Masters and Servants Act in 1837 quickly enforces employers' control over workers in early South Australia

Hindley Street, Adelaide, in 1846 (looking west from King William Street). The structure for masters'  legal control over employees was well entrenched by this stage. 
George French Angas image, possibly based on an earlier one by S.T. Gill. Courtesy State Library of South Australia.

The third law passed by the governing council of the new province of South Australia in 1837 was the Masters and Servants Act. Labourers could get free passage to South Australia, in return for working for an employer for two years.

The Masters and Servants Act put a penalty of six months imprisonment for laborers who didn’t fulfil their two-year indenture to the employer. This included neglecting or refusing to do the agreed work, or taking leave without permission. They could forfeit all or a part of the wages owed to them.  Masters and servants laws from Britain were designed to regulate servants and other workers and were weighted heavily to favour employers.

Founding idealist Edward Gibbon Wakefield wanted South Australia to reinforce a social structure, centred around the middle class. He was concerned that this had broken down in other Australian colonies where the lower classes, including ex convicts, were unwilling to work for land owners when they could start up their own farms and enterprises.

Wakefield’s system for South Australia was for land to be made available at a price that meant labourers could aspire to buy it but only after a period of saving while working and guaranteeing a labour supply for other land and business owners. Employers travelling to South Australia were particularly keen to secure their workers through indentures before leaving Britain, because they knew that wages were generally higher in the other colonies of Australia and that employers had found it difficult to keep workers.

Samuel Stephens, the first manager of the South Australian Company, also experienced a pre-settlement workers’ rebellion when the company’s hired ships, the Duke of York and the John Pirie, arrived at Kangaroo Island in 1836. For a while his workers had the upper hand, deciding when, what and how long they would work. But, since the company was the only employer and the only ready source of food, they had little option but to work as directed.

Employers also had wide discretionary powers to enforce what they saw as acceptable behaviour in their servants. For women especially, this included appropriate standards of sexual morality. Margaret Clark, the servant of South Australian founder Robert Gouger and his wife, was in trouble at least twice on the voyage to the province. She was accused of flirting with the sailors (what Gouger described as “lightness of conduct”) and then biting the arm of another serving girl.

The Gougers applied to the captain for appropriate punishment. He ordered half her head to be shaved – common punishment for female convicts. Margaret Clark laughed and joked her way through the punishment, making her offence worse as far as the Gougers were concerned. They decided that she was beyond redemption and decided to  leave her at the Cape of Good Hope if they could, in the care of the Children’s Friend Society, in exchange for another girl.

Clark’s defiance was seen more generally and seriously in at least 25 workers’ strikes in South Australia between 1836 and 1850, the best known being the Burra copper miner’s strike of 1848. At this time, strike action violated the Masters and Servants Act, and the alliance of groups of workers to plan such action was illegal. Even though it was illegal, about 400 unions were formed in Australian colonies between 1850 and 1869.