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‘A Frivolous Prosecution’: Allegations of Physical and Sexual Abuse of Domestic Servants and the Defence of Colonial Patriarchy in Darwin and Singapore, 1880s–1930s

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Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony

Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series ((CIPCSS))

Abstract

This chapter explores the relationship between domestic service, violence, and colonial masculinities in the settler colony of Darwin and the exploitation colony of Singapore. The chapter analyses representations of assault and abuse of domestic servants by their British, white Australian, and Chinese masters in order to illuminate the ways in which violence could challenge or sustain colonial patriarchy. The central argument is that the ways in which violence towards Chinese and Aboriginal servants was either justified or ignored by the press, colonial officials, and ordinary colonists reflected an underlying agenda to protect the reputation of ruling-class men and the colonial venture as a whole. By comparing Darwin and Singapore, this chapter aims to illuminate the shared and particular preoccupations that underpinned settler and non-settler colonial projects.

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for the critical and helpful feedback on this chapter. Thanks also to my research assistant on this project, Claire Wright.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 6, 8.

  2. 2.

    Jeremy Martens, ‘Settler Homes, Manhood and “Houseboys”: An Analysis of Natal’s Rape Scare of 1886’, Journal of Southern African Studies 28, no. 2 (2002), 369; Prinisha Badassy, ‘“And my blood became hot!”: Crimes of Passion, Crimes of Reason: An Analysis of the Crimes of Murder and Physical Assault against Masters and Mistresses by Their Indian Domestic Servants, Natal, 1880–1920’, Journal of Natal and Zulu History 23, no. 1 (2006), 73–106; Amirah Inglis, The White Women’s Protection Ordinance: Sexual Anxiety and Politics in Papua (London: Sussex University Press, 1975), 54–55, 65–66.

  3. 3.

    Jordanna Bailkin, ‘The Boot and the Spleen: When Was Murder Possible in British India?’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, no. 2 (2006), 472–488; Fae Dussart, ‘“Strictly Legal Means”: Assault, Abuse and the Limits of Acceptable Behaviour in the Servant/Employer Relationship in Metropole and Colony 1850–1890’, in Colonization and Domestic Service: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives, ed. Victoria Haskins and Claire Lowrie (New York: Routledge, 2015), 153–171; Victoria Haskins, ‘“Down the Gully and Just Outside the Garden Walk”: White Women and the Sexual Abuse of Aboriginal Women on a Colonial Frontier’, History Australia 10, no. 1 (2013), 11–15.

  4. 4.

    Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Giving Masculinity a History: Some Contributions from the Historiography of Colonial India’, Gender and History 11, no. 3 (1999), 447.

  5. 5.

    In Singapore in 1921, 19,369 domestic servants were employed. This compares with 212 servants in the Northern Territory. This figure does not include the substantial number of Aboriginal servants employed in the Northern Territory who were not counted in the census. J.E. Nathan, The Census of British Malaya 1921 (London: Waterlow and Sons, 1922), 118; Chas. H. Wickens, Census of the Commonwealth of Australia 1921: Part XVII Occupations, 1250.

  6. 6.

    B.W. Higman, Domestic Service in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002), 175–181.

  7. 7.

    Christopher Munn, ‘Hong Kong, 1841–1870: All the Servants in Prison and Nobody to Take Care of the House’, in Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–1955, ed. Douglas Hay and Paul Craven (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 366, 387; Dussart, ‘“Strictly Legal Means”’, 159.

  8. 8.

    Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies’, Journal of American History 88, no. 3 (2001), 456.

  9. 9.

    Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai’i (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1993), 25.

  10. 10.

    Alan Powell, Far Country: A Short History of the Northern Territory (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1988), 52.

  11. 11.

    Alfred Searcy, In Northern Seas (Darwin: Northern Territory Department of Education, 1984), 70.

  12. 12.

