It's Not The Money, It's The Land
I read this book because I wanted to understand a particular incident in Australian history.
Here’s what I knew going in. Some time in the 1960s, the Australian government enforced a law that said Aboriginal stockmen on outback cattle stations had to be paid the same as their white counterparts. In theory, this was supposed to be a blow against racism. In practice, the cattle stations simply fired all the Aboriginal workers and hired white people instead.
I was interested in this because it seemed like a classic case of well-meaning government intervention gone wrong. But I wasn’t sure if my vague recollection of this event was accurate, and I wanted to get the full story.
I did some googling. The Australian Trade Union Institute, predictably, refers to the equal pay decision as the result of a heroic struggle by indigenous workers against racist oppression, embodied by the evil cattle companies. The National Museum tells a similar story. The ABC describes it as a part of Aboriginal Australians’ long-running struggle for equality before the law, a battle which is still with us today.
All these sources want you to come away convinced that the decision was obviously a good thing.
And, look - it feels pretty bad to disagree with this. Who wants to take a bold stand against dirt-poor indigenous stockmen, living in tin humpies with no running water, getting paid in bits of beef and tea, in favour of an international meatpacking company owned by an immensely rich British lord? Which of these people sounds like The Good Guys to you?
The whole story of Aboriginal stockmen in Australia’s outback is very easy to fit into a standard leftist narrative of racist oppression, collective action, and working-class triumph. A whole bunch of Communists are involved. There’s even a famous song about it - From Little Things Big Things Grow, which celebrates the Wave Hill walk-off, when Vincent Lingiari led a stockmen’s strike for equal pay and ultimately the return of the Gurindji people’s stolen land. It’s very clear from the song who the heroes are.
But I still felt like I was missing something. So I turned to Bill Bunbury’s excellent book It’s Not The Money, It’s The Land: Aboriginal Stockmen And The Equal Wages Case, which takes a slightly more complicated view.
The northwest corner of Australia is a very long way away from anywhere.
It wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that European pastoralists began to move into the Northern Territory and the Kimberley. These were not men who had been successful back east. They came with no more than a gun, a mule and a few packs of tobacco, ready to set up cattle and sheep stations among the rivers and plains of the Fitzroy valley.
Right away this created a complicated situation with the local indigenous people.
Sheep and cattle drank from the same waterholes as the Aborigines, took over traditional hunting grounds and turned them into pastures. The Aborigines naturally assumed that they were entitled to kill and eat the new animals. The pastoralists took a dim view of this.
But the Aborigines were also the only available labour force. Bunbury describes this early period of settlement as a long process of compromise, where both sides played an active role in negotiating for as much as they could get. Sometimes there was violent resistance to European settlement, as in the case of Jandamarra - a native policeman who shot his own white colleague and led a three-year guerilla campaign against the settlers.
Sometimes they were able to work out a deal.
Bunbury emphasises the ad hoc, informal nature of the situation. A typical arrangement on a Kimberley cattle station would be for an entire group of indigenous people - old men, young men, little kids, women with babies - to set up camp somewhere on the property. (Keep in mind that these stations are enormous, and sparsely populated - there’s plenty of room for hundreds of people to live.)
Some of the men would go to work on the station, learning to ride horses and mend fences. They’d work to their own schedule. They weren’t a slave labour force - if they didn’t like the job, they would walk off.
They were paid largely in goods - flour, sugar, beef and tea, the luxuries of the Australian outback in the late nineteenth century. The pastoralist would undertake to keep the whole community fed and clothed. No money was involved. It wasn’t anything like a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, with structured hours and wages. The Aborigines worked whenever they wanted to, or could be made to. They got compensated the same way.
Crucially, they got to stay on their land. Aboriginal groups in this situation had some capacity to maintain a traditional lifestyle, to hunt and gather as they’d been doing for centuries, to steer the boss away from building over sacred sites. Bunbury thinks this is extremely important - you can tell from the name of the book.
This is a book about the growth of the state.
In the nineteenth century, the Australian government had very limited power to assert control over cattle stations in the Kimberley. There are policemen, but not a lot of policemen. Sometimes indigenous people are captured, chained and subjected to trial in a language they don’t understand, then deported to prison on Rottnest Island, thousands of kilometres away. It doesn’t really make sense to do this but the state has to demonstrate its validity any way it can.
