As the decades shed ever more light on colonialism’s brutal treatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, Australia has sought reassurance that at least, unlike Britain and America, our history is not marred with the heinous stain of the Caribbean and African slave trade.

But groundbreaking historical research must now give pause for reconsideration. It transpires that some of the scions of colonial society established themselves in Australia with wealth earned through slavery and official compensation for the loss of income from it when the British government eventually abolished the trade in dark-skinned humans.

A New South Wales governor and a Melbourne mayor, a prominent churchman who established this country’s oldest university, establishment bankers and the owners of vast rural estates, including the legendary Barcaldine in Queensland – birthplace of the Australian Labor Party – came to Australia after they or their families acquired slavery wealth.

The revelations, in a new book from political scientist and historian Clinton Fernandes of UNSW, Canberra, are drawn from the Legacies of British Slave-ownership database at the University College London (UCL) – a remarkable resource that aims to publicly record those Britons who profited from slavery.

While researching the book – Island off the Coast of Asia, Instruments of Statecraft in Australian Foreign Policy – Fernandes sought to test his belief that while humanitarianism was a factor in slavery’s abolition, economic rationalism was at least equally responsible.

Fernandes writes, “By the early 19th century, sugar cane on slave plantations in the British West Indies was so intensively cultivated that there was a crisis of overproduction. The unprofitability of the slave colonies was a major factor in Britain’s decision to abolish the slave trade. Popular understandings in recent years have emphasised philanthropic rather than economic reasons for abolition. But the truth is that economic factors were highly influential.”

While the Australian colonial frontier was devastating in its brutality for Indigenous people (at least 60,000 of whom died during conflict with “settlers”, soldiers and police), the early Australian economy grew, literally, allegorically and mythologically “on the sheep’s back” with an agricultural export industry established on land stolen from original Aboriginal inhabitants.

Fernandes writes, “There was no industrial revolution in this period, but rather a burgeoning agricultural export industry that helped create a group of wool-rich rural elites. An industrial business class appeared after the discovery of gold in the 1850s. In the 60 years before this, however, there is a largely unknown source of wealth: slavery.”

Political scientist and historian Clinton Fernandes has documented the slave-owning histories of Australia’s early settlers. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

Abolition of British involvement in slavery happened incrementally over almost three decades. Arrangements differed according to geography. The British Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1807) did not actually ban slavery but rather the trading (that is, buying, selling and transporting) of slaves between Africa, the West Indies and America.

In 1833 parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act for the British Caribbean, Canada and the Cape of Good Hope. Even then, slavery remained in the East India Company’s territories of Sri Lanka and St Helena in the South Atlantic. The 1833 law came into force in 1834. In 1835 the British parliament granted £20m in compensation (40% of the total British income, equivalent to some £300bn today) to former slave owners for loss of income.

The money, Fernandes writes, “provided the starting point for several investments in Australia … slave owners and former owners settled in Australia using the proceeds of slave ownership and compensation”.

The revelations may come as a particular shock to South Australians who’ve long prided themselves that their colony – and its capital, Adelaide – was effectively established with a neat transferal of British civility, leaving it thankfully devoid of the convict heritage of other colonial states.

Indeed Fernandes, a former Australian Army intelligence officer, began his research into the slavery component of his book by focusing on the South Australian establishment.

He says, “I wanted to test my hypothesis about the role of state intervention – in economics and war – in the development of Australia’s prosperity. It’s important to try to falsify your hypothesis, not to look for material to confirm it. The Australian colonies were slave-free, but they were part of an empire that wasn’t. So I suspected there might be something to uncover. I started in South Australia because I hoped to refute the hypothesis there, since it prides itself as a planned British society based on free settlement rather than convict labour.”

George Fife Angas, a pillar of the South Australia establishment, was compensated for 121 slaves in Honduras.

And so, he came across English-born George Fife Angas (1789-1879), a pillar of the South Australian establishment. A merchant banker, landowner, colonial parliamentarian and philanthropist, he helped establish the Union Bank of Australia in 1836 and the South Australian Banking Co. He was sufficiently wealthy to buy 4,000 acres of fertile land on the Rhine and Gawler rivers in the Barossa range and, according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography (self-declared as “Australia’s pre-eminent dictionary of national biography”) he was: “A Christian first, despite his varied business ventures Angas had a lifelong passion for forming societies and joining charitable committees”.

