Sickness and slavery: reflecting upon Aboriginal domestic workers and disease in Australian history

It was close on 20 years ago now that I wrote a book about my great-grandmother, Joan Kingsley-Strack. The book documented her experiences as a white activist in the 1930s, campaigning against the New South Wales Aborigines Protection Board’s “apprenticeship” policy. It was also quite some years ago, that I published an article on Stolen Wages in Labour History. This article was rooted in my great-grandmother’s insistence (on the basis on her own, direct experience of employing Aboriginal domestic servant apprentices) that the system was, in fact, slavery. In some ways I hesitate to go back to work that I did so long ago, but the question of slavery continues to be raised in relation to this history and to Australian history more generally. And so, at the risk of repeating myself (don’t they say history repeats itself? Not that historians repeat themselves?), I revisit my great-grandmother’s story, and the history of enforced Aboriginal domestic service. In light of recent, global events, and the theme of the conference, it is timely to reflect on the significance of health and disease for our understanding of this history as slavery.