The power relationship between the pastoralists and their indigenous workers is constantly being negotiated. It’s not standardised at all. Some bosses are good, some are monstrous. Sometimes, indigenous people are beaten, massacred and sexually abused. Other times, they’re able to work out a reasonably stable way of life.
Bunbury in no way idealises this situation. He’s not describing the pastoralists as white saviours. What he continually tries to do is represent all the people involved as individuals, making tough decisions under conflicting economic and cultural pressures. He doesn’t think the situation was good, exactly, but he thinks it was a compromise that worked.
Aboriginal workers on the cattle stations were getting ruthlessly exploited, by the standards of anyone else in the country - but they didn’t know that. They didn’t have any sense of what it would mean to work a standard day for a standard wage. And the pastoralists were determined to keep it that way.
It wasn’t until WWII that this began to change.
Indigenous people from the Kimberley got involved in war work, where for the first time they were treated as something approaching equals. They were integrated into the vast industrial apparatus of the Allied war machine, and it changed the way they understood the world.
In 1946 there was a strike in the Pilbara, coordinated by Aboriginal lawmen and a white Communist named Don McLeod. The strikers asked for a minimum wage of thirty shillings plus their keep. The Seamen’s Union placed a solidarity ban on wool exports from the Pilbara town of Port Hedland. The mainstream press ignored it, but it was covered by the Worker’s Star.
Bunbury seems pretty ambivalent about this.
On the one hand, it was a partial success. Indigenous workers did end up getting paid more. And Port Hedland was a viciously racist community - it’s impossible not to feel sympathy for the strikers when they’re getting locked up and chained like animals.
But equality under the law has its downsides. Bunbury is clear that this was not a case of, like, Communist agitators stirring up an otherwise quiescent and peaceful people. The Aborigines themselves were unhappy with their situation, with being harassed by police, beaten with stockwhips and generally treated as subhuman. They saw trade unionism as a potential way out.
Bunbury shares their enthusiasm. He feels the same righteous anger as they do. But he also knows how it ends.
Australian trade unions have always had a complicated relationship with Aboriginal workers.
Remember that this was the period of the White Australia Policy, strongly backed by the Labor Party, intended mostly to keep out Asian and Pacific immigrants who would otherwise bring down wages for the average working-class white man.
The Communists were broadly opposed to this. They wanted to unite the global proletariat - to build solidarity across all the workers of the world, not merely the whites. But they represented only a very small part of the Australian trade union movement. Businesses opposed it, too - wanting to import cheap Chinese labour - but the public backed it, and they won.
(A lot of the Australian national character, in my view, can be traced back to the strength and conservatism of the trade union movement in the early 20th century. We would be a very different country today - perhaps less stable, but also less risk-averse and complacent - if we’d allowed mass Chinese immigration from the beginning. But that’s a digression.)
In the 20s and 30s, Bunbury writes, Australian unions fought very actively to kick Aborigines out of work. They wanted the stations to employ white shearers at white shearer’s rates, not Aboriginal shearers for the price of a cup of tea. They stopped drinking beer in hotels that employed Aboriginal people, and tried to ban black workers from running power plants and engines, on the basis that they were illiterate and would inevitably stuff it up.
They resented indigenous labour for the same reason they resented Chinese labour - indigenous people worked cheaper, and they thought that wasn’t fair. Equal pay was a double-edged sword. Its intended beneficiaries, from the old-fashioned union viewpoint, were not the Aborigines but the whites.
All this is important background to understand what happened next.
In 1965 the Northern Australian Workers Union, a small Communist-dominated group with a long history of support for Aboriginal rights, brought a case before the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission, which was in charge of handling industrial disputes under Australian labour law.
The union argued that the award rate for pastoral workers - an industry-wide minimum wage standard - should also apply to Aboriginal workers. No longer could the cattle barons get away with paying people in beef and tea. The old compromise had to be broken up. Aborigines had to be paid in money, on a daily wage, in the same way and to the same standards as everyone else.
