Trust Women Book Club: Black Convicts
with Alyx Gorman and Georgia Grace

On Wednesday 2 July 2025, the Victorian Women’s Trust proudly presented a Trust Women: Feminist Book Club webinar on Black Convicts by Santilla Chingaipe.

In Black Convicts, journalist and filmmaker Santilla Chingaipe uncovers their lives, tracing Australia’s hidden links to slavery and the global forces that shaped our penal system. Shortlisted for the 2025 Stella Prize, this groundbreaking work challenges how we think about Australia’s past, and our present.

Joining her in conversation is Sita Sargeant, founder of She Shapes History, feminist walking tours. Together, they discuss the experiences of Black convict women and girls, exposing the intersections of race, gender, and labour exploitation in colonial Australia.

Black Convitcs is available now. Published by Simon & Schuster.

Featured speakers:

• Santilla Chingaipe, journalist and filmmaker.
• Sita Sargeant, author and founder of She Shapes History.

Further Resources

• Black Convicts (book by Santilla Chingaipe)
• She Shapes History (book by Sita Sargeant)
• Our African Roots (SBS film by Santilla Chingaipe)
• Squaring the Circle (article in The Monthly by Santilla Chingaipe)
• A Loo of One’s Own (book by Eleri Harris)
• Hidden women of history: Australia’s first known female voter, the famous Mrs Fanny Finch (article in The Conversation by Kacey Sinclair)
• Coming to terms with the brutal history of Queensland’s Native Mounted Police (article in the ABC by Georgia Moodie)
• Shino Konishi (academic)
• Dr Julia Hurst (academic)
• Prof Zoë Laidlaw (academic)

Transcript:

This transcript has been edited for clarity. 

Sita Sargeant:
Hello everyone. My name is Sita and I am going to be your host today. I am tuning in from Naarm, the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woiwurrung and Bunurong Boon Wurrung Peoples of the Kulin nation. I want to begin by paying my respects to elders past, present and emerging. And I want to just say it is always such a great privilege to be sharing and talking about stories, and particularly women’s stories, on a land where oral storytelling has been one of the primary, the primary form of sharing, you know, art and history and culture and literature, for thousands of years.

So thank you all for joining us today. For those who do not know me, I am the founder and CEO of She Shapes History. I am wearing our jumper. We make women’s history accessible, engaging, and relevant for a wide audience through walking tours, now a book, social media and partnerships as well. And I am delighted to be hosting this webinar.

So this webinar marks the final instalment of the Victorian Women’s Trust Trust Women Feminist Book Club. And there have been quite a few fabulous previous sessions that you can catch up online. And the team, I believe, is popping a link in the chat. And there will be a short Q&A at the end of today’s conversation. So definitely use the Q&A box to be submitting your questions. And just thank you again all for joining us. Now onto today’s fabulous guest. I am thrilled to be here with the incredible Santilla Chingaipe. But this is a real fun fact, Black Convicts is the only book that three different people in my life have gifted me saying, “I saw this and thought of you”.

Santilla Chingaipe:
Awww.

Sita Sargeant:
That hasn’t happened with any other book. And I think that it really says how deeply aligned this is to my interests. And I think that in another life, this is the sort of thing that I would have been doing for the story of India in Australia. And so I’m really delighted to be…

Santilla Chingaipe:
Which you still can do. Which you can still do.

Sita Sargeant:
Yes. feel like I’m so swept up in the scaling of a company now.

Santilla Chingaipe:
There’s still time. There’s still time.

Sita Sargeant:
But, no. It’s just such an exciting book, like, you know, and I think a lot about I’m going to briefly give my personal family history.

Santilla Chingaipe:
Yeah, go for it.

Sita Sargeant:
My mother’s family, they were from Indonesia, but Tamil, so South Indian by kind of, you know, ethnically. And it was because they were brought over as indentured labor by the Dutch. And I find that kind of gap between, you know, slavery and then indentured labor so interesting because it touches so many people in Australia now in ways that we don’t kind of actually fully engage with. So I have been so delighted that you have produced this book. So I’m going to give a very kind of background of who you are besides that unhinged sort of, you know, I just love the fact that this book exists.

So Santilla is a Zambian born filmmaker, historian and author. So her work explores settler colonialism, slavery and migration in Australia. Black convicts is her very first nonfiction book and was published last year, and has been shortlisted for the 2025 Stella Prize, which is such a massive deal. She’s also the powerhouse behind the critically acclaimed documentary Our African Roots, which you can go and stream on SBS On Demand. And she’s been recognised at the United Nations as one of the world’s most influential people of African descent. Has delivered the 2023 E.W. Cole Lecture: Who Gets to Write History? Such an interesting topic, by the way. And her journalism has been published globally, all over the place. And I’m not going to read out all of the places it’s been published, but it’s everywhere. So welcome. I’m very excited for this conversation. Thank you for being here.

Santilla Chingaipe:
Thank you, Sita. And I’m so glad that you’re doing this. I think that there is so much that we can talk about just in terms of who gets to write history. Both of us as women who are undertaking various projects in trying to write back into history, you know, historical actors who’ve been excluded for a very, very long time. But also the fact that, you know, we’re both women of colour. And that also adds another layer to the erasure of certain stories and certain histories and that kind of silencing, which I think, is very, very interesting. And it’s so wonderful because this is a very rare thing . It’s very rare that I get to talk to another woman that is working in the space of producing history, writing history, making history accessible to the public. And also just centring, you know, the stories of people that have long been excluded. So this is a treat. And I’m glad that so many people have been gifting you the book.