    David Carment, ‘“A De Facto Australasia”: Darwin, Asia and the Australian Identity’, Northern Perspective 18, no. 1 (1995), 8; C.M. Turnbull, A History of Singapore, 1819–1975 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1977), 88–91.

  13. 13.

    ‘Census Figures for Darwin, 1911’: A1/15, 11/16191 (1911), National Archives of Australia, Canberra (hereafter NAA).

  14. 14.

    Adele Perry, ‘The State of Empire: Reproducing Colonialism in British Columbia, 1849–1871’, Colonialism and Colonial History 2, no. 2 (2001).

  15. 15.

    Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-Davis, ‘Introduction: Beyond Dichotomies’, in Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class, ed. Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-Davis (London: Sage, 1995), 3.

  16. 16.

    Christopher Lloyd and Jacob Metzer, ‘Settler Colonization and Societies in World History: Patterns and Concepts’, in Settler Economies in World History, ed. Christopher Lloyd, Jacob Metzer, and Richard Sutch (Leiden: Koninklijke and Brill, 2013), 3.

  17. 17.

    Hayes Marriott, ‘The Peoples of Singapore: Inhabitants and Population’, in One Hundred Years of Singapore, ed. Walter Makepeace, Gilbert Brooke, and Roland Braddell (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1991), 360.

  18. 18.

    Ann Curthoys, ‘An Uneasy Conversation: The Multicultural and the Indigenous’, in Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand, ed. John Docker and Gerhard Fischer (Sydney: University of NSW Press, 2000), 32.

  19. 19.

    Edwin Lee, The British as Rulers Governing Multiracial Singapore 1867–1914 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1991), 91–92, 288.

  20. 20.

    Claire Lowrie, Masters and Servants: Cultures of Empire in the Tropics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 29–32.

  21. 21.

    Penny Edwards, ‘Mixed Metaphors: Other Mothers, Dangerous Daughters and the Rhetoric of Child Removal in Burma, Australia and Indochina’, Balayi: Culture, Law and Colonialism 6 (2004), 42.

  22. 22.

    ‘News and Notes’, Northern Territory Times and Gazette, 17 January 1885.

  23. 23.

    Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 22 September 1891; ‘A Frivolous Prosecution: Justification for Striking a Javanese Servant’, Straits Times, 21 June 1909; ‘Taiping Topics’, Malaya Tribune, 15 May 1914; ‘A Troublesome Amah’, Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 7 May 1915; ‘A Technical Assault’, Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 4 July 1923.

  24. 24.

    ‘Transcript of Interview with Lim Ming Joon’: ACC 000334/07, 25–6, National Archives of Singapore (hereafter NAS). Translated from Mandarin to English by EthnoLink Language Services, certified by the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters (NAATI), http://www.ethnolink.com.au/translation/naati-accredited-certified-translations-australia

  25. 25.

    Dussart, ‘“Strictly Legal Means”’, 157.

  26. 26.

    Bailkin, ‘The Boot and the Spleen’, 463–464.

  27. 27.

    Sarah Steinbock-Pratt, ‘“We were all Robinson Crusoes”: American Women Teachers in the Philippines’, Women’s Studies 41, no. 4 (2012), 382–384.

  28. 28.

    E.M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c. 1800–1947 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 110–111.

  29. 29.

    John Thomson, The Straits of Malacca, Indo-China and China (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Low and Searle, 1875), 71–72; John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth Century Britain: Essays on Gender, Family and Empire (New York: Pearson Longman, 2005), 193–197.

  30. 30.

    For Darwin, see ‘Law Courts: Police Court, Palmerston’, Northern Territory Times and Gazette, 14 January 1882. For Singapore, see ‘Labu Assault Case: European Lady Charged’, Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 1 April 1924; Straits Times, 13 January 1927; ‘“Mem” Fined for Striking Cook’, Straits Times, 19 June 1937.

  31. 31.

    Claudia Knapman, White Women in Fiji, 1835–1930: The Ruin of Empire? (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1986), 19; Lowrie, Masters and Servants, 136–143.