The pastoralists presented mountains of evidence that this would be a disaster. The union’s case was basically: listen, mate, it’s the law. The Commission went away, thought about it, came back and ruled in favour of the union.
Bunbury sympathises with the Aborigines. He is clear that the pastoralists were, in many cases, exploitative and cruel. His book is full of personal testimonies from people on all sides of the argument, showcasing the immense difficulty of the situation.
Some of the most interesting testimony comes from Hal Wootten, a lawyer working for the pastoralists. Wootten’s sympathies are naturally in favour of equal wages. He wants to go to work for the union, but they’re uninterested in making a serious case - believing instead that the justice of the matter is self-evident, and they can’t possibly lose.
Like most Australians of his day, he knows almost nothing about Aboriginal people. He wants to find out more. So he goes to work for the pastoralists instead. He’s very aware of his own position - he says quite consciously that he was caught up in “the general liberal ideology of the day”.
He visits the stations, meets some of the Aboriginal workers and becomes excruciatingly conscious of the total impossibility of communicating with them in any way. “My most abiding memory of the case,” he writes,
“is the scene on the station with some Aborigines demonstrating some work in stockyards. On one side the rest of the Aboriginal community silent, uncommunicative, not making a sound, and on the other side all the white fellows in the case, the union representatives, the judges, the Commonwealth representatives, the pastoralists and absolutely no interaction or communication between the two groups.”
He becomes convinced that the entire system of liberal equality, backed by the Australian state, is being imposed on indigenous workers without their understanding or consent. What they want, as Bunbury argues, is not just money but land. They want to live in traditional ways on their own sacred sites, as part of a holistic community. And this isn’t fungible. It can’t be made to fit into the system of award rates.
Wootten describes the pastoralists as having a “feudalistic” attitude to the Aborigines on their land - treating them as peasants, as natural inferiors, but still maintaining a friendly and even respectful relationship.
The Commission is caught in a bind. On the one hand, it understands the arguments of the pastoralists. It’s in no way convinced that extending the minimum wage law will actually benefit indigenous people.
On the other hand, the union’s case is clear. A government founded on the principle of equality, in the liberal atmosphere of the 1960s, cannot make decisions based on race. “There must be one industrial law,” it writes, “similarly applied to all Australians.”
The feudal relationship that Wootten describes is obviously ripe for abuse, and deeply offensive to enlightened liberal sensibilities. It may still be better than the immediate alternatives. But the Commission can’t allow it to exist.
So the call gets made to change the law, and the inspectors head out to the stations to see that it’s enforced.
Bunbury interviews one station owner about the transition. Before the law, he’s supporting around three hundred people at a rate of about a pound a month. Some of these people are stockmen, some are children, some are old blokes who just do odd jobs around the house.
After the law, he has to select about fifteen people and pay them whatever the award rate is. He can’t maintain an economic relationship with a whole community, all beholden to each other in a complex web of social obligations - he has to single out a few workers and pay them as individuals, then hope they support everyone else.
The law’s designed for individual breadwinners - it can’t handle whatever the Aboriginal family structure is. It assumes you’re going to have one male worker maintaining his individual accounts, supporting a wife and a couple of kids. The Aboriginal communities on the stations are not built like that. I don’t know how they do work, really - it seems very difficult to even communicate across some of these cultural lines.
Still, they muddle through. I get a little confused about the details here. It seems like some stations made an effort to make sure that the Aborigines could stay on their land, building schools and devaluing their properties by handing over parcels of land to the State Housing Commission. Others get the guns and dogs out and just tell them to fuck off.
By the mid-1970s the outback towns of Halls Creek and Fitzroy Crossing were surrounded by squatters’ camps. Thousands of people living in cars and dirt shacks, in conditions of third-world poverty, with no work and no means of support beyond welfare.
A lot of these people have never seen a town, even a tiny one like Fitzroy Crossing, and have no idea how to interact with it. They don’t know how to walk by the side of the road, how to spend money in a shop, how to talk to a policeman. They have no reason to know these things. They obviously can’t get a job - the best work around is on cattle stations, and the cattle stations legally can’t employ them at a rate they are willing to pay.
They’re bored, lonely, depressed, homesick and drunk. They’ve been living in the desert for thousands of years - they can’t just wake up one day and become fully assimilated subjects of Western industrial capitalism. Without the land they have no future.