I do want to touch on the gap that you highlighted between indentured servitude and slavery. And I know we’ll get into a bit, a lot more detail when we start discussing the book. But the way the empire, because this was a big the big revelation that I had halfway through writing the book was, why do we not talk about empire? Because it’s the big force that’s right there, you know. We end up being colonised by this small island in Europe that at one point in history becomes so powerful and wealthy that it controls close to two thirds of the landmass on Earth. And through that kind of territorial control, power and wealth, it has sort of created these systems of labor exploitation. And so if you were not finding yourself as a convict, you were then either enslaved. If you’re not enslaved, you were either, you know, having your labor exploited by being a soldier for empire.

So you were either in the Navy, in the Army, or performing other services because they needed the numbers. In terms of, you know, because again, just think about the territories and just the amount of expansion that Britain had at a certain point. And then the fourth was indentured servitude. And so you had these systems that, and sometimes you found that people crossed over. That they would be in one system and end up in another, which is the case with the black convicts, where they’re being exploited as enslaved people first and then find themselves as convicts in another. And you find that also in the Australian context, where there is a very blurred line between, indentured servitude, convict ism, because you also have Indigenous people that also end up as convicts at various points, as well as versions of slavery that took place on this continent. So empire is a very, very fascinating point of inquiry and interrogation.

And my biggest question was, why do we not spend enough time thinking about, talking about Empire? I think academic historians do. There’s a lot of work that’s being done, but a lot of it is staying within universities. And that’s a whole big conversation there. And I have my own issues with that. But so much of the popular history that is available for people in bookshops, some of the stuff that makes it onto television is nowhere near bridging that gap between the facts and the evidence and the interrogation of Empire, and the things that we should be considering, versus the rehashing of the mythologies that we’ve been told to death. And many of them have steered away from the facts and evidence of actual historical events.

Sita Sargeant:
Yeah. It’s so interesting that you bring up that point of empire, because that was something that I still do think about a lot in the context of kind of Australia’s relationship with India and the fact that, you know, many of those trade routes came directly through India and through Calcutta. It was coming from, you know, the UK to Australia they came from Calcutta. And I remember I had this oh my gosh moment when I was reading… I used to be a research assistant kind of in that space. And reading up on kind of the very early days of the New South Wales colony. And you have kind of the governor writing to the UK, basically saying “We’re struggling, there’s no food here, it’s a bit shit. Can you please send us something?” And the response is “Just write directly to India.” But we never talk about the role that, you know, non European countries played in the story of Australia. And I, I still feel like we’re not really talking about it in a big way, which is why I think that your book is really, really exciting.

Santilla Chingaipe:
Yeah, I agree. And even I mean my book, I had to set parameters very quickly when it became very clear that the numbers of non white convicts were far more than I ever imagined or anticipated, and I had to place parameters. And the parameters for me was I was like, “Okay, I’m going to turn my attention to people of African descent. And I only focus on people transported to the East Coast. So I don’t even look at WA. So I look at the East Coast from 1788 to about 1840, when transportation sort of stops on the East coast.” But I will tell you, when I was looking at the indents which are the arrival cards on ships, which detail a number of things. There were people who were being convicted from across empire, including present day India, including present day Oman, including present day Iran, Afghanistan. And so again, the story of empire is a big part of our own inheritance as this nation state that’s now known as Australia.

And so we have to be considering that. We have to be considering the ways in which what empire was doing elsewhere was also shaping what was going on here. And what we’ve also subsequently inherited, you know, through systems and structures, you know. And we’ll get into that in a lot more detail. But I do think that it’s not,I think again, just going back to the popular, telling of our origin story, if it’s not, excluding or spending time considering the dispossession, displacement, of First Peoples, it is absolutely just writing an origin story that, it’s as if this island popped up in the middle of Asia with these British settlers. And there was, you know, and there were no other forces that were contributing to what was going on. It’s like, well, but where did these British settlers come from? Or what did they bring with them? What were the laws and policies that they then brought with them? How have we then, and what, and where did these laws and policies come from? Because they didn’t come from a vacuum.

You know, as I write in the book, one of the fundamental pieces of legislation in empire that begins in Barbados, because Barbados is a very useful case study in understanding the British Empire, because Barbados is Britain’s first territory that it colonises. So it does what it then does to other territories, including here about 200 or so years later, which is it arrives, displaces, dispossessed, massacres First peoples, brings in it imports labor. So the first workers that arrive in Barbados are working class, Irish and Scottish people who are convicts. So the term at the time to be sent as a convict to Barbados was to be Barbadossed. So it was for a term, it was understood that if you made a, you know, served a sentence, made a little bit of money, you could return back to back to England. And then later on there was introduction because England enters the transatlantic slave trade fairly late comparative to other European countries. Portugal is the first in the 14th century, then the Spaniards and everyone else.

