Abstract
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The history of Indonesian labour activism as seen from an Australian
perspective is best known in the context of World War Two when the presence
of Asian seamen in Australia sparked a flourish of internationalism and anticolonial
protest under the umbrella organization of the Seamen's Union of
Australia. But the story of Malay maritime worker protest has a deeper history,
reaching back to the early years of the pearl-shelling and trepang industries
when Malay workers from the Dutch East Indies were brought to work off the
northern Australian coast. Before the advent of a seamen's union, these workers
faced harsh working conditions and had little recourse to legal forms of protest.
Their refusal to accept poor conditions was met with reprisals which included
physical punishment, gaol sentences and detention on board ships without shore
leave. There is evidence that in the late nineteenth century the most common
form of protest was mutiny, with Malay crews seizing vessels and sailing to the
Dutch East Indies. By the twentieth century there was more scope for
negotiation, with increasing support from Australian unions and improved
government regulation. The milder forms of more recent protests and the
willingness of Indonesians to take their cue from Australian unionists has
somewhat obscured the nature of early Malay protest. This paper takes a longer
view of worker activism in order to highlight the deep roots of maritime protest
in the Indian Ocean region.