Today as a distinct race of people, there are some 70,000 surviving Australian South Sea Islander descendants
Flag-raising at the Australian National Maritime Museum by national ASSI dignitaries: custom women from Vanuatu, ASSIPJ board, New South Wales Council for Pacific Communities and the Tweed Heads community, 21 November 2020. Image Lola Forester
The legacy of blackbirding Slavery and Australian South Sea Islanders
In the mid-19th century, as Britain and the USA were abolishing slavery, thousands of South Sea Islanders were kidnapped from their homelands and forced to work in agricultural, pastoral, maritime, bêche-de-mer, fishing, cotton and railway industries in Australia. For over a decade, (Waskam) Emelda Davis has traced the bitter legacy of this practice, which is derived from the Atlantic slave trade known as ‘blackbirding’.
BLACKBIRDING WAS A ONCE-COMMON TRADE in which people from Pacific islands were tricked, kidnapped or coerced into slavery. Some small islands had their entire male populations stolen, which devastated island culture and economy by breaking up generations of kinship and civil society. Along with Australian First Nations people, South Sea Islanders were forced to work across pastoral, maritime and fishing industries, and played a key role in establishing Australia’s sugarcane industry. 38
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Human trafficking
From 1840 to 1950, the Pacific labour trade moved 1.5 million Indigenous and Asian people around the Pacific. Blackbirding began illegally in New South Wales in 1847, when entrepreneur Benjamin Boyd kidnapped the first 119 Melanesian men to slave on his whaling industries alongside Maori and First Nations peoples. They were taken from New Caledonia (Lifou Island) and Tanauta (formerly Tanna Island), Vanuatu. A disaster resulted when they escaped from Eden, in southern New South Wales, and walked back to Sydney, where they were found roaming around Kings Cross naked seeking passage back to their homelands. It is reported that one ‘man Tanna’ was found dead on the shores; he had been denied passage on a recruiting ship called Portenia returning to Vanuatu and drowned as he began to swim back to his island home. Between 1863 and 1908, more than 60,000 men, and some women and children, were taken to Queensland from the 80 islands of Vanuatu and the Solomons, including Papua New Guinea, Kiribati, Tuvalu, New Caledonia and Fiji (Rotuma).