So by the time Britain sort of enters the slave trade, it’s about the 16th century. And they then start to import trafficked Africans, to Barbados. And so in Barbados then also becomes Britain’s first slave colony. And so you have these groups of people working side by side, essentially on these plantations. You know, growing various sorts of crops. And for a while it’s all working quite well because they’re sort of like, you know, worker solidarity, as tends to happen in most economies in that sort of structure. And after a while, as most workers do, particularly when they’re being underpaid and overworked, will protest. And so a lot of the workers, black, white, and everyone else that would have been there started to protest. And the authorities didn’t like this. They didn’t like the fact that there was solidarity amongst the ranks of the workers.

And so what they started to do was that they decided to systematically sort of empower one group over the other, and they started to do this across racial lines. And after that protest, so you’ve got a period of about not even 100 years when, a piece of legislation is introduced for the very first time called slave laws. And these are introduced in Jamaica, in Barbados in about 1664, 65, if I’m not mistaken. And these slave laws, for the very first time in the Anglophone world, there’s the introduction of language that makes a distinction across racial lines. So black people are referred to as Negroes. And Europeans at this point are referred to as Christian, because the understanding is that black people can’t become religious. They can’t, you know, but that shifts later on, because when there’s a realisation that there’s missionaries and all of this and people start being converted, they change language from European to white. And so now you’ve got a piece of legislation which is making a distinction across racial lines, and is saying that this is how you treat this group versus this group. And that piece of legislation, the slave law, is then taken to Britain’s other colonies that it’s now kind of expanding upon. So North Carolina, Virginia, Jamaica, everywhere else. And every territory is then kind of adding its own flavour I guess, to this legislation. And so you’ve got from the 17th century, what we’ve now inherited as modern racism in the English speaking world. That starts from this piece of legislation that happens in Barbados and is absolutely consequential to what we’ve then, inherited. And I think it’s very important to begin there, to begin to understand why.

Because I think we also spend a lot of time in this country, spending a ridiculous amount of time being distracted, talking about “are we aren’t we racist?” and all this sort of stuff. And it’s like, well, do you actually understand what we’re talking about when we when we meet, when we’re talking about racism? But also it was very important for me to get people to understand how racism came to be in the English speaking world and how it then ends up in a place like Australia, because it’s absolutely there in the colonial archives. It’s absolutely there in the way in which laws and things are being legislated here by the time convicts start to arrive. But it was very important to get people to see that this didn’t come out of nowhere. It wasn’t a thing where, you know, people just woke up. I mean, obviously there was prejudice and there was all these sort of distinctions being made by race. But it’s only until the laws, into the conversation that things start to take a turn. And that’s when you start to see this then racialised form of slavery start to take a hold.

Sita Sargeant:
Yeah. It’s. Yeah. It’s so interesting. I think that maybe we should go back to the start a little bit and I might ask a good, kind of like, framing question about what actually drew you to this story of black convicts? Aad also, when did you know that this needed to be a book as opposed to just having it be the TV series? When did you go like, “I want to make this a book.”?

Santilla Chingaipe:
I never wanted to write a book.

Sita Sargeant:
What a relatable thing.

Santilla Chingaipe:
Because I knew it was going to be a lot of work. You have no idea. I had the first publisher just kept knocking and knocking to try to convince me all sorts of ways to, like, can you? Because I mean, I was like this is a big undertaking. Because, I mean, when I was approached to write the book… So, to answer your question, how did I start? I started sort of this, you know, I went to the NGV. This would have been, summer of 2018, 2017/2018. There was an exhibition there, a very big exhibition called Colony. And it was telling the story of the colonisation of this continent. There were two perspectives. One was from an Indigenous perspective, and the other was from the European perspective. The Indigenous perspective was on the ground floor. The European perspective was on the ground floor, third floor. And because of that geographic placement, I kind of had to start at the ground floor, which was a European perspective. And at the start of the, at the entrance of the exhibition there was a very big label that told the story that we all get told at school. The landing of the First Fleet, Governor Arthur Philip and, you know, the fact that, you know, most of the people on the ships were British convicts. But at the bottom it said something along the lines of “but a few were Armenian and African”, I think it said. And I remember thinking, “Oh, African. I’ve never really, I’ve never heard that before.Who are these people?”

So now my whole purpose throughout the exhibition is to try and see if I can find anything about these people. And there’s nothing there’s no mention of them. It was a passing sort of mention in the label. So I go home and I do a little bit of research and I see that there are a couple of mentions online of First Fleet convicts. And so I applied for a State Library Victoria Fellowship. Because I was like, “Let me see if I can spend a bit more time identifying the First Fleet African convicts and then verifying them.” And then what I was interested in doing, was I successful in that mission, was to make a video work. Because I could kind of signal to the research without having to, you know, footnote and all that sort of stuff. I was like, I don’t want, you know… And interestingly enough, a lot of this goes back to who gets to write history and my own, insecurities at the start of it, because I sort of thought, I don’t write histories, people like me don’t write history. We get told what history is. And so my own insecurities were sort of pushing me away from the research.

And I had a very stubborn publisher who approached me, and she was very persistent. And she kept saying… And she was British. So she also understood empire. And so she was very interested in this potential undertaking that would consider empire, from an Australian perspective. Because generally empire is interrogated from the centre, very rarely from the outside. And then, you know, she brought me a couple of cocktails. Still did not budge. It was like “You’re going to have to do a lot more than that. You know, writing a history book. Are you kidding me? ”Until eventually she said, “What if I gave you a bit of money? Would that change things?” I was like “Well, it does kind of change things.” And I thought, let me try. Let me try. I didn’t know, I didn’t know what I was doing.