  32. 32.

    Carl Trocki, Opium and Empire: Chinese Society in Colonial Singapore, 1800–1910 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 11.

  33. 33.

    ‘Letter to the Editor’, Northern Territory Times and Gazette, 12 February 1881; Northern Territory Times, 6 October 1883; ‘European or Chinese Labor’, Northern Territory Times and Gazette, 4 May 1889.

  34. 34.

    Glenice Yee, Through Chinese Eyes: The Chinese Experience in the Northern Territory, 1874–2004 (Parap: Glenice Yee, 2006), 38.

  35. 35.

    Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities, 199–200; Powell, Far Country, 123–124.

  36. 36.

    Somerset Maugham, The Casuarina Tree: Six Stories (London: Heinemann, 1926), 117.

  37. 37.

    Xavier Herbert, Capricornia (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1987), 8, 10.

  38. 38.

    For Darwin, see ‘Legal Information: Police Court’, North Australia, 18 March 1888; ‘Chinese Secret Societies’, South Australian Register, 23 July 1891; ‘Opium Smuggling: Chinese Cook Heavily Fined’, The Advertiser, 19 May 1909; ‘Inspector of Police to Government Resident’, 1887, Government Resident of the Northern Territory (South Australia), List of Inwards Correspondence, 1870–1911: NTRS829, A9768, Northern Territory Archives Service, Darwin (hereafter NTAS). For Singapore, see Jonas Daniel Vaughan, The Manners and Customs of the Chinese of the Straits Settlements (Singapore: Mission Press, 1879); ‘A Dishonest Boy’, Straits Times, 4 July 1899.

  39. 39.

    Ong Siang Song, One Hundred Years’ History of the Chinese in Singapore (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1984), 265; ‘A Ferocious “Boy”’, Straits Times, 1 July 1899; ‘Three Tragedies: Angus Street Murder’, Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 17 June 1909; ‘Murderous Assault: Hylam Servant Attacks Master’, Malaya Tribune, 26 September 1919.

  40. 40.

    ‘Law Courts: Police Court, Palmerston’, Northern Territory Times and Gazette, 14 January 1882.

  41. 41.

    Warwick Anderson, ‘The Trespass Speaks: White Masculinity and Colonial Breakdown’, The American Historical Review 102, no. 5 (1997), 1343.

  42. 42.

    Henry Reynolds, North of Capricorn: The Untold Story of Australia’s North (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2003), 107.

  43. 43.

    Powell, Far Country, 156.

  44. 44.

    ‘Murdered by a Chinese Cook: Waiter’s Head Beaten In’, The Advertiser, 5 March 1906; ‘Seven Persons Killed: A Cook’s Revenge’, Northern Standard, 29 April 1930; ‘Station Hand Shot: Chinese Cook Imprisoned’, The Advertiser, 21 April 1926.

  45. 45.

    Ching-Hwang Yen, ‘Class Structure and Social Mobility in the Chinese Community in Singapore and Malaya 1800–1911’, Modern Asian Studies 21, no. 3 (1987), 427.

  46. 46.

    Trocki, Opium and Empire, 183–185.

  47. 47.

    Song, One Hundred Years.

  48. 48.

    Lowrie, Masters and Servants, 143–147.

  49. 49.

    Joyce Ee, ‘Chinese Migration to Singapore, 1896–1941’, Journal of Southeast Asian History 2, no. 1 (1961), 42.

  50. 50.

    Tony Austin, ‘“A Chance to Be Decent”: Northern Territory “Half-Caste” Girls in Service in South Australia 1916–1939’, Labour History 60 (1990), 52–53.

  51. 51.

    Austin, ‘“A Chance to Be Decent”’, 52–53.

  52. 52.

    ‘The Black Man’s Burden’, Sunday Express, 3 June 1934; ‘Alleged Ill-Treatment of Natives Nt—Reports by Foreign Newspapers’: A1/15, 1934/8852 (1934), NAA.

