Governor Phillip's IOU economy: Colonial monetary improvisation on stolen Eora land reveals British structural underfunding and Indigenous dispossession
Original framing: “Before the budget: how Governor Phillip managed without cash in the colony” — The Conversation - Global
The Eora operated a sophisticated gift-reciprocity economy grounded in Country: fish, tools, knowledge, and ceremony circulated through kinship and custodial obligation, not debt. Phillip's IOUs — paper claims on a British commissariat that often failed to deliver — severed value from Country and imposed a foreign ontology where worth derives from Crown promise. Surviving Sydney Language vocabularies (collected by Dawes and Collins) contain no term for 'interest' or 'specie', but rich lexicons for sharing (ngarala) and reciprocal obligation (budyari). The IOU system did not 'manage without cash'; it actively dismantled an existing monetary ecology.
Phillip's IOU system was not a clever workaround but a founding violence: British structural underfunding met Indigenous monetary sovereignty and resolved the contradiction by imposing a fiat currency that could not pay for Country.
The commissariat's paper promises — backed by a Treasury that refused to send silver — functioned as both wage suppression for convicts and legal erasure for Eora economies. This pattern repeats: from the Rum Corps' monopoly to the 1890s depression's private banknotes, Australian monetary history is a series of settler-colonial experiments in extracting value from stolen land. The trickster's lesson is clear: any monetary system that cannot honour yam fields, songlines, and reciprocal care is not economy — it is enclosure with better paperwork. Restoring the Eora terms ngarala and budyari to our economic vocabulary is not symbolic; it is the prerequisite for a currency that serves life.