"I profoundly reject the black armband view of Australian history. I believe the balance sheet of Australian history is a very generous and benign one. I believe that, like any other nation, we have black marks upon our history but amongst the nations of the world we have a remarkably positive history." - John Howard, 1996.

From the start, our rulers have been prepared to sanction any sort of abuse of human beings, if their power and profits depend on it. For more than a third of White Australia's history, from 1788 to 1868, convicts were an essential pillar of the Australian colonies. Over that period, some 157,000 men, women and children were transported here in chains.

In part, the horror of transportation was an attempt to discipline the lower orders of Britain. But unfree labour was an essential part of building up colonies throughout Britain's sprawling worldwide empire. Tradespeople and people with the skills needed for a new colony were transported, as well as those assigned to the back-breaking work of building jails, barracks, roads and docks.

So Australia's working class started work in chains.

Farming was done by convicts working for government overseers and, especially after 1800, by convicts assigned to private capitalists.

James Brine was one of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, transported in 1834 for attempting to form a union among agricultural labourers in Dorset. He was assigned to a magistrate named Robert Scott. Stricken by a severe cold after spending 17 days up to his chest in a creek washing sheep, Brine begged for a blanket. Scott refused, saying:

"What would your masters in England have had to cover them if you had not been sent here? ...you are sent over here to be severely punished, and no mercy shall be shown you. ...I will flog you as often as I like... don't you know that not even the hair on your head is your own?'"

Infractions of work discipline were brought before magistrates who were themselves major landowners and employers of convict labour. The punishments dished out to those who failed to work hard enough could be horrendous. Robert Hughes in The Fatal Shore records the case of Charles Anderson, who over several years was sentenced to a total of 1,500 lashes for such "offences" as "looking round from his work, or at a steamer in the river, etc." By such means was work discipline instilled into Australia's early working class.

Convicts found guilty of offences while in Australia were sent to outlying penal colonies - Macquarie Harbour, Newcastle, or the most horrific of all, Norfolk Island, the Guantanamo Bay of the nineteenth century.

The first miners in Australia were convicts sent to Coal River, now known as Newcastle. The commandant wrote in 1810 that his jail was "the hell of New South Wales". Coal miners were forced to stay underground during the week, sleeping without any bedding.

From 1831 coal mining became a private monopoly when the Australian Agricultural Corporation was allocated 1400 convicts to mine coal. The profits produced by convict labour helped sustain the company, which is still making a profit almost two centuries later.

Irish convicts were singled out for especially harsh punishment. Ireland was England's first colony, and England's subjugation of the Irish people was maintained by extreme violence and justified by a vicious racist ideology. Both were imported to Australia.

Seventy per cent of Irish convicts were transported for their first offence, mainly petty theft. But when convicts from Ireland's mighty 1798 rebellion began arriving in Australia, the colonial elite's paranoia about Irish convicts became a full-fledged panic. One fully in the grip of this condition was the Reverend Samuel Marsden, a leading Anglican clergyman, a substantial landowner and a magistrate.

Marsden was convinced that the newly transported Irish rebels around Parramatta were hoarding pikes and plotting rebellion. Lacking evidence of any sort, he resolved to have some of them "punished very severely" until they talked. But the savage floggings that ensued failed to elicit any information. For example, even after 300 lashes that exposed his backbone and reduced his haunches to a jelly, Paddy Galvin, a young boy about 20 years of age, defiantly said: "You may as well hang me now, for you never will get any music from me so."

Governor King ordered a second court of inquiry, which concluded that, though there was no evidence, things looked suspicious. The "several atrocious offenders" under suspicion were flogged again and sent to life exile on Norfolk Island.

Such anti-Irish panic on the part of the Protestant upper classes was to become a regular feature of Australian politics for over a century.