I had, I think at the start I had something like 30 or so names and in my office at the State Library every time I just, you know, identify a black convict, I’d put a post-it note up. And I remember after months the wall just being completely filled with names. And when I first started, I just had 30. And I thought it was just going to be a book, like biographies. I didn’t think it was going to be a bigger thesis. And that just came with the writing process. It came with my own understanding of history. It came with my interrogation of history. I went back to uni over the course of writing this book, as well. And that also helped inform the writing process and the thinking.

Because people like me and you get told history. We get told what empire did to us. We get told what empire did to our ancestors. We don’t get to turn around and go, “Well, actually, Empire also did these things, which are also interesting and worth thinking about.” But also, as someone that has been shaped by Empire, I have every right to also ask questions, right? And I think it’s a very challenging thing. And in this country specifically, like I said, we don’t do enough of it. Outside of incredible Indigenous scholarship, where Indigenous scholars for a very, very long time, have been pushing us to see and understand these things and bring our attention to these bigger questions around the role of Empire. We still don’t interrogate our history enough. And then if we do, if we are revisiting our history, we’ve kind of almost accepted that a certain kind of person tells us our history. It’s going to be a bloke who’s going to be old, most likely white. And in recent years, I mean, there’s been feminist histories that have been written. And there are obviously female historians who have also taken on that space, and that’s also been very wonderful. But yeah, I mean there’s still not a lot of space for people that look like me and you writing about it.

In the book, I sort of touch on this idea of who gets to write history, why? And why these erasures and silences happen. And why there is still the these preconceived ideas about who we believe, when it comes to, you know, who gets to tell us about history. Because history for a lot of people, I mean, history’s probably one of the closest social sciences to kind of science, because history relies on so much evidence. And historians are supposedly objective. Which is not true. There’s no such thing as an objective historian. Your lived experience shapes your historical inquiry. And I think because of these ideas around history, that there is some kind of perceived neutrality. That neutrality can only be embodied by whiteness. That the rest of us must be very emotional. Or we must be coming from a place of, you know, where our identity is shaping how we’re thinking about history. And you’re like, well, “If you’re white, you also writing about white people.” So I don’t quite understand that. Do you know what I mean? It’s this weird logic that just doesn’t quite add up.

But again, I’m laughing about it. But a lot of this is really shaping how people engage with histories. Which histories they’re willing to engage. Which histories they’re willing to take seriously. And that was also part of why I went back to uni was because I was like, “Well, I know all of this. But I need some scaffolding that’s going to… if there’s going to be a doubting Thomas in the room that’s going to question my seven years of research and hard work. I’ve got that back up.” But that was the only reason why I was… It was also because I knew that as a black woman writing history, everything I write is always picked apart with a fine tooth comb. Like, it’s always scrutinised. Like I just can’t avoid it. Because it is this thing of, like, “There’s just no way. There’s no way. There has to be something”, right? And it’s just what it is. I mean, I can’t help that. I can’t change what we’ve inherited. What I’m interested in is how we work through this inheritance. Rather than, bemoan the fact that yeah, it’s a bit shit.

Sita Sargeant:
Yeah, it’s really… I found it really interesting kind of stepping into the history space as someone who didn’t come from a history background. And coming at it from the point of view of, like, “How do we make history accessible to a wider audience?” Whether that’s through walking tours or, I used to work in a museum. Which was interesting, being kind of in a museum that had over 100 staff. That half of which were back of house. And I was one of two people of colour. And I’m half white, so you get half a point with me, I always say. Well, you don’t get a full point. And I’m like, that’s appalling. And it’s these major institutions that are kind of like writing the story of Australia and people like us aren’t, you know, the key figures in them.

Santilla Chingaipe:
Because it’s almost inconceivable that you could have people of colour that are shaping the nation state of Australia. It’s just it’s, you know… I mean, when I made Our African Roots, one of the reasons why I made Our African Roots. Because the documentary came during the course of writing the book. Because I sort of thought this book’s going to come out and there is no real foundation of people actually having an awareness. And I wanted to, at the very least, have something to be starting from. So you’ve got at least some general awareness that people of African descent existed in colonial Australia. But what was interesting with that was, I went through every myth we tell ourselves about ourselves. Whether it’s a cricket story. The greatest cricketing team, Don Bradman’s Invincibles. Found a person of African descent. Write them out of that team. You know, whether we’re telling the story of Eureka. Part of the Eureka story, there’s John Joseph, African-American man. He’s the one that fires a shot that allegedly kills the charging British officer, Captain Wise. And is the first put on trial because of the colour of his skin. You know, First Fleet, boom. 15 convicts of African descent. That’s another story we tell ourselves. What is the other story? Bushrangers. Ned Kelly, all these. First convict bushranger, black guy from the US, John Caesar. Let’s think about that.

