertiser, 15 June 1837, p. 2. A misreported summary is in Sydney Monitor and Commercial Advertiser, 19 July 1837, p. 3. ↩
10. Sydney Herald, 26 June 1837, p. 4. ↩
11. G. F. Davidson, Trade and Travel in the Far East: or, Recollections of Twenty-one Years Passed in Java, Singapore, Australia, and China, Madden, London, 1846, p. 205; Sydney Herald, 9 July 1838, p. 1; Sydney Monitor and Commercial Advertiser, 14 September 1838, p. 3. Also see Davidson’s letter of 29 January 1838, published in Sydney Herald, 28 June 1838, p. 4. ↩
12. See his letter dated 12 May 1838 published a year later in Sydney Herald, 3 May 1839, p. 2. ↩
13. G. F. Davidson, Trade and Travel in the Far East: or, Recollections of Twenty-one Years Passed in Java, Singapore, Australia, and China, Madden, London, 1846, pp. 203-5. ↩
14. Also see the Campbell papers in the NSW State Library: ML A3587 (with M. Roe, Quest for Authority in Eastern Australia, 1835-1851, Melbourne University Press. Parkville. 1965, pp. 47, 71-4).↩
15. E.g., see the remuneration of Edward and Mary Smith in 1852 (W. J. M. Campbell, Four Pioneers of the Limestone Plains: Edward Smith, born 1822, died 1888, Mary Smith, born 1818, died 1907, Matthias Smith, born 1817, died 1903, William Kilby, born 1811, died 1902, Federal Capital Press, Canberra, 1955, p. 12).↩
16. See J. K. S. Houison, ‘Robert Campbell and the Wharf’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, vol. 23.1, 1937, p. 1. ↩
17. See §12 of the NSW Government’s Report from the Committee on Immigration, 1841. ↩
18. On the detail and mythology attached to the putative Scottish shepherd model at Duntroon, see J. McDonald, Canberra: II. Colonisation (1824-1861), second edition, Sorley Boy, Melbourne, 2025, pp. 252-8. ↩
19. The ‘dukedom’ criticism comes from John Lhotsky (A Journey from Sydney to the Australian Alps Undertaken in the Months of January, February and March 1834, R. Ackerman’s Repository of Arts, London, 1835, p. 68; with J. McDonald, Canberra: II. Colonisation (1824-1861), second edition, Sorley Boy, Melbourne, 2025, pp. 170-1). The wealth of the Campbells seems to have earned them mistrust and envy (e.g., S. Shumack, S. [ed. J. E. and S. Shumack], 1967 [1977 reprint], An Autobiography, or, Tales and Legends of Canberra Pioneers, ANU Press, Canberra ,1967, p. 141). ↩
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