Community Interest and Labour Power: A Tale of Squatters, Shepherds and the Law

The mainstay of the pastoral industry, the worker recognised as the face of pastoral labour is the blue-singleted shearer. The shearer has, throughout Australian labour history been lauded and even worshipped- consider for a moment the reverence in which Jackie Howe is held. There is a need however to recognise that another group of pastoral labourers kept the industry afloat long before Jackie Howe even donned his first "bluey". These labourers are the shepherds who controlled the sheep flocks of the squatters over vast acres ofland in the decades prior to fencing. One group of shepherds in particular are of exceptional interest for the rarely acknowledged position they hold in colonial labour history and for the manner in which the law regulating their labouring conditions was changed, used and abused by their employers. The shepherds in question are the Chinese from Amoy (Xi amen) who were brought to the colony of New South Wales under indenture in the middle of the nineteenth century to watch over the squatters' flocks.