  53. 53.

    Mary Montgomerie Bennett, The Australian Aboriginal as a Human Being (London: Alston Rivers, 1930); Alfred H. Brown, Report on Some Problems of Northern Australia (Australia: Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Australia, 1914), 131.

  54. 54.

    Of the sixteen employers’ accounts that I accessed, only two mentioned violence between Aboriginal servants, and none suggested employer–servant violence. ‘Transcript of Interview with Betty Dangerfield’: NTRS 226, TS 187 (1982), tape 1, 9, NTAS; ‘Transcript of Interview with W.E (Bill) Eacott’: NTRS 226, TS 758 (1992), tape 1, 11–12, NTAS.

  55. 55.

    ‘Annual Report of the Northern Territory’ (Commonwealth Government of Australia, 1912), 48; ‘The Discouragement of White Labor: Cruelty to Natives’, Northern Standard, 25 April 1922; ‘Starving Blacks: To the Editor’, Northern Standard, 19 April 1925.

  56. 56.

    Claire Lowrie, ‘The Transcolonial Politics of Chinese Domestic Mastery in Singapore and Darwin 1910s–1930s’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 12, no. 3 (2011).

  57. 57.

    Victoria Haskins, ‘Domestic Service and Frontier Feminism: The Call for a Woman Visitor to “Half-Caste” Girls and Women in Domestic Service, 1925–1928’, Frontiers 28, no. 1/2 (2007), 127.

  58. 58.

    Northern Territory of Australia: Report of the Administrator for the Years 1915–1916 and 1916–1917: nla.obj-54061288, 45, 47, National Library of Australia, Canberra (hereafter NLA).

  59. 59.

    See, for example, ‘The Natives: Revelations at Federal Inquiry’, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 January 1920; ‘In Territoria: Trial of Prisoners, Peculiar Court Methods’, Daily Standard, 31 March 1917; ‘Darwin Doings: Missing Documents, an Aborigines Plea’, Register, 1 January 1920; ‘The Darwin Inquiry: Investigation Regarding Administration’, Queenslander, 10 January 1920.

  60. 60.

    Victoria Haskins and John Maynard, ‘Sex, Race and Power: Aboriginal Men and White Women in Australian History’, Australian Historical Studies 126 (2005), 42.

  61. 61.

    For example, the attempted sexual assault on a white woman by an Aboriginal courier called Packsaddle in 1938. Fiona Paisley, ‘Race Hysteria, Darwin 1938’, Australian Feminist Studies 16, no. 34 (2001), 43.

  62. 62.

    ‘Oenpelli Blacks: Gins Get a Few Strokes’, Northern Territory Times and Gazette, 3 January 1920.

  63. 63.

    ‘Transcript of Interview with Dolly Bonson’: NTRS 266, TS 429/2 (1982), tape 1, 12, NTAS; ‘Transcript of Interview with Hilda Muir’, NTRS 226, TS 793 (1993), tape 1, 5, NTAS.

  64. 64.

    Ann McGrath, Born in the Cattle: Aborigines in Cattle Country (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 142.

  65. 65.

    Fiona Paisley, Loving Protection: Australian Feminism and Aboriginal Women’s Rights, 1919–1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000), 70–91.

  66. 66.

    ‘Half Caste Woman’, Northern Standard, 1 February 1935.

  67. 67.

    Auber Octavius Neville, Australia’s Coloured Minority: Its Place in the Community (Sydney: Currawong Publishing Company, 1947), 183.

  68. 68.

    Victoria Haskins, ‘“A Better Chance”?—Sexual Abuse and the Apprenticeship of Aboriginal Girls under the NSW Aborigines Protection Board’, Aboriginal History 28 (2004), 33–35.

  69. 69.

    Ah Eng Lai, Peasants, Proletarians and Prostitutes: A Preliminary Investigation into the Work of Chinese Women in Colonial Malaya (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1986), 46–47.