We talk about, you know, the right… You know, which is an important point and a big part of this country’s history. The moment in history when white women are given the right to vote. And we talk about that movement. But we also don’t talk about Fanny Finch, the first known woman to vote in Australia happened to be a black woman from London. Boom. So that was also important. And on and on and on and on. So all of these, you know. Even the Anzac story. And in the Anzac story, what’s wonderful about the story is that you’re going to find, you know, all racial backgrounds. I mean, you’re going to find people from the subcontinent. You’re gonna find Indigenous Australians. You’re going to find you know, at the heart of this big mythology that we tell ourselves about ourselves.

And, and so, again, why? So if we can find people of African descent at every point of these major stories that we say have defined us and shaped us as this nation state, why is it inconceivable to think that people like me and you are actively contributing to this country? And shaping this country? And that our ideas and our thinking and all, like, why is it so inconceivable?

Yeah. And ,you know, short answer racism. Not in a simplified sense, but you know what I mean? Like, it’s sort of… And this is why I think these conversations are very important. I think it’s sort of going, how do you challenge bias, but also how do you get people to understand how these systems have literally been structured and that we keep on reinforcing them without actually interrogating why? Like, yeah, why do we do that? Why do we do that?

Sita Sargeant:
Yeah. 100%? And one of the, so I love the story of Fanny Finch. So I’m going to kind of like use her as an example for anyone who hasn’t heard her story. So essentially, she is the very first known woman to have voted in Australia. And she was of African descent. She voted in Castlemaine, which I used to say is Castlemaine, until three people told me off. Because people love telling me off. Castlemaine and she voted in 1856, which is, you know, more than half a century before, kind of like white women gain the right to vote in 1902. And a really interesting woman. She was working class. She ran a pub. She was a mother of, like she was a single mum. And the whole reason she was able to vote was because of this loophole in the law, essentially, that said that if you were a person who paid your rates or bore a miner’s license, you can vote. And because she was a woman who owned her own business, who had left an abusive husband, she was able to vote through this loophole in the law. And we actually tell that story on our tour in Canberra. And we talk about it in the context of this Centenary Women’s Suffrage fountain, which takes you through the key moments of suffrage in the story of Australia. And we say this story really should be on here, like it’s a really key story in the story of suffrage.

And a really amazing flow on effect of us having told that story is that one of my guides who kind of has gone on and written a children’s book for Allen and Unwin about the first two women in Parliament, and is like a cartoonist and an illustrator. She included Fanny Finch in the timeline at the end. The, you know, the timeline of women’s history in Australia in those key moments. And then for the election last year, she did all the cartooning, and Fanny Finch was one of like five central characters that she included in the story of Australia and Australian democracy. So it’s like, it just takes, you know, one person to go, “This story is important and central.” And then you have a major institution at the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House that’s positioning that and saying, “This is one of, you know, five stories we want to elevate as a key story about democracy this year.”

So I just think it’s like, I think that there are those shifts but you need the people who are like at the pointy end going, “This is an amazing story, it’s an important story, and it’s a story about Australians. And I love seeing people’s delight when we tell them that story.

Santilla Chingaipe:
And recognising the value of those stories. Right? I think we’re in a very interesting time. I think, you know, there was a brief period, probably towards the end of the Obama years when there was almost like this real desire for inclusiveness and diverse storytelling and the centring of these narratives. And we’ve seen there has just been a whole backlash to all of that now. Which is incredibly disheartening because it feels like you’re making a couple steps forward and then you start taking steps back. Because then when we do the work that we do, it is misread as though it is sort of some kind of woke agenda. And it’s like, oh, we’re not going into like colouring history and going, “What would the First Fleet look like if it had…?” I’m not doing that. I am really going, these people were there. They were there. Can we talk about them? Can we also talk about what this then means for what we’ve inherited, but also how do we, you know, their descendants exist. I mean, every event that I do, there’s at least 2 or 3 descendants that show up, you know, who want to talk about their complicated inheritance.

And also because we had a period in this country’s history, from around Federation when we had this very racist legislation, the White Australia policy. That for so long did not make it possible for people to talk about racial diversity within their families. And you’ve now got generations, and this is where it gets very interesting to the work, because I don’t do genealogy. And so when people come to… I can’t answer a lot of questions because I’m like, that’s not what I do. I don’t look into family histories and genealogy. But what I suspect people want to know is sort of going, I have this ancestor because we now have access to technology that tells me that my ancestor came from Barbados.But yet there was a generation where people didn’t talk about it. And so, you know, I couldn’t talk to my mother about it because it was something that she didn’t want to talk about. But I want to know. I want to know who I am. Everybody. That’s a question that we all want to know. We want to know who are we?Who are our ancestors? Where did we come from? I mean, I think every human arrives at some point in their life where they are curious.

And part of doing this work and having these conversations and institutions recognising the importance of this is that it means a lot to a lot of people to be able to have a sense of belonging, to be able to make sense of who they are. And continuing to exclude doesn’t do us any favours.

And I just don’t understand why, you know, like in the US or in the UK or even in Canada, they do a very good job of interrogating empire. Of seeking to revisit not just national histories, but national mythologies. And thinking about the intersections of various things, whether it’s power, whether it’s race, whether it’s memory, whether it’s capitalism. All of these things that are very pertinent to the contemporary. And I just don’t think we do enough of it. I don’t think we do enough of it. I think we’ve just kind of gone, oh, yeah, that was a story. Ships arrived. Boom. Okay, done. We don’t have to go back there again.

Sita Sargeant:
How do we change that? Like, how can we make it so that we’re having more of a national conversation about these things?

