Defining moments: Slavery
1863: First South Sea Islanders brought to work in labour-intensive Queensland industries.
DURING FOUR DECADES from 1863 more than 62,000 South Sea Islander men, women and children were brought as labourers to Australia. Many were kidnapped in a practice known as blackbirding.
After Queensland became a distinct colony in 1859, its government was eager for income and encouraged trade. Australia’s first viable sugar cane harvest was taken in 1862 near Brisbane. The first commercial sugar mill began production soon after, and, recognising the industry’s potential, the federal government encouraged the establishment of large plantations. In the early 1800s labour in Australia’s colonies had been cheap and plentiful due to a surplus of convicts, ticket-of-leave holders, emancipists and indentured servants, but this changed with the abolition by 1868 of all convict transportation. Because sugar production required a large workforce, Queensland plantation owners proposed using ‘coloured’ labour. This was in response to both the white labour shortage and the belief white people could not endure hard physical work in a tropical climate. For the first time, in 1863, a group of 67 South Sea Island labourers was brought to Brisbane to work, initially on a cotton plantation. But cotton soon proved unviable, and, when sugar showed promise, most were sent to work in the cane fields instead.
South Sea Islanders had been recruited, mostly by white men contracted by plantation owners, since the 1840s for labour-intensive industries across the Pacific. The labourers, known as Kanakas, came from 80 different island nations, including Vanuatu, Fiji and Papua New Guinea, and had little legal protection from exploitation. Even more controversial were the trade’s ‘recruitment’ techniques. Many workers were taken forcibly by labour agents; others were deceived about what to expect in Australia. From 1863 to 1904 more than 62,000 people were brought to work in Queensland’s sugar, pastoral and maritime industries. In 1868 the state government introduced the Polynesian Labourers Act, hoping to limit their exploitation while on transport ships and in the fields. But unscrupulous operators found ways to circumvent the legislation’s aim to prevent blackbirding, and forced recruitment continued. In 1880 the legislation’s first major revision came with the Pacific Labourers Act (Queensland), which made forced recruitment techniques illegal and imposed minimum living standards on ships, which were to be enforced by government inspectors. But they weren’t always conscientious and some took bribes from crew.
The White Australia movement was gaining strength by the 1880s and the importation of ‘coloured’ labour was broadly opposed by Australian unions wanting to protect their members’ jobs. Yet plantation owners continued lobbying for cheap imported labour. In 1891 the Queensland government imposed a ban on recruiting indentured South Sea Islander workers, but it was postponed for 10 years when the sugar industry was badly affected by a global economic depression. On 17 December 1901 the governorgeneral assented to the Pacif ic Island Labourers Act (Australia), which provided for “the Regulation, Restriction and Prohibition of the Introduction of Labourers from the Pacific Islands and for other purposes”. It was part of a legislation package the new federal government enacted in its first year that constituted the White Australia policy and required deportation of most South Sea Islander labourers from 1906.
About 10,000 islanders living in Australia when the Act was passed mounted a campaign to oppose it. Letters of protest were sent to the prime minister, governor-general and the king, but no major changes were made to the Act.
The deportations began in late 1906 and continued until 1908, returning more than 7500 South Sea Islanders to their countries of origin, even though many had arrived here so young they had no memory of the places they’d left. About 2500 remained in Australia.
In 2000 the Queensland government recognised South Sea Islanders as a distinct ethnic and cultural Australian group and acknowledged the discrimination and injustice they had experienced throughout their history in Australia.