Summer special: Blackbirding

NICK GRIMM: Hello, I'm Nick Grimm and thanks for joining me for this Audio Current Affairs Summer Special.

Today we're bringing you a story about the ancestors of many modern day Australians.

They were brought here against their will and forced to toil in the hot sun of a wide brown land far from home.

Of course, I could easily be talking about the convicts transported here from Britain to serve hard labour, but instead today we're looking at the more than 60,000 South Sea Islanders who in the latter half of the 19th century were brought to these shores to work for a pittance on sugarcane and cotton farms.

As Nance Haxton discovers, their descendants want to shine a spotlight on the shameful practices that some have dubbed "Australia's slave trade".

(SINGING) Luana Pitt and her mother Avanel Parsons.

SONG LYRICS:

Just breathe
We've been through pain
Heartbreak we've been through pain
Along the way
Both past and present
We're here to say
We have strength to carry on
So let's keep out culture strong
Whispers of our ancestors they breathe
Breathe
Breathe
Just breathe
I said the whispers of our ancestors they breathe
Breathe
Breathe
Just breathe

NANCE HAXTON: Luana Pitt wrote this song to help her family deal with the lingering trauma of a painful past.

LUANA PITT: I didn't know there was slave trading going on there with actual South Sea Islanders so I'm still learning.

(SINGING) Whispers of our ancestors they breathe.

NANCE HAXTON: Her grandmother was among more than 62,000 South Sea Islanders brought from their island homes in the Pacific to work as labourers on Australian farms.

They cleared the land with their hands and machetes, and were paid a pittance for their labour.

LUANA PITT: We're trying to find steps, so one step at a time because we don't know where our roots and even our language is at the moment we've got to just find that again. So it's been a hard road.

NANCE HAXTON: They endured horrendous living conditions and many died.

Their graves are still being discovered today.

MATT NAGAS: This is the gravesite.

NANCE HAXTON: On a lonely hill adjacent to the old Bundaberg cemetery, a few white crosses dot the landscape.

It's believed the remains of more than a thousand people lie here in unmarked graves.

While the hard labour and sweat of South Sea Islanders helped Queensland grow rich and prosperous, for those who died here, there were no headstones to mark their passing.

MATT NAGAS: No, in this area here this is called "portion set aside", psa section. Up until 1943 no black person was allowed to be buried over that cemetery.

NANCE HAXTON: Matt Nagas calls himself a proud Australian South Sea Islander.

The respected elder is regularly asked to identify sites suspected of being another lost grave of an unnamed islander who was brought here and never went home.

MATT NAGAS: It just confirms our stories what's been told and how when the stories came back that they were buried where they died.

Remember they didn't have morgues to keep them for days. They buried them more or less the same day. So that means just taken onto the fence line. Lot of people were buried along fence lines because they presumed they would never grow anything there. But then fence lines got moved.

I've lost my great grandparents on my Mum's side they died at Bingara we don't know where their graves are.

NANCE HAXTON: The South Sea Islanders who came to Australia as farm labourers were called 'Kanakas' - a Hawaiian word meaning 'man'.

Many of the thousands brought to Queensland and Northern NSW to work on plantations were lured onto ships by deception or simply forced against their will.

Most of the labourers were men, but women and children were also taken from more than 80 Pacific Islands, mainly Vanuatu (then known as the 'New Hebrides'), the Solomon Islands, and Papua New Guinea.

Brian Courtice is the former federal MP for Hinkler.

Here at his property Sunnyside near Bundaberg, a crop of sweet potatoes is ready for harvest, it's taken the place of the sugarcane that was once the mainstay of the farm.

BRIAN COURTICE: It's very peaceful Nance, isn't it we've got chickens running around here now.

In Vanuatu the islanders call these trees Christmas trees because they come out around Christmas time, and you'll just see the first red flowers of the poincianas.

And I purposely planted these where I knew the first row of burials were.

NANCE HAXTON: Brian Courtice's family has lived on Sunnyside for almost a century - his grandfather bought the property in the 1920s.

He grew up hearing stories about the unmarked graves of islanders that lay within its boundaries.

Five years ago, Matt Nagas helped him find the site - and it's now been heritage listed.

BRIAN COURTICE: Nance there's 13 in the first row, there's ten in the next and six in the next. They lie north south and then there's ten on this side, seven on this side and then three more on this side making up 29 and there's a child there the grave there is a small one.

NANCE HAXTON: Since finding the graves, Brian Courtice has pieced together the dark history of the property, when it was under the control of landowner Edward Turner in the late 1800's.

BRIAN COURTICE: So all the early settlers knew. They all remarked what a very cruel and hard man Turner was.