Santilla Chingaipe:
You ask questions. Because with any situation, and this is what good history does, is that it tells you that, I mean. There’s an event. An event is a fact. You know, January 20th is when the First Fleet actually landed. They arrived in Botany Bay January 26th. So January 26th, let’s take that as the accepted fact. 1788 there’s a landing. We know the number of ships. We know the number of people on the ships. We know apart from human cargo there were animals and food and all this sort of stuff. So those are the sort of the facts that we know. Right? So that’s one version of the story.

But what’s the other version of the story? What about the people that are looking at the ships arriving? What’s that story? What is the story of the environmental impact of bringing in these animals, that are not native to this land? What does that do? In that 100 years or whatever it is, whatever period you want to look at, what is that environmental impact? And you could just tell a story just on that. You could tell a story just based on. I mean, people have done this. It’s not new. Not just the experiences of women, but also sort of looking at what role did class play? Because that’s another thing we don’t do enough of in this country is interrogating class. Which I think is probably one of the most unspoken things. Yet it is the thing that is causing the most inequality. What does that look like? And what does it look like also, across lines of race, gender, and everything else. Right?

How do we think about power? What does power look like in that context? If you are a convict who is forcibly brought to this island, and yet you’ve been empowered by colonial authorities. You’ve been given a gun. What does that look like? Do you have agency in that context? When, if any moment, if you make the wrong move there’s a couple of Redcoats who are going to shoot you very quickly. So what kind of agency do you have? But you also have power, as a convict because you’ve got a weapon, over Indigenous peoples in that context. What does that mean? I mean, again, I don’t know what the answers are, but what I’m saying is, is that there are so many interesting stories that are worth considering. And worth thinking about. I begin the book, in the 14th century because… the 13th century. Because, what I’m interested in is also thinking about like, yes, the book is looking at this very consequential but brief period of this ongoing colonial project that we know as Australia, you know. But I was also interested in, what about if we considered what Australia was before it became this nation state? Right?

And I start with these coins, these Kilwa coins that were found in Arnhem Land in the 70s, by a retired navy, person that worked for the navy. And he found these coins, these five copper coins just about the size of a five cent coin in the Wessel Islands. Anyway, he had these coins for a while. After many, many years they end up being sent to the British Museum for testing. And the British Museum comes back and says, “Well these are coins that belonged to this very powerful kingdom that was in the Indian Ocean called Kilwa.” And this kingdom had existed from about the 10th century to about the 14th century. And it was the powerful kingdom. It was so wealthy that it built Great Zimbabwe. If you know the history of Great Zimbabwe, which is also a very incredible site. It is sort of I mean, it’s not quite like Africa’s Stonehenge, but it’s very grand in its architecture. And the first mosque in Africa was built in Kilwa. So Kilwa the island is just off the coast of present day Tanzania. And as part of its wealth, it became this important trading hub that would connect Africa with the Middle East and Asia. And this trading route meant that half a year you had people coming from the Middle East and Asia following the wind. And they’d spend six months in Kilwa and then they’d return. And as a result of that, you then had, you know, the language of Swahili was born in Kilwa because it’s an amalgamation of Bantu languages, Arabic and Persian, and all sorts of things.

So you’ve got all this, this happening, and then the Portuguese decided that they’re going to enter this thing called the slave trade. And as a result of Portugal’s colonial expansion, they destroy everything in Kilwa and they melt down all the copper coins. And so prior to these five coins being found in Arnhem Land, only two had been found. One in Oman, present day Oman, another in Great Zimbabwe. Again, these two places make a lot of sense because there was trade happening already, right? So why five coins in Arnhem Land? Right? And this is the question that a lot of anthropologists and historians have been trying to answer. And there are a lot of theories around them. And the theory that I put in the book. And the argument is that there was potentially trade happening between northern Australia and Africa via the Silk Road. And I find that to be a very fascinating story. I’m sort of curious about that. I’m sort of curious about what would that have looked like.

But also, again, I think part of the problem with a lot of these, colonial imperial histories that we’ve inherited have placed First Peoples, colonised peoples as being unsophisticated, as being passive, as being all sorts of things. And yet here is an example of trade happening. A very sophisticated trade route happening across continents that sits outside Europe. I find that fascinating. And so interesting. But also it makes sense because humans are humans. I mean, humans get curious. Humans want to travel. Humans migrate. All sorts of things.

And I just, and again, going back to how do we change it? We have to start asking more sophisticated questions.

Sita Sargeant:
Yeah, 100%.

Santilla Chingaipe:
You know, like we have to. Like, we can’t just sort of go, “Oh yeah, that’s a story therefore it shall always be.” It’s like, “Really?”

Sita Sargeant:
Yeah, 100%. And I really think that we’re at such an exciting moment for Australian history in that we are having a conversation about who we want to be as a nation and looking at our past to go like, “Who are we? Who actually are we? What have we erased?” So I think it’s a very exciting time to be in the history space. I love being in this space. I’m like, gosh, you know, I get to literally shape history. And I think on that note, we should let other people ask questions. If you have any, please drop them in the Q&A chat box. We’ve already got two here already. And I think that, like both of them actually flow on really well from this.

