Power in Food on the Maritime Frontier: A Zooarchaeology of Enslaved Pearl Divers on Barrow Island, Western Australia
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Power in Food on the Maritime Frontier: A Zooarchaeology of Enslaved Pearl Divers on Barrow Island, Western Australia Tom Dooley 1
& Tiina
Manne 1 & Alistair Paterson 2
Accepted: 5 October 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Use of Indigenous divers on nineteenth-century northwest Australian pearling luggers gave rise to a transregional apparatus of coercion, physical mistreatment, and arguably, slavery. Where accounts of conditions experienced by divers are limited to the documents of contemporary colonial men, our contribution explores a rare archaeological perspective. Zooarchaeological and taphonomic analysis of the Bandicoot Bay campsite, Barrow Island, evokes an exploitative labor relationship inherited from a wider colonial process yet actively renegotiated by its participants through subsistence practices. The operation’s pearlers selected a camp that advantaged concerns for labor organization and resource management while their divers seized opportunities for selfdirected subsistence. Keywords Zooarchaeology . Colonisalism . Pearling . Slavery . Aboriginal Australians
* Tom Dooley Tiina Manne [email protected] Alistair Paterson [email protected]
1
School of Social Sciences, University of Queensland, Michie Building (9), Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia
2
School of Social Sciences, University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Perth, WA 6009, Australia
International Journal of Historical Archaeology
Introduction The use of Aboriginal divers on the pearling luggers of late nineteenth-century northwest Australia gave rise to a documented apparatus of coercion, physical mistreatment, and arguably, slavery. Yet the biases of the documentary record and the scarcity of archaeological work on related sites in the northwest has left the experiences of divers within this industry largely inaccessible until recently. The Bandicoot Bay campsite, Barrow Island (Fig. 1), preserves a rare archaeological record of the labor relationships of a late nineteenth-century pearling venture. We argue that the assemblage of vertebrate faunal remains reflects, simultaneously, a strategy by colonial pearlers to manage the resource drain of food rations, and an effort by their Aboriginal slave divers to pursue their food needs under restricted conditions. Historical documents that survive from the nineteenth century, while limited to the writings of contemporary colonial men often far from the frontier, provide insight into the broader processes which facilitated the exploitative activities of the pearling industry. The British colony in Western Australia was established in the southwest corner of the Australian continent at King George Sound, in 1826 as a military outpost of New South Wales, then at the Swan River Settlement in 1829 which became Perth and the capital of the colony of Western Australia. The small population of settlers largely remained in the southwest until the mid-nineteenth century, when the potential for extractive industries and pastoral
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