The people that lived across the road the Coppin family witnessed him hitting South Sea Islanders with a stick but it wasn't a little stick - it was a big hunk of wood. He was convicted of hitting South Sea Islanders and he was convicted of starving them. He didn't feed them and that's why we believe there's 50 buried somewhere here we certainly know there's 29 on this site. It's not only a monument to the 29 people that died here a long way from home but it's a monument to the 16,000 people that died and are lying all over Queensland in unmarked graves. To me this is like the unknown solider, whether it be the French or the Australian unknown solider it's the same thing and these people had families back in the Solomons and Vanuatu and they never saw them again.

NANCE HAXTON: Sounds like this has been quite an important journey for you.

BRIAN COURTICE: Nance it has and it's so important that I'll show two other graves that symbolise what I'm saying.

NANCE HAXTON: Brian Courtice's father and mother are themselves buried under heritage listed trees that were planted by Edward Turner 142 years ago.

The same tree where a South Sea Islander died.

BRIAN COURTICE: The tree behind us here is one that a South Sea Islander was hanged by, I would think that's the only tree we know in Australia that was used to hang someone.

They had to sleep on dirt floors and were not used to cold weather in winter and cold wet winters that also along with the fact that they weren't fed properly had an effect on their health and that's why so many died because they simply were malnutritioned and overworked and had shocking living conditions.

NANCE HAXTON: But it's a story that's well known here locally in Bundaberg isn't it but not throughout Australia is it?

BRIAN COURTICE: It's not, and it's a story that needs to be told and of course it's something I think would encourage tourists to drive all the way up to Cairns to see the regional cities that were built on the backs of South Sea Islander labour, every sugar town was built on the sweat and toil of South Sea Islanders.

NANCE HAXTON: Matt Nagas says his community knows all-too-well what happened during this dark time in Australia's history,

But like Brian Courtice he believes it's time the wider community learnt more about it as well.

MATT NAGAS: It was every bit of slavery. Yep, from our talks of the old people when they talk about some of the hurtful things that happened even the women you know that were brought over were used as maids and for their um, can't put it any other better way but for the bedtimes too for the property manager or whoever it was. We have children that are here today from that.

NANCE HAXTON: Sounds like it's really time for Australia to come to terms with this, teach it in schools and embrace that.

MATT NAGAS: Yeah. I think our governments need to learn from the past I think even I talk about Indigenous people, it wasn't taught in the schools as much as it should have been and its created a lot of problems today. I knew a lot about American history when I grew up through my social studies books and all that, and Captain Cook I learnt a lot about that. I never learnt too much about who Indigenous people was and nothing at all about who South Sea Islander people were.

NANCE HAXTON: The Australian South Sea Islander community estimates there are now more than 70,000 descendants of the original kanakas living in Australia today.

Emelda Davis is one.

The Sydney woman is the President of the Australian South Sea Islanders Port Jackson group.

EMELDA DAVIS: We're a force to be reckoned with in this country it just needs to be put in perspective and shared.

NANCE HAXTON: She says its time Australia came to terms with the practice that was widely known as blackbirding.

EMELDA DAVIS: Blackbirding was derived from the African slave trade and it was about the coercion, kidnapping and the I guess the slavery of people taken from the islands, from the 80 islands of Vanuatu and Solomons.

A lot of people are just learning to understand that term and a lot of people have various arguments around slavery the term, and blackbirding and indentured labour, because they assume that because people were being paid a pittance that that was justified. And it's not. Slavery is slavery.

NANCE HAXTON: Emelda Davis' grandfather Moses Topay Enares was only 12 years old when he was coerced from a beach on Tanna Island, put and kept in the hold of a ship until he arrived in Queensland to work on the cane fields.

He never saw his family again.

His story and others were recounted by her grandmother, when her memories were recorded by a university researcher in the 1970s.

EMELDA DAVIS: She speaks about how they were coerced onto the ships and then thrown into the hole and they were given a stodge like flour even though flour wasn't around then but some sort of meal or something to eat, and people were sick and tired and people died.

We still don't know the specifics of that we have the oral histories and now we've got to go out and search for archives that might be able to connect the dots so again displaced, disoriented.

Everybody's got ancestry.com in terms of searching convict history today but what about our mob? We are a significant race of people in this country and you can't deny that. It's around you everywhere you walk in this country people of colour. We need to do a lot more work collectively it's a shared history it’s our story it's the Australian story.

JEFF MCMULLEN: The Queensland South Sea Islanders clearly were treated as slaves.

NANCE HAXTON: And it's a story being told by people like Veteran journalist, filmmaker and human rights advocate Jeff McMullen.

He was one of the main speakers at the Australian South Sea Islander Recognition Symposium in Sydney in September.

JEFF MCMULLEN: I came across these issues a very long time ago as a young ABC foreign correspondent.

I was posted to Papua New Guinea and I was shocked when a coffee plantation owner said to me, your country had white slave masters.

And he explained that in the late 1800s, people from three or four New Guinea provinces, the outreach parts, were actually taken to Australia and worked in the sugar plantations.