I’ll go with Justine first. “Do you get a sense that we are currently witnessing the fall of empire and a shift occurring around the world, a growing empowerment of Indigenous or nonwhite people?”

Santilla Chingaipe:
Are we seeing a fall of empire? I think we’re still working through the reach of empire. I think people are waking up to the realities of just how implicated we’ve all been within empire. Whether that’s not just… because, you know, colonisation doesn’t just begin with the arrival, the genocide, the dispossession. You’ve also got it embedded within legislation. You’ve got it embedded within institutions. You’ve got all of this stuff that still needs so much reform and yet has not been quite considered as in, where did we inherit this from?

I write about the police, the Native Mounted Police, and a force that precedes the Native Mounted Police in my book. And when I was reading into the history of that and how so much of it was just literally just brought over, and how very little has changed. Because the way the police was set up was to protect the squatters and to keep Aboriginal people out. And when you think about contemporary policing and how that’s structured. And the ways in which it protects some at the detriment of others. To me kind of goes, we need to be really thinking about what works for our context. What should we be thinking about? Rather than kind of accepting that this is how things have always been and therefore it works within our context.

And so I hope that we can continue to consider the ways in which empire has absolutely shaped us and shaped what we’ve inherited, and the systems and the structures. Because I think once we start to understand that we can start to figure out how to begin to dismantle them and figure out a way of then going, what is the appropriate response for our context? Right? Because our context is very unique. I mean, we live on a continent that has more than 150 Indigenous nations that in itself, that is a lot of diversity. On top of the diversity that has arrived, whether willingly or unwillingly. And that has all played a role in, you know, what we’re all experiencing and engaging with. And yet we’ve been given these systems that worked in Britain and, you know, and then gone, “Yep, this is going to work for you guys.” And like, you know. So I think part of it is also kind of going, how do we then think through what works in the future that benefits everyone and doesn’t benefit a few while excluding so many people? Because these systems were naturally not designed for a majority, they were designed to benefit a certain group of people. And we continue to see that playing out. And so yeah.

So I think, I don’t know if we’re seeing a falling of empire. I think in terms of nonwhite historians writing history, there’s definitely a shift for sure. But again, I mean, this has been happening since the civil rights movement. I mean, there have been historians who have, there’ve been some brilliant post-colonial historians, particularly from the subcontinent. And again, you always have these waves, but then you also have periods where it quiet again. So I’m cautiously optimistic. I’d like to think that things are changing. But then the way power centres itself, it’s really hard to. Yeah, it’s really hard to be optimistic.

But I will say, I will say and I say this every time, because I really do think some of the best history being written in this country is being written by Indigenous scholars. And a lot of it, unfortunately, is either locked up in academic institutions and there’s a whole thing about access to that work. But, at every event I try to encourage people to really seek out Indigenous historians because they are doing some incredible thinking around the ways in which empire has shaped us, and the way to think through it.

Sita Sargeant:
Are there some key people that you would recommend?

Santilla Chingaipe:
Yeah, I would recommend Shino Konishi, who’s fantastic. She used to be at UWA, she’s now at ACU I think, in Victoria. So if you can get hold of any of her work, including just short journal articles. She’s fantastic. Julia Hurst, who’s at Melbourne University who is also, a brilliant historian. I’d also recommend Zoë Laidlaw. She’s not Indigenous, but she was my research supervisor at Melbourne. And she’s a fantastic historian of empire who’s thinking very deeply about all of this inheritance and thinking about how we work through it. So those three would be the names.

Sita Sargeant:
Amazing. Thank you. Okay. Another question. The question that I think everyone who’s written a book or working in this space dreads to get “What facet of history will you be exploring next?”

Santilla Chingaipe:
I’m actually doing a shorter piece, 5000 words. For the Saturday paper. And it is about the White Australia Policy. And I’m telling it from the perspective of a boxer who was deported to the United States. He’d been here for a while, married, had children. But because of the White Australia Policy, he was deported. And the reason why I’m doing it is because this year marks the 125th anniversary of the White Australian Policy coming into law. And I also think that many people don’t actually quite understand. I think people understand intellectually that we had this race policy. But I don’t think a lot of people actually know how it impacted people, how impacted families. But also the ways in which that the, the law, yes, I mean it wasn’t technically abolished because we just shifted from the White Australia Policy to the introduction of the Racial Discrimination Act. But just because something’s been outlawed doesn’t mean that the cultural undertones and all these sorts of things that come with the narratives that went around the White Australia Policy.

I mean the White Australia Policy was so entrenched that there were like, White Australia pineapples. After, Pacific Islanders were deported from Queensland the growers of fruit and vegetables would make it a point to let their consumers know that white hands had grown and cultivated the pineapples that they were consuming. I mean, we roll our eyes, but this did not cease to exist until the 70s. You know, it was at the very least, we have members in our families generationally who lived through the White Australia Policy. So it’s something that I’m interested in telling. But I’m also interested in telling it from a perspective of an individual that was caught up in this mechanism. And also thinking about the ways in which it continues to manifest today.

Sita Sargeant:
Yeah, I and I think particularly through government policy, like the fact that, you know, for the first 70 years of Australian public service policy, you have the White Australia Policy. Kind of, you know, shaping foreign affairs. Shaping social services. Shaping all of those key institutions. We’ve had the white Australia policy longer than we have had them.