The ADB says “he joined influential reformers in fighting for the emancipation of slaves and the restoration of nonconformist missionaries in British Honduras”. It omits to mention he’d also been a slave owner.

“According to this [UCL] database George Fife Angas … was compensated for four claims in Honduras in 1835. The claims involved more than £6.942 for 121 slaves,” Fernandes writes.

Isaac Currie (1760-1843), a banker with Curries & Co and the East Riding Bank, was, Fernandes writes, another prominent South Australian “associated with four compensation claims in Jamaica, worth more than £15,379 for 841 slaves”.

In 1835, meanwhile, English trader John Samuel August received £2362 for 40 Honduran slaves. He died in 1839 leaving his fortune to his wife and four children, including a daughter, Sarah. According to the UCL database “all the beneficiaries of John Samuel August’s will emigrated, to the newly established colony of Adelaide in South Australia”.

Sarah later married Alfred Langhorne, an overseer and squatter, and a successful farmer who purchased the property, Laverton, west of Melbourne – today’s Altona Homestead.

Godfrey Downes Carter (1830-1902), a celebrated lord mayor of Melbourne, from 1884 to 1885, was, according to the UCL database, a beneficiary of the £472 paid to his father, John Adams Carter, described simply by the ADB - with a somewhat characteristic omission – as a “merchant and planter”.

Fernandes writes, “The ADB says he was born in Jamaica and arrived in Victoria in 1853. ‘By frugal living he slowly prospered,’ we are told, and became ‘one of the most esteemed and trusted businessmen in Melbourne’. Not a word is mentioned of his slave-owning family background.”

John Belisario, who pioneered the use of anaesthetics in dentistry, was, Fernandes writes, “the son of active slave owners in Jamaica in the 1830s”, while John Buhôt, the first person to successfully grow sugar cane in Australia, “was the son of a slave owner in Barbados”.

Again, the ADB evades the truth, saying Buhôt was “born in Barbados” to a “merchant” father.

The ADB says Charles Edward Bright (founder of Bright Brothers & Co steamship company; president of the Melbourne Chamber of Commerce; chairman of the Melbourne Harbour Commission; trustee of the public library, Victorian museum and national gallery, and Union Bank of Australia director who lived from 1829 to 1915) was the son of a “prominent landowner”.

But his family was beneficiary to the £8384 compensation for 404 slaves on a Barbados estate.

The prominent Sydneysider Alexander Kenneth Mackenzie (1769-1838), who migrated from London to Sydney in 1822, is perhaps best known for establishing the Bathurst Bank and as secretary and cashier of the Bank of New South Wales. He was an ardent campaigner for colonial tariff reduction on timber, prominent in the turf racing community and Scots Church.

Mackenzie was also, for more than a decade, a slave dealer in St Vincent. Once again, the ADB omits this.

NSW governor Lachlan Macquarie is often described as a benefactor of Aboriginal people even though he was responsible for their slaughter. Photograph: Toby Mann/AAP

So much Australian history has, like the continent, been subject to colonisation – a glossing over of salient and unpalatable fact that tells the true story of British invasion, Indigenous dispossession, frontier murder and war, and pastoral expansion. Several times in recent years I’ve written about how generations of Australian historians (add to the list politicians of all persuasions, dramaturges and novelists) have wilfully overlooked the actions of the fifth governor of New South Wales, Lachlan Macquarie, who has been afforded a reputation of benevolence to Aboriginal people even though he was responsible for their mass murder, the use of “terror” tactics against them and the theft of their children.

The ADB has already embarked on a significant undertaking to, in the words of some historians, “decolonise” and upgrade parts of the dictionary. Critical to this is the forthcoming Australian Research Council-funded Indigenous biography volume. The decolonisation process will involve, among other things, amending – or perhaps replacing – some of the earlier and notably incomplete entries, now online, so that they include previously omitted accounts of, for example, massacres of Indigenous people. I’ll be writing more about this critical, resources-intensive task in the near future.

The ADB is prominent among defenders, by omission, of Macquarie and others, including John Batman (the syphilitic killer of Tasmanian Aboriginal people) responsible for murdering this continent’s Indigenous.

The dictionary of biography mentions that Macquarie’s first wife Jane Jarvis was “a West Indian heiress”, but doesn’t note her inheritance: Antiguan slave plantations.

