Neck Chains & Brutality: How Australia Turned Aboriginal Men into Slave Labor

While the world pictures slavery in America’s South, Australia was shackling Aboriginal men and boys with neck chains and forcing them into hard labor under the blazing outback sun. From the 1800s well into the 20th century, white colonists and law enforcement routinely:

• Chained groups of Indigenous people together by the neck like animals

• Marched them hundreds of miles to prison camps or pastoral stations

• Forced them into unpaid, back-breaking work—cattle mustering, mining, infrastructure—under threat of violence or death

This wasn’t “penal labor”—it was state-sanctioned slavery, designed to dispossess, control, and break Aboriginal communities. Many never returned home.

(Source: The Sun - Aboriginal Slaves in Chains)