Santilla Chingaipe:
And what was interesting about the White Australia Policy, because, when you look at the legislation by the way it was structured in the Constitution, it doesn’t read as racist. Right? Where the White Australia Policy becomes racist was within the discretionary powers that the immigration minister had. Particularly with the dictation test. So if foreign governments questioned Australia and said “So your policy, is your policy?” then Australia said “No, no, no no no, no, we’re not, we’re not racist. Like, look at our policy.” But meanwhile behind the scenes, someone arrives from Japan. You give them a test in Italian. You know they’re absolutely going to fail because you’re looking at them going, “We don’t want this person.” You know.

And this is kind of how things culturally manifest in this country where we sort of say, “Oh, we’re not racist.” It’s like, “Well, uhhhh.” You know what I mean? And I’m like, that’s not… discomfort is a good thing. It’s a useful thing. It’s not a terrible thing. But I would much rather we sit in a place of discomfort, than a place where we keep sweeping things under the rug. When a lot of these policies continue to hurt and harm a lot of people. And I think we all would like to reimagine, a better future for all Australians.

Sita Sargeant:
Yeah, 100%. Okay. Another question. This is from Annette. “I’d love to hear about the African-American convicts in Australia. You mentioned John Caesar. Why were they sent here? Was it related to resistance to slavery in the US? And were they part of the convict rebellions that happened in colonial Australia?” And then she says, “I will definitely read your book to find out more.”

Santilla Chingaipe:
Yay! African-American convicts. Okay. So the vast number of the convicts that I write about in the book came from the West Indies. So they were enslaved in the West Indies. Others from South Africa. Others were enslaved in Mauritius. And then there was also Americans. And yes, the Americans were enslaved. The Americans show up very early, particularly on the First Fleet.

And the reason why they show up early is because they were the Americans that, this is around the American Revolution. And so the British essentially need more labor. And they offer, and ‘offer’ I use that because it’s very difficult to say if it was a choice that enslaved people had, or if they were forced into being conscripted. So they offer enslaved people a form of freedom. Should they enlist and side with the British during the American Revolution. And about 3,000 or so men and boys do so. And so someone like John Moseley, who ends up on the First Fleet, born in Virginia. He ends up fighting for the British. Obviously the British lose the war.

And part of the deal was, because when George Washington was like, “Well, these these people are American property. They have to stay in America.” And the British were like, “Well, no, actually.” You know. And so they evacuated a lot of these enslaved people who were then referred to as “loyalists” via New York through to present day Canada. Some stayed in Canada, others continued to the UK. When they arrived in London.

This is after the 70 year war. So you’ve got poverty already in the streets of London. Economic hardship. It’s already very difficult when you add race on top of that. And so some of them end up committing petty crimes. A lot of it was survival because things that they’re stealing are like food and things like that. And that’s how many of them end up as convicts and are transported to Australia. So that’s the journey for some of the American convicts. Not all of them. But for particularly the ones that came early on.

Sita Sargeant:
Amazing. Thank you. Well, we’re nearly at the end of the talk. Is there anything else you would like to say as a final kind of like, moment?

Santilla Chingaipe:
There’s always so much to say.

Sita Sargeant:
I know that’s a terrible question.

Santilla Chingaipe:
There’s always so much to say. I just, I think… What I will say is this: I think one of the things that writing history has taught me is that one, if I have any reason for optimism is, I will say, since this book has come out, I get the sense that… I’m not going to generalise here because I don’t know if it’s a litmus test for the entire country. But I get the sense that for a number of Australians, they really do want to know about their history. And they’re really curious because most of the events have been very well attended. People are genuinely interested in these histories. People genuinely want to understand. And so what that tells me is that there’s clearly been a big gap between what people want to know and what’s being offered.

And that provides a wonderful opportunity because clearly audiences want to know. Audiences want to sit with the discomfort. People want to hear these things. People want to understand. And, and that’s very encouraging for me going forward, because it sort of means that, I can keep doing this work knowing that there will be people ready to receive it.

But also, the other thing that’s been very exciting is seeing more women interested in history. Because, again, there’s always been this sort of assumption that blokes are the ones that read history and, you know, you get dad a Gallipoli history books or Father’s Day or whatever. And I will tell you from the audiences that have come to my events, that can be the furthest thing from the truth.

And that makes me very excited because I’m like, “No, people want to know about their histories. They want to understand what we’ve inherited, and sit with that complexity.” And that’s been a just a very, very wonderful outcome for me, you know, since having this book out in the world. And so, I just I’m really thankful to everyone that’s shown up on this zoom, really is very special. I’m glad that you took time out of your Wednesday to hear me and Sita to talk about history. And thank you to the Victorian Women’s Trust and Ally and Rachael and everyone for making this possible. It’s been really, really special.

Sita Sargeant:
Yeah. Thank you so much Santi for being here. I agree, I think that there’s a real hunger for history. I think that people want history that’s accessible, engaging and relevant. And I think that your book is entirely that. So hopefully everyone goes off and buys and reads the book.

And if you’re in Melbourne, Sydney or Canberra, hopefully I will see you on a tour.

Santilla Chingaipe:
Yes!

Sita Sargeant:
Awesome, thank you.

This event was proudly presented by the Victorian Women’s Trust, as part of Trust Women: Feminist Book Club, a free literary series.