What is supposed to happen here, according to the worldview of the 60s liberal reformer?
You can always say the state “should have done more”. To this day this is a recurring theme of the conversation around Australia’s indigenous policy. We should have provided jobs for them, we should have given them an education, we should simply have spent more money and done more liberal intervention until the whole thing got sorted out.
You can always say they should have listened more to indigenous people. This is more or less Bunbury’s conclusion. He argues that the Commission should have made more of an effort to find out how the Aboriginal communities on the stations felt, to realise that the land meant more to them than the money and the white man’s law couldn’t cover their needs.
This seems kind of true, although difficult to put into practice. The Aborigines on the stations don’t always have a strong sense of what “money” is - how are they supposed to make decisions about award rates and government inspections? And it gets into a whole tangle of arguments about who’s actually empowered to speak for indigenous people - which, again, is a massive recurring fight in Australia.
You could of course argue that Aboriginal people should get their land back from the cattle barons.
This did in fact occur. In response to strikes like the Wave Hill walk-off - trade union actions led by and for indigenous people - Australian governments began to pass a whole series of land rights laws, granting Aboriginal communities direct control over their own properties. I have no idea how well or badly this went and it’s a little outside the scope of the book.
But it’s a logical next step. The equal pay decision seems to have objectively made matters worse. You can do nothing, but that’s not very liberal-reformer of you - and also, it seems clear that indigenous activists like Vincent Lingiari are themselves calling for justice.
It’s not 1890 any more - they’re joining unions, they’re getting law degrees, they’re coming to see themselves as your equal. Are you going to tell them to get back in the humpy and go back to working for scraps?
Bunbury tells the story of the Noonkanbah people. They’re driven off an unprofitable cattle station in 1971, and wash up in Fitzroy Crossing, drunk and unemployed like everyone else. They decide they want their land back.
With what Bunbury describes as “considerable” government help, they’re able to buy the station for themselves and set it up as a working cattle operation. It’s still in operation and seems to be doing reasonably well, all things considered - not a raging success, but at least it works.
Could all this have been avoided?
Bunbury tells this story with a sense of grim inevitability that I’m not sure is totally justified. The equal wages decision was, by all accounts, just bad. You can’t make a case for it, even from a lefty point of view. It ruined stable communities, forced people into poverty, created huge amounts of unnecessary misery and despair.
To this day a lot of outback towns are full of homeless Aborigines, living in creek beds, plagued by crippling alcoholism and clearly unemployable for life. Bunbury argues that the equal wages case is a big part of the reason why. We can’t blame these people for being unemployed; in 1966, we made it illegal for them to work.
Of course it sounded good to the Communists. I don’t think it’s even their fault. There’s always going to be a few Communists who campaign for Communist-sounding things, on the basis that equality is good. The problem is that governments are supposed to make decisions on a slightly stronger basis than “this sounds good, therefore it must be”. And apparently they can’t.
A lot of the people Bunbury talks to say something along the lines of “the decision was terrible, but it had to happen. Maybe we could have done it better, but we had to do something. We couldn’t leave it alone.”
Having done something, you then have to do something else. You have to do land reform. Land reform kind of works, but it doesn’t close the gap. So then you have National Sorry Day, and land acknowledgments in every meeting, and the Voice to Parliament referendum, and some kind of Treaty-of-Waitangi-style arrangement that the state governments are supposed to be putting together.
The endgame for a lot of activists is total indigenous sovereignty. I’ve never been sure how this is supposed to work. Do we just cede the entire Northern Territory? To who? Aren’t there a bunch of post-colonial countries already, and don’t they continue to have problems?
But there appears to be a kind of internal logic to the state that says you’ve got to do something. If there are problems, the state has to solve the problems. If the solution to the problems creates more problems, the state has to solve those problems as well. It’s hard to just stay still.
This is not the book I wanted to read on this subject. The book I want to read on this subject is a thousand pages long and covers the entire history of the Australian workers’ movement going back to the First Fleet. Robert Caro would have to do it.
