Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. ix, 227 pp. (Figures, maps.) US$50.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-4002-0.
As a social history of the pearling trade in the Arafura and Timor Seas, The Pearl Frontier examines interactions among late colonial era racism, labour exploitation, and nation building. A peripheral frontier between nascent nations becomes a social and economic hub that forces and shapes Australian national policies on the categorization and civil rights of diverse ethnicities.
Blending life history narratives with detailed archival research, the authors chronicle the century of large-scale Australian-run pearling businesses arising after 1860 when slavery was abolished in the Dutch East Indies. Based in Broome, Darwin, and the Torres Strait Islands, white Australian pearling masters recruited Asian workers from Singapore and the Dutch East Indies. Systematic abuse of Asian workers by indenturing them at low wages occurred while European states passed laws against colonial slave-like labour practices. Ironically, “white Australia” national policy exceptions, made specifically for pearlers to exploit foreign labour, led to the establishment of multi-ethnic communities in Australia and eventually undermined the agenda of Australia as the Pacific’s white bastion. Personal histories of people who lived this painful process are a major strength of this book. Australian citizenship application records of former indentured servants from Indonesia provide substance to these accounts.
A key argument of the book is that pearling industry toil intensified cultural and social relations among the Timor and the Arafura Seas region’s diverse peoples through mobility and intermarriage, and created a contiguous social region. Intensification occurred despite the creation of legal obstacles to physical and social mobility. Indonesian pearling workers were needed by an exploitive industry, but not wanted as people, as exemplified by Australia’s 1901 white-only immigration law.
Chapter 1 introduces the region’s social history of ethnicities, mobility, and seasonal work. Chapter 2 examines the 1860–1890 entry of Australian entrepreneurs into a long-established pearling trade amid British, Dutch, and Portuguese competition for control of East Indies commodities, territory, and labour. The Australians recruited male Asians on two- or three-year indentured contracts. Pearl shell and pearls were processed in Australia for export to world markets. Seasonal weather conditions kept workers on shore in northern Australia for three months each year. Segregation of whites and non-whites led to social relations between Indonesians and Australian Aboriginal peoples, despite legal impediments. Stories of an Alorese man’s unregistered marriage to an Aboriginal woman, whose descendants met the authors in Broome in 2010, adds an engaging narrative quality.
Chapter 3 explores eastern Indonesian understandings of their maritime world; land and sea blend into a contiguous series of places defined by cultural histories. Symbolic ship imagery pervades coastal villages. Livelihoods depend upon boat travel or walking in shallow seas. Chapter 4 chronicles business activities of Australian and Arab pearling entrepreneurs, who attempted to influence world pearl shell prices. Windfall profits and bankruptcies followed fluctuations in fashion and demand for pearl shell. Narratives of these entrepreneurs’ careers explain the motivations behind labour strategies shaping the lives and deaths of the workers. In 1911, in the Torres Strait area, 11 percent of the divers died in accidents; many other workers died from vitamin deficiencies. Despite risks, many workers vied for lucrative diving jobs.
Chapter 5 develops the book’s central argument regarding labour migration into northern Australia. Political lobbying by pearl industry titans resulted in Australian labour law exemptions for indentured foreign workers, classed as “outside civilized community.” The authors’ use of personal narratives provides Indonesian perspectives underlying changing patterns of marital relations, religious practices, and work. The pearling masters would jail and not pay indentured workers who refused to sign contracts or were disobedient. Such abuses raised dilemmas for Darwin’s growing trade unions, which lobbied for a white Australia and segregation of Asian workers staying on shore. However, flagrant abuses of Asian workers motivated intervention by some union leaders. Thus, Asian workers on Australian soil challenged white Australian policies. If unions stood for workers’ human rights, then Asian workers needed to be classed as nonhumans in order to maintain the fiction.
The book demonstrates the consequent challenges to Australian racist policies. Defiance of social segregation arose in Darwin and Broome where Asian and Aboriginal people outnumbered whites. Chapter 6 addresses intergroup dynamics among workers at sea and on shore. The racial hierarchy placing Japanese and Chinese below Europeans, but above diverse cultural groups of Indonesians and Aboriginals, led to conflicts escalated by poor living conditions and wages. For decades, tensions in a few northern Australian towns fueled debates over segregation and immigration policy in Australia.
When Japan entered World War II, the Australian pearling industry shut down. Chapter 7 describes internments of Japanese workers, and unprecedented relocations of Indonesians, stranded in Australia by the war, to southern Australia. Consequent settlement support from churches and anti-segregation advocates established connections which in postwar decades led to overturning the white Australia policy. Indonesians enlisted to fight the Japanese, often as special forces or espionage agents behind enemy lines. Capture meant execution. The book profiles Indonesian men who survived the war, but had minimal success gaining their promised Australian citizenship, which raised questions in Australia about race-based human rights.
The Australian pearling industry declined following Indonesian independence in 1949; decolonization made it difficult to contract indentured workers. By the early 1970s, Indonesian economic nationalism policies pushed out Australian pearling businesses, leaving behind social connections between Indonesians and Aboriginals across the Timor and Arafura Seas. The results support the authors’ central argument that histories of trade, labour, consumption, and social relationships are intertwined, but the strand of trade establishes the path.
This book makes a valuable contribution to scholarship on the history of commerce and labour in the Timor and Arafura Sea region. Pearling activities shaped the region’s modern society and inadvertently transformed race-based ideologies and labour movements throughout Australia. Blending scholarship with chronicles of the workers’ lives makes the book accessible and interesting to a wide readership. A minor critique of the book is a lack of detail regarding the perspectives of Japanese pearling workers. Otherwise, the book makes a significant contribution to consolidating rare knowledge of historic relations between peoples of Indonesia and Australia.
A. Ross Gordon
St. Stephen’s College, Edmonton, Canada
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