Aborigines in the
The essence of the colonial relationship is the exploitation of the indigenous population by the invaders. In the Australian case, not only did the Europeans dispossess the Aborigines of their land by force of superior numbers and firepower, but where practicable, they extracted lowly-paid work from them. Although this theme has already been briefly discussed in reference to the nineteenth century in southeastern Australia, the Aboriginal experience of the European world of work must be more closely scrutinised in order to understand the impact of the capitalist economy on traditional Aborigines. The focus will be largely on the northern cattle industry in which over 10,000 Aborigines were working at any one time between about 1900 and the 1960s.
The Aboriginal movement into the European economy in northern Australia was a gradual process which was only completed after military defeat, dispossession and dependence on European food finally engulfed most Aborigines. Until then they had one foot in their traditional economy and the other in the invaders'. Indeed, the Aborigines in the Arnhem Land region were quite adept at relating to another economy. Since the eighteenth century the Macassans had come each year to gather trepang and employed the Arnhem Landers to help them. For several months the Aborigines would gather the trepang from the shallows, and cook and dry them for a payment of rice, tobacco, alcohol, sarongs and scraps of metal and glass. The women, when they were not involved in this work, provided sexual services to the Macassans. The whole business was highly ordered and generally peaceable.
It was little wonder that when the lone European doggers (dingo hunters), crocodile and buffalo shooters and miners came to the north after the 1870s, the local Aborigines easily fitted into the pattern of intermittent work in return for food and tobacco. Many Aborigines controlled these small-scale economic systems. Those who worked for the snake and possum skin collector, or the wolfram and tin miner, often only brought in enough of the material to keep the European