The reason Australia has such strong minimum wage laws, set by collective bargaining across entire sectors, is because trade unions fought for them and won. At their high point, in the 50s and 60s, the unions represented well over half of the Australian work force. They were capable of getting what they wanted, and what they wanted was better wages for their members.
The equal wages decision was not just the fault of a few well-meaning but basically stupid lefty reformers. It was the consequence of millions of blue-collar workers rationally pursuing their self-interest through collective action. To prevent it from happening, the men on the Commission would need to have made a deliberate decision to set themselves against the tide of mass democracy - the very system that guarantees their right to rule.
Of course in the long run, union density collapsed and all the jobs went to China anyway. Now the activists and reformers are the driving force on the left, creating their own internal teleology that’s hard to fight against. You have to do progressive things, because you just have to do them, because you have to.
Bunbury basically accepts this. The conclusion he draws is that the government should have done better, that it should have listened more closely to indigenous people - not that it should have stayed out of the whole situation.
I sympathise with this. It’s hard to imagine an Australia where the entire process of social democracy simply didn’t occur - where there was no worker organisation, no trade union movement, no White Australia and no minimum wage laws. Maybe it was all historically inevitable, and we do just need to go all in on land rights. I can at least see the argument for it. I would say that reading this book gave me a much better understanding of why the Voice referendum was a thing, and why the whole conversation about indigenous sovereignty operates the way it does.
But it’s also clear what the limits of this process are going to be. And it does seem pretty conspicuous that the market had already worked out a functional solution to the problem, a deal that let indigenous Australians keep stable jobs on their own land, long before the government got involved to say those jobs weren’t good enough and screw the whole thing up beyond redemption.
[1] Sometimes it is said that small risks of ex post very bad events are particularly hard to estimate, but I think the issue is general to all small risks, and it is just that small risks of catastrophic outcomes are more important and hence more worth discussing.
[2] This is related to the idea of the availability heuristic.
[3] I haven’t actually read Infinite Jest, but I have read Freddie Deboer’s post about it, so without having read it I can say that if you enjoyed that, you’d probably enjoy this book too. Using another critic’s review that complains people react to the “discourse” rather than read things for themselves, to bolster my anonymous credibility in a book review hosted on a different blogger’s website, but only for people who read footnotes? That’s the kind of meta thing that is totally appropriate for this book, and you’ll probably find the book satisfying or unsatisfying in proportion to how well you like the rest of this review.
[4] I discovered only after reading this and Tigerman, another Harkaway novel, that Harkaway is actually the pen name of Nicholas Cornwell, son of David Cornwell… aka John le Carré of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy fame. So he’s actually another nepo baby (laudatory?).
[5] You know, like a strong recommendation to skip to the Conclusion.
[6] Though the movie is a surprising good adaptation of an “unfilmable” book.
[7] Incidentally, If this ever get published, I would love if this description was enough to get people to read it who skipped the plot section. Future me would love to know how thoroughly you feel betrayed in the comments..
[8] Coward ;)
[9]Chomsky 1991b refers to “Linguistics and adjacent fields: a personal view”, a chapter of The Chomskyan Turn. I couldn’t access the original text, so this quote-of-a-quote will have to do.
[10] Chomsky’s domination of linguistics is probably due to a combination of factors. First, he is indeed brilliant and prolific. Second, Chomsky’s theories promised to ‘unify’ linguistics and make it more like physics and other ‘serious’ sciences; for messy fields like linguistics, I assume this promise is extremely appealing. Third, he helped create and successfully exploited the cognitive zeitgeist that for the first time portrayed the mind as something that can be scientifically studied in the same way that atoms and cells can. Moreover, he was one of the first to make interesting connections between our burgeoning understanding of fields like molecular biology and neuroscience on the one hand, and language on the other. Fourth, Chomsky was not afraid to get into fights, which can be beneficial if you usually win.
[11] One such sound is the bilabial trill, which kind of sounds like blowing a raspberry.
[12] This reminds me of a math joke.
[13] Why is this vacuously true? If, given some particular notion of ‘sentence’, the sentences of any language could only have one word at most, we would just define some other notion of ‘word collections’.
[14] He and archaeologist Lawrence Barham provide a more self-contained argument in this 2020 paper.
[15] A famous line at the beginning of Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax goes: “Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance.”