Fernandes reveals that a founder of the University of Sydney and its former vice chancellor, Reverend Robert Allwood was born in Kingston, Jamaica, the son of a slave owner, also Robert Allwood. According to the slavery compensation database, the reverend “lodged a compensation claim of more than £10,000 for 202 slaves in British Guiana under a mortgage in 1836”. Allwood migrated to Sydney in 1839, after which he was elected a fellow of St Paul’s College when the university was founded. Allwood remains a revered figure in Australian divinity and education, his connection to slavery hitherto unacknowledged.

Archibald Paull Burt (1810-1879), was a giant in the colonial affairs of Western Australia where he served as chief justice of the Supreme Court. The dictionary of biography says he was the son of a “planter” in the West Indies. His father, George Henry Burt was, in fact, besides the speaker of the house of assembly in St Kitts, also a slave owner. Fernandes reveals that the West Australian, Archibald Paull Burt, was compensated for three slave estates.

Barcaldine, Queensland, is known as the birthplace of the Australian Labor Party, the revered place where striking workers met under the “tree of knowledge”.

British Guiana-born (later Sir) Donald Charles Cameron (1814-1872) established the property of Barcaldine Downs, from which the town takes its name, in 1863. In 1835 his uncle, also Donald Charles Cameron, and his father, John Cameron, were compensated some £46,000 for five slave plantations in British Guiana. The son and nephew, Donald Charles Cameron, was a direct beneficiary of those compensation payments. Fernandes argues the son/nephew, Donald Charles, owed his immense wealth (and capacity to buy vast swathes of property in Victoria and Queensland) to decades’ of slave profits stretching to when he was in British Guiana, as well as to the lump sum paid to his father and uncle on abolition.

Barcaldine in Queensland, the birthplace of the Labor party, was named for slave owner Donald Charles Cameron’s Barcaldine Downs property. Photograph: Mark Kolbe/Getty Images

Australia, most notably, Queensland, is yet to reconcile its own history of “blackbirding” – the theft of Indigenous peoples from the Solomon Islands and the islands of Vanuatu – for so-called “indentured labour” on cane plantations. Restitution has not been made for what the families of those stolen and forced to work in Australia rightly term “sugar slavery”.

In WA, until well into the 20th century, Aboriginal “prisoners”, many of whom had neither committed nor been convicted of criminal offence, worked on public building and private agricultural projects while chained to one another at the neck. One prominent Aboriginal rights campaigner named it for what it was – “brutal slavery in full swing”. Aboriginal children were stolen and forced to work as unpaid domestics and rural labourers across the colonies.

Those who write our history must now incorporate the reality that colonial Australia’s foundation economy is stained with the profits of British slavery. More research will follow and, perhaps, expose the names of more European pioneering/establishment families who got out of the slave trade before the British compensation provisions of 1835.

Meanwhile Fernandes says it defies credulity that the ADB, which is produced by the Australian National University in Canberra, was ignorant of the slavery connections of some of the people whose lives it purports to authoritatively chart.

“The ANU’s Chancellor, Gareth Evans, called the ADB ‘the indispensable record of who we are, and of the characters who have made us what we are’. I agree it’s an excellent project, a national treasure, in fact. But the systematic sidestepping of the slavery angle cries out for an explanation. Nationalism often relies on getting your history wrong,” Fernandes says.

Many other prominent Australians – among them, Barry Jones, Geoffrey Bolton and Malcolm Turnbull also praise, on the dictionary’s website, the attributes and importance of the ADB.

It is astonishing that it took until 2015 for the British Government to repay the £20m (£300 billion today) 4% consolidated loan it undertook in order to compensate slave owners from 1835.

“The taxpayers as a whole paid out the slavery compensation, but only the rich slave owners benefited from the £20m. To me this succinctly demonstrates how costs and risks are socialised but profits are privatised. That’s the theme running right through the book and indeed through Australian foreign policy history,” Fernandes says.

“The book’s 230-year survey of Australia’s external relations shows that ‘national interests’ is code for the objectives of those who dominate the private sector. The public bears the costs and risks while small dominant groups benefit disproportionately. This is usually dismissed as a ‘radical critique’, but it comes right out of Adam Smith, who said that ‘the principal architects’ of policy were in the private sector, and their interest ‘has been most peculiarly attended to,’ while others’ ‘has been sacrificed to it’.”