Carlton Supporters Club

Quote from: Thryleon – on March 29, 2026, 03:46:21 pm

Your move.

https://www.unaa.org.au/2020/06/13/was-there-slavery-in-australia-yes-it-shouldnt-even-be-up-for-debate/

Slavery is the ownership of a person as property.  That has never happened in Australia.

People have been exploited, ill-treated and denied their liberty in Australia - and that still goes on today - but never owned or bought and sold.

What is slavery?

Australia was not a “slave state” like the American South. However, slavery is a broader concept. As Article 1 of the United Nations Slavery Convention says:

    Slavery is the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.

These powers might include non-payment of wages, physical or sexual abuse, controls over freedom of movement, or selling a person like a piece of property. In the words of slavery historian Orlando Patterson, slavery is a form of “social death”.

Slavery has been illegal in the (former) British Empire since the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade of 1807, and certainly since 1833.

Slavery practices emerged in Australia in the 19th century and in some places endured until the 1950s.
Early coverage of slavery in Australia

As early as the 1860s, anti-slavery campaigners began to invoke “charges of chattel bondage and slavery” to describe north Australian conditions for Aboriginal labour.

In 1891 a “Slave Map of Modern Australia” was printed in the British Anti-Slavery Reporter, a journal that documented slavery around the world and campaigned against it.

Reprinted from English journalist Arthur Vogan’s account of frontier relations in Queensland, it showed large areas where:

    … the traffic in Aboriginal labour, both children and adults, had descended into slavery conditions.

Dr Huggins' articles focus on her own career, as well as the experiences of her mother, Rita Huggins.

"In answer to the recent denial that there was slavery in Australia -- my mother and her 13 siblings were slaves who worked in domestic service and stockwork," Dr Huggins said.

According to the editors, the volume was "pioneering" in this focus on Indigenous women and girls in the workforce. 

The Australian Government follows the definition set out in the International Convention to Suppress the Slave Trade and Slavery of 1926, that is 'the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised'.  Almost all nations follow the 1926 convention.

There are slavery-like offences, such as forced labour, debt bondage and human trafficking but none involve ownership and, therefore, aren’t slavery.

It’s fine to take an academic perspective and argue that indentured labour is slavery but, legally, it’s not.