Harold Finch-Hatton

Finch-Hatton travelled aboard the Somerset which along the way, somewhere in the Indonesian archipelago, “ran down a native boat and drowned everyone in it.” They anchored off the pearling station of Somerset on Cape York where “black divers..go down and bring up the mother-of-pearl shells,” and a couple of white men have taken residence purely “to enjoy the society of black women.” Finch-Hatton writes that the Government Resident was waging an endless war against the local aboriginal clans. He eventually arrived in Keppel Bay off Rockhampton and then made his way to his brother's station near Mackay.

A description of the frontier town of Mackay is given, including the various sheep, cattle and sugar industries that were beginning to be established around it. The implementation of the Marsupial Act is depicted where droves of marsupials were entrapped and destroyed to reduce competition for the fodder of the introduced stock. The author writes about the boiling down establishments where thousands of excess sheep and cattle were boiled down to make tallow, which ensured a basement price for all stock at £1 10s a head. Life on the nearby goldfields of Mt Britten and Canoona is described and the difficult life of a bullock driver is mentioned.

In a section about the types of hunting available for the sportsman in Australia, Finch Hatton writes that “away up north an occasional raid after the wild Blacks enlivens the monotony of life.” He says that just about every station has a couple of “black boys” working stockmen but “they are not much use after they get about 20 years old..they generally get sent away..and sooner or later die of drink.” Many aboriginals worked on the tobacco plantations and a school had been set up in Mackay to educate some of them. The deliberate mass poisoning of aboriginals at Long Lagoon is recounted as is the practice “when the blacks are troublesome, it is generally considered sufficient punishment to go out and shoot one or two.” He further explains that “whether the blacks deserve any mercy at the hands of the pioneering squatters is an open question, but that they get none is certain. They are a doomed race and..they will be completely wiped out of the land.”

Finch-Hatton also writes about the Native Police, which was a force of black troopers under the command of a white officer, whose job was to “disperse” groups of aboriginals who speared livestock and, occasionally, shepherds. He narrates that the Native Police officer “knows perfectly well that unless he manages to shoot down a decent number of (blacks) before they can escape his services will soon be dispensed with.”

The issues surrounding labour on the plantations is described at length. The conditions of Kanaka indentured workers kidnapped or recruited from places like the New Hebrides are mentioned. They were paid a lowly wage of £6 a year on a three-year contract, after which they were induced to spend most of this money at stores in town selling “the most utterly worthless” goods at an astronomical mark-up. Finch-Hatton tells of a riot at the Mackay races between whites and Kanakas, where in response to the Kanakas throwing bottles, the white men climbed upon their horses and charged them wielding their stirrup-irons, killing a few and driving the rest into the canefields. The political struggle between the plantation owners and those calling for compulsory employment of white labour at good wages is explained. To maintain cheap workers, the planters tried importing “coolie” labour of ethnicities including Singhalese, Malays, Indians and Maltese.

Finch-Hatton was an enthusiastic advocate for Imperial Federation, where all the Englishmen in the British colonies would unite in a close racial, religious and political unity in order to realise an overwhelming global domination. He ends the book deploring the now mostly realised possibility of the Empire disintegrating and England sinking into obscurity.