Indentured labour; sugar coating

This paper brings together late nineteenth-century Australian photographs of sugar plantation landscapes with urban exhibitions of sugar commodities. Recent research has reassessed the material histories of commodities (Beckert, 2015; Trentmann 2016; Smith, 2018), crossing global geographies to rejoin histories of production to consumption.

In nineteenth-century Australia, racialized debates about labour in the sugar industry were entangled with questions of geographic destiny and metropolitan investment. This is evident in the case of Thomas Swallow, who in the 1880s pioneered the northern Queensland sugar industry at his Hambledon Plantation, providing sugar to his successful biscuit factories in the southern city of Melbourne. They operated under the brand Swallow and Ariell. Both plantation and factories were depicted in contemporary media as based on up-to-date technological developments. Meanwhile, Swallow and Ariell products were promoted through international exhibitions, displayed in architectural ‘trophies’ at Melbourne, Sydney, Calcutta, London, Paris, and Philadelphia.

However, the modernity asserted by these representations belied another reality: around 60,000 indentured labourers from islands in the western Pacific working in Queensland’s developing sugar fields. Swallow believed that indentured labour was essential: Hambledon was made viable by land clearing and the cultivation of sugar cane undertaken not by machinery but by the toil of Chinese and Pacific Islander labourers.

In this paper, we use the visual and material cultures of plantation landscapes and metropolitan exhibitions to examine how the labour demanded by Hambledon and the Swallow and Ariell factories both underpins and is veiled by projections of mechanised productivity and consumerist modernity.