Robert Hughes notes that: "The basis of prison discipline was the informer. On Norfolk the policy of splintering the convicts as a class, dissolving solidarity in mutual suspicion, was taken to extremes; the authorities felt, quite correctly, that if the prisoners were given the smallest chance to combine there could be a bloody uprising... Thus not to inform became suspicious in itself, and hardly a week passed without the disclosure of elaborate plots...as convicts competed for trivial favour from [the] officers by denouncing one another."

So effective was this method of control that there were only two large-scale armed uprisings by convicts: the 1804 Castle Hill rebellion and a short-lived revolt on Norfolk Island in 1834. In both cases, repression was brutal. Leaders of the 1804 rebellion were hanged in chains, their bodies left to rot in public as a deterrent for others.

For five months after the Norfolk Island uprising, the rebels were kept locked to a chain cable and "disciplined in a state of nudity for four hours each day, with their arms up and fingers extended, and such of them as betrayed the slightest emotion of pain, were either stabbed by the Military or flogged on the spot."

Though there were few full-scale revolts against the convict system, there were constant smaller rebellions. At the female "factory" in Parramatta there were repeated riots and fires. And there were numberless attempts at escape, with some escapees making it as far as Chile and the United States.

But the most common form of rebellion, and perhaps the most effective, was the simplest: the slow-down, the classic form of resistance of forced labour. Historians Bob Connell and Terry Irving note: "Early dispatches show governors almost foaming at the mouth over the difficulty of getting the convicts to raise crops. Slow-down is the meaning of the ‘neglect of duty' charges that crop up so often in the punishment books. It is the situation behind respectable settlers' endless complaints about the laziness of the convicts."

Such tactics won substantial informal concessions, first limitations on the hours of work, then the right to work for pay part of the time. It's worth remembering that systematic "bludging" at work has a long and honourable tradition in the class struggle in Australia.

There were also attempts at union organisation. The first recorded attempt was in 1795 among reapers harvesting wheat. In 1819, James Straiter tried to organise a combination among the convict-shepherds to secure higher pay during the lambing-period. He survived 800 lashes and was transported to Port Macquarie.

The convict system was an obvious threat to the slowly growing ranks of the non-convict workforce. Cheap convict labour was used to undercut the wage rate of other workers. And as late as 1840, as transportation was being abolished to New South Wales, a strike by the Sydney Morning Herald's compositors was broken using convict labour. The same means was used to break an 1841 strike of Sydney bakers.

It is no surprise that the infant labour movement consistently called for an end to the convict system. There were humanitarian voices in Britain also. But arguably the decisive event in the abolition of transportation was the colossal slave revolt that shook the British sugar colony of Jamaica in 1831 and 1832. Though eventually crushed, this revolt pushed Britain's rulers to end slavery and abolish various forms of unfree labour through the Empire.

In Australia the process took place unevenly. Transportation to New South Wales was abolished in 1840. But the dependence of Tasmania's economy on convict labour helped to ensure that the system survived there until 1852. The Swan River settlement (today's Perth) had been established as a private, for-profit colony. By the end of 1850, however, the settlement had only 5,886 colonists. Once again, unfree labour got the wheels turning. Over the next 18 years almost 10,000 convicts slowly put the colony on a more profitable footing.

Of course, a lot has changed since colonial times. A modern economy needs workers motivated less by the threat of a good flogging and more by the habits and work ethic produced by generations of economic compulsion.

But even today, the system of imperialism relies on soldiers or policemen inflicting unspeakable tortures on their victims. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay serve the same function that Norfolk Island used to fulfil. Most of us will never see the insides of these hell-holes. But the tortures inflicted in them form an essential part of a worldwide system of terror and control.

This is why John Howard takes the "history wars" so seriously. A few "black marks", he tells us, shouldn't be allowed to spoil our "remarkably positive history". Howard wants to brush over the racism and exploitation in Australia's past, because he wants us to ignore the racism and exploitation in Australia's present. He wants us to forget that from the birth of "Australia" up until today, the power and profits of our rulers have required the systematic abuse of human beings.