Part 2 of the Cane Series
I’ll admit, before diving into this series, I hadn’t given much thought to how the sugar industry shaped our Constitution. Like many Australians, I knew the name Sir Samuel Griffith from schoolbooks, maybe from a university crest or a street sign..but not much more. Yet, as I followed cane’s tangled path through Queensland’s past, it led me to a moment in time when sugar, race, labour, and law collided. And at the heart of it stood Griffith: barrister, Premier, and constitutional architect.
What struck me wasn’t just what he said, but why he said it....and what he hoped Australia might become.
On 31 March 1891, during the charged debates that would shape the nation's Constitution, Griffith rose to speak on a subject that had long troubled him.... the importation of black labour into Queensland's cane fields. He warned:
“...the introduction of an alien race in considerable numbers into any part of the Commonwealth is a danger to the whole of the Commonwealth... upon that matter the Commonwealth should speak, and the Commonwealth alone.”
It was a defining moment. Not just in law, but in the struggle to decide what kind of country this fledgling Australia would be.
A Nation Grown in Cane
By the late 1800s, Northern Queensland was booming... but not under its own steam. Its sugar industry depended heavily on imported labour, much of it drawn from the South Pacific through a practice known as blackbirding. Young men and boys.. some willing, many deceived... were brought to Queensland to work long hours in brutal heat, living in compounds under colonial control.
Flysa's brilliant piece explores this with painful precision.
Between the 1860s and early 1900s, over 62,000 Pacific Islanders were brought to Queensland and northern New South Wales.
Men and boys from Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia and beyond were made to cut cane, dig drains, and do what no European would under that blistering sun. One such place was Rita Island off Ayr in northern Queensland. A “camp” if you wanted to soften it. A prison, if you were honest.
This was not simply hard labour - it was indenture, and in many cases, it was slavery in all but name.
Local planters claimed it was essential. Europeans, they argued, couldn’t...or wouldn’t....do the work. But critics, including Griffith, saw something darker: a labour system that echoed the global stain of slavery and risked turning Queensland into a plantation society, alien in character to the rest of white Australia.
Samuel Griffith: The Premier With a Legal Mind
Born in Wales in 1845, Samuel Walker Griffith migrated with his family to Australia as a child. A brilliant student, he rose swiftly, first as a barrister, then as Premier of Queensland (twice), and ultimately as one of the principal drafters of the Australian Constitution.
Griffith was not a man of shallow sentiment. Nor was he what we might now call a multiculturalist. But he was a constitutionalist, with a deep concern for national unity, fairness under law, and the long-term cohesion of the new nation.
He condemned the Kanaka trade early in his career, calling it “a scandal and disgrace.” He pushed to restrict and ultimately end the practice...not only on ethical grounds but because he believed it undermined the principle of free labour and placed Queensland at odds with the other colonies.
Griffith didn’t want a society divided between overlords and imported labourers. He wanted a single people...a Commonwealth with shared laws, shared customs, and shared responsibility.
The Constitution and the Racial Contract
As he took the lead in drafting the 1891 version of the Constitution, Griffith worked to ensure that immigration powers rested with the Commonwealth. He believed individual states, especially those like Queensland with sugar barons and separatist leanings, couldn't be trusted to uphold national coherence.
This move wasn’t just about law. It was about preventing the economic and racial fragmentation of the continent.
In effect, Griffith helped lay the legal groundwork for what would become the White Australia Policy - a policy which in its time was seen by many as the only way to ensure a free, equal, and internally unified Australia.
Griffith was not trying to build a fortress. He was trying to prevent a plantation.
Cane, the North, and the Dream of Division
In the background of these debates was a louder rumble: Northern Queensland separatism. Many in the north believed Brisbane neglected them. They wanted their own state, their own laws, their own trade relationships.. especially with the Pacific.
In that regional ambition, the sugar industry played a double role: a point of pride, and a political lever.
Griffith understood this. He had walked the cane fields, felt the tension between capital and labour, between the old empire and the emerging federation. And he knew that if Queensland - or a breakaway North - continued to rely on black labour, it could fracture the new nation before it was even born.
That’s why he fought to ensure that immigration policy rested at the federal level. Not just to unify policy, but to stop Queensland’s economic dependence from pulling Australia’s moral compass off course.
