Listening to Tony Abbott give a 9-minute thumbnail history of Australia and particularly touching on the early convict years, I felt compelled to add a point.
Whereby many people point to America with its dark history of black African slaves who built much of the nation, Australia was/is unique in so much as for the first 80 years of the colony, we too had our own slaves.
The difference being that, viewed through the prism of a dictionary definition of slavery being imprisonment, free labour and brutal treatment, our slaves weren’t bought and sold and owned by individuals but rather owned by his majesty’s government in the form of the 162,000 white, Anglo convicts transported between 1788 and 1868.
For all intents and purposes, we were our own slaves. These men and women were in the true sense of forced labour and deprivation of liberty, Australia’s very own slaves..
These were the convict/slaves who carved the rock and built the roads and the bridges to all points north, south and west over the mountains and across the creeks rivers and much, if not most of the infrastructure for the first 80 years in the life of the colony.