Masters and colonisers

Tropical whites: Hegemonic masculinity and menswear at the crossroads of Australia and Asia, 1900–1939

“…Magistrates and senior public servants shared the top rung with local executives of the British Australasian Telegraph Company and large pastoral companies. 40 In Broome, the same applied to the most successful pearling masters. 41 Further down the hierarchy ranged professionals such as doctors and lawyers, ordinary public servants, less successful pearlers, small business owners, the managers of pastoral properties and pearling fleets, bank clerks and other office workers.…”

‘What a Picture Can Do’: Contests of colonial mastery in photographs of Asian ‘houseboys’ from Southeast Asia and Northern Australia, 1880s–1920s

“…For white colonists, mastery over 'native' servants was considered to be a symbol and an expression of colonizer status. 38 Photographs of seemingly devoted male and female servants provided a means through which the power of the colonizers could be immortalized and presented as objective scientific 'fact'. 39 Thus, in Figure 8, a highly choreographed studio image from Singapore, the Chinese servant is focused intently on his master, his queue (long plait) uncoiled as a sign of respect.…”

“…By the 1910s, the numbers of Chinese male servants in the Northern Territory had gone into dramatic decline in large part as a result of the policies of immigration restriction brought in to transform the multi-ethnic north into a bastion of white settlement. 62 The Northern Territory's powerful white Australian trade union movement celebrated this development, arguing that the colonial practice of employing Chinese 'houseboys' was anathema to the values of democracy and egalitarianism that, they maintained, were at the heart of white Australian nationalism. 63 They lobbied the Commonwealth government to replace the Chinese domestic staff in government employ with white labour.…”

“…Where that was not possible, they argued that Chinese cooks and 'houseboys' should be paid the same wages as that of a white male servant. 64 Perhaps the inclusion of names in the photographs of Filipino and Chinese servants from the Philippines and Northern Australia can be interpreted in light of this rhetoric of democracy and working men's rights. Yet, neither the Australians nor the Americans were alone in imagining themselves as more progressive and enlightened than other Western nations.…”

“…82 Certainly, Chinese male servants in Singapore were well known for asserting their rights in the workplace and in colonial society more broadly. 83 Even photographs that were clearly taken in the ethnographic style, such as Figure 16, can be used to illuminate relationships between servants. It is possible that racial hierarchy and strategies of segregation and divide and rule that governed colonial life in British and Dutch colonies in particular resulted in marked separation between servants of different ethnicities working in the same home.…”