Pacific Islanders Are Recruited and Kidnapped for Queensland’s Plantations

In August 1863, the schooner Don Juan reached Brisbane carrying South Sea Islanders recruited from the Loyalty Islands and the New Hebrides, reported as 67 in some sources and 73 in others. Robert Towns, a Sydney-based merchant seeking cheap field hands to capitalise on the global cotton shortage caused by the American Civil War, had chartered the vessel to supply his Townsvale estate. The recruitment, carried out under Captain Grueber with Henry Ross Lewin as recruiter, was quickly accused of deception and kidnapping. The labourers were bound by contracts that paid only about six pounds a year, a low rate that became the pattern for the Queensland trade.

Over the next four decades, an estimated 55,000 to 62,000 Pacific Islanders were brought to Queensland under indentured contracts. The practice, widely termed blackbirding, quickly pivoted from cotton to coastal sugar cane plantations, as well as inland pastoral stations and northern fisheries. While colonial promoters depicted the traffic as voluntary labour migration, recruiters frequently seized Islanders at gunpoint or coerced them through false promises. Most were men, but women and children were also taken. Conditions on the plantations were harsh, and some accounts estimate that about 30 percent of those brought to Queensland died there.