  70. 70.

    Susan Pederson, ‘The Maternalist Movement in British Colonial Policy: The Controversy over “Child Slavery” in Hong Kong, 1917–1941’, Past and Present 171 (May 2001), 163.

  71. 71.

    ‘Mui Tsai in the Straits: Why It Must Be Banned by Statute’, Straits Times, 27 January 1932.

  72. 72.

    Lai, Peasants, Proletarians and Prostitutes, 50–53.

  73. 73.

    Edith Picton-Turbervill, ‘Minority Report’, in Mui Tsai in Hong Kong and Malaya, ed. W.W. Woods and C.A. Willis (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1937), 233.

  74. 74.

    See, for example, ‘Transcript of Interview with Miu Ling Lee’: ACC 001917/02/03 (1997), 37–38, NAS. The exception is Lucy Lum’s account of her grandmother abuse of a mui tsai. Lucy Lum, The Thorn of Lion City: A Memoir (London: Fourth Estate, 2007), 160.

  75. 75.

    Janet Lim, Sold for Silver: An Autobiography of a Girl Sold into Slavery in Southeast Asia (Singapore: Monsoon Books, 2004), 35, 38.

  76. 76.

    Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers, ‘Women in the Chinese Patriarchal System: Submission, Servitude, Escape and Collusion’, in Women and Chinese Patriarchy: Submission, Servitude and Escape, ed. Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1994), 9.

  77. 77.

    On Hainanese houseboys, see ‘The Limit: Lade Threatened with Axe by Hylam Servant’, Malaya Tribune, 29 September 1922; ‘End of the Assizes: Last Case Being Heard Today’, Malaya Tribune, 25 January 1926; ‘Onan Road Murder: Hylam Boy Guilty’, Malaya Tribune, 16 September 1933. On white mistresses, see ‘Labu Assault Case: European Lady Charged’, Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 1 April 1924; ‘“Mem” Fined for Striking Cook’, Straits Times, 19 June 1937. For violence by Eurasian men, see ‘Girl Witness Collapses: Poignant Scenes in Police Court, Eurasian on Murder Charge’, Malaya Tribune, 17 January 1931; ‘Amah’s Alarming Experience: Eurasian’s Escapade in Field’, Straits Times, 8 January 1932.

  78. 78.

    ‘Cruelty to Mui Tsai: Story of a Callous Mistress, a Shocking Case’, South China Morning Post, 9 May 1930.

  79. 79.

    Victor Purcell, The Chinese in Malaya (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), 79, 181; Picton-Turbervill, ‘Minority Report’, 214, 231–233.

  80. 80.

    Between the 1880s and the 1930s, I located only two other newspaper accounts of assault on servants by Chinese employers.

  81. 81.

    ‘A Register of Girls’, Straits Times, 19 August 1937; ‘Sir George Maxwell on the Mui Tsai Problem II: “Registration Was Very Badly Done”. “Worse in Malaya Than in Hong Kong”’, Straits Times, 6 August 1937.

  82. 82.

    Lai, Peasants, Proletarians and Prostitutes, 53.

  83. 83.

    Sarah Paddle, ‘The Limits of Sympathy: International Feminists and the Chinese “Slave Girl” Campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial Studies 4, no. 3 (2003).

  84. 84.

    Marriott, ‘The Peoples of Singapore’, 353, 360.

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  1. University of Wollongong, Gwynneville, NSW, Australia

    Claire Lowrie

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  1. School of Humanities, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

    Penelope Edmonds

  2. School of Humanities, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    Amanda Nettelbeck

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Lowrie, C. (2018). ‘A Frivolous Prosecution’: Allegations of Physical and Sexual Abuse of Domestic Servants and the Defence of Colonial Patriarchy in Darwin and Singapore, 1880s–1930s. In: Edmonds, P., Nettelbeck, A. (eds) Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76231-9_12

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