The Judicial Mind That Endured
Griffith’s story didn’t end in Parliament. He became the first Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, where he interpreted the very Constitution he helped write.
His judgments helped define Commonwealth powers for generations. His writings, in many cases, still echo in the decisions of modern courts.
He also, famously, translated Dante’s Inferno into English in his spare time, a fitting pastime, perhaps, for a man who spent his life navigating the confusion between power, law, and national identity.
He was not perfect. But he was principled. And unlike many, he saw clearly the long game of history.
Legacy: What Do We Do With Griffith?
Today, Griffith’s name remains carved into universities and towns, but his story is rarely explored in full. He doesn’t fit neatly into either heroic or villainous categories. And perhaps that’s why he’s so interesting.
He was neither a crusading progressive nor a blind reactionary. He was a man of the law, with a deep conviction that Australia must be one people, not a patchwork of regional empires and labour castes.
He helped end blackbirding. But not because he dreamed of multiculturalism. He did it because he believed the soul of a nation could not be built on indentured backs or enclaves of identities.
In tracing cane’s path through the Constitution, I found more than sugar and sweat. I found the heartbeat of a nation still trying to figure out who it is. Griffith walked that same path, long before us. And in his legal voice.... measured, deliberate, and forward-looking...we can still hear the echoes of a nation trying to get its foundations right.
We forget sometimes, in the noise of today’s arguments, that Griffith helped write the blueprint for this country.... not just its structure, but its spirit. And he did so with a deep concern for balance: between state and federal power, between liberty and order, between people and the machinery that governs them. His vision for Australia was not only legal....it was moral.
Griffith knew something we are in danger of forgetting: that the law must never outpace the people, and that national identity, if not rooted in shared understanding and consent, becomes fragile.
Today, we speak of inclusion and diversity, but too often do so with the cold language of quotas and slogans. We speak of unity, but fracture on the very words meant to bind us. The Constitution Griffith helped shape is now increasingly seen not as a living agreement between citizens, but as a platform to be reinterpreted, repurposed, or overridden.
He warned, in his judgments and in his writings, that centralisation, whether legal, cultural, or bureaucratic, would risk alienating the very people it was meant to serve. And perhaps, in 2025, we are seeing the fruit of that.
The average Australian feels more regulated but less heard. More taxed but less secure. More lectured but less represented.
In Griffith’s time, the question was how to unite a group of colonies into a federation without erasing their character. Today, the question is whether the federation still respects the character of its people.
It may be too much to ask what Griffith would say now. But I suspect he would urge restraint, humility, and above all, service. Not rule. Not ideology. Service.
Let this be a reminder - not just of what he wrote, but why he wrote it.
Who Are We Now?
And yet I find myself pausing, wondering if we are now trying to reinvent a nation that had, perhaps, already made up its mind. For generations, Australia fostered a pride in its national character: the “Aussie larrikin”... hard-working, joke-loving, unpretentious, and free. A fair go. A neighbourly shrug. A world where we laughed at ourselves before anyone else could.
But something’s shifting.
Today, over 30% of Australians were born overseas. A new resident arrives every 44 seconds. We are told this is progress - but to many, it feels like being quietly replaced. Religious and cultural divisions test our social glue. The housing shortage is not just inconvenient - it is existential. Energy bills climb. Families buckle under tax burdens used to fund policies that often seem to benefit newcomers more than those who built the foundations.
There is a creeping resentment, not born of racism, but of exhaustion. Long-time Australians watch as benefits flow, housing is prioritised, and new laws threaten to brand their discomfort as “hate.” The fair go feels one-sided. Voices of concern are dismissed. Pride becomes silence. And silence becomes bitterness.
The irony is hard to ignore: once we debated how to avoid becoming a slave-driven society. Now some feel like slaves in their own country; tethered by debt, drowned in regulation, and punished for objecting.
Griffith feared a nation divided by class and colour. Today, we fear one divided by entitlement and enforced silence, where unity is replaced by slogans, and belonging must be negotiated through bureaucracy.
The question is no longer just “Who were we?”
But “Who are we now?”
And more urgently - “Do we still have the right to say?”. We are in the shit, aren't we?