And then over the years and decades that followed, I learned more about the global story of the connection between the sugar trade and slavery.

And all of my learning deepened my understanding that whether we call it indentured labour akin to slavery, what we really need to focus on, is that in the conditions that they were set to work here, it was akin to slavery.

That's what I think the country needs to understand. It's not to wallow in guilt, because the truth allows you to understand how we got to where we are now.

NANCE HAXTON: You also see parallels with the current debate in Parliament on human trafficking?

JEFF MCMULLEN: In our Federal Parliament, we're conducting a national inquiry about what they term modern slavery. Eerily, many of these things are so strikingly similar, the current inquiry is about people who are brought here under false pretences, are held in captivity, are not allowed to freely travel, are paid sub social wages, the terms of modern slavery are fitting to examine as to what happened in our past and to say, if this is modern slavery, what occurred in the late 1890s?

In particular, when the British empire had formally had its Abolition Act, and the British Empire was saying, they were moving past slavery, but here, under the regulations that were written up into law in Queensland, the blackbirders managed to conduct something akin to slavery.

NANCE HAXTON: Just a few months ago Australian South Sea Islanders gathered in Sydney to commemorate 170 years since the first Melanesian labourers were brought to Australia.

In 1847 Benjamin Boyd brought 65 people from New Caledonia and Vanuatu to Eden in New South Wales to work in his whaling and pastoral businesses.

The descendants of those who made the journey to these shores are now seeking recognition of the contribution their ancestors made towards the nation's growing economy and their place in the history books alongside the landowners and entrepreneurs who reaped the profits from their hard labour.

Now the Australian Maritime Museum is doing just that with an exhibition focussing on their role in the nation's shipping industry.

Dr Stephen Gapps is the curator.

STEPHEN GAPPS: We haven't told these sort of stories before and we're looking to tell the South Sea Islander histories and the story of blackbirding is part of the overall maritime Australian history. So…

NANCE HAXTON: And it's something that perhaps not a lot of people are really familiar with.

STEPHEN GAPPS: No it's not. There’s two things I suppose, looking around the museum's stories, we don't tell that one.

But also it was interesting to find our own objects in our own collection that do have elements of South Sea Island connections with them.

This is early stage so over the next few years we'll be doing some transformations in the museum and hopefully these stories can be included in that.

NANCE HAXTON: So what really brought about this change in focus, to embrace this?

STEPHEN GAPPS: The Maritime Museum is meant to tell the National Maritime story. It's always been a focus for us. It just, it's a complex story.

And people are becoming more aware of the importance of this sort of story as well as to people in the present as well as its role in Australia's history in the 19th century it was quite a challenging and important debate back then.

NANCE HAXTON: The bronze statue of entrepreneur Robert Towns stands in the main street of the town that bears his name, Townsville.

Regarded as a founding father to many residents here, to other Australians he was a notorious blackbirder.

As Emelda Davis sees it, Australia needs to reassess its history, along with the monuments that have been erected to those who profited from the cheap labour of South Sea Islanders.

EMELDA DAVIS: Robert Towns didn't do this on his own. No one man's an island. And people need to recognise that.

You know even the work that we do as leaders in our communities, you're only successful because of the people you surround yourself with.

And 62,500 plus, that's the statistics from the academics and I'm sure it was a lot more than that. A significant contribution to the nation and to his success in particular.

In the United States, communities have become bitterly divided over the removal of statues celebrating the lives of the confederate soldiers who fought to maintain slavery in America's south.

For her part, Emelda Davis would like to see the statue of Robert Towns remain where it stands.

But she wants a statue of a canecutter added to the monument to better reflect the region's history.

And others believe Australia needs to find a way to acknowledge the complexities of its past.

University of Queensland historian Emeritus Professor Clive Moore has studied the history of Australian South Sea Islanders for more than 40 years.

CLIVE MOORE: I don't think you take down statues and I don't there's any of the South Sea Islanders out there who are saying take down statues, but they're saying be honest. And you either change the plaque on the statue or you very nicely put up another statue in the same park which is of a South Sea Islander wielding a cane knife and saying these are the people whose muscle and sweat built our sugar industry and our pastoral industry. That's what they're asking for.

And it just seems to me that the people who run these towns ought to have enough sense to realise that it's a necessary process to bring these people into the mainstream and to acknowledge that there are two sides to this.

You don't just glorify Robert Towns you don't just glorify John Mackay which is what the fathers and mothers of a town are inclined to do, they will name a town after somebody that person's very important.

But you've got to accept the good and the bad with what they do and you need to be honest about where these names come from because you're dealing with a hurt in a community that goes back 150 years.

NANCE HAXTON: And that hurt still causes pain for a community that feels it's never been given due recognition from wider society.

Clive Moore's research has shown South Sea Islanders were brought to Australia on at least 700 separate ship voyages, that's more than 60 times the number of vessels that made up the First Fleet that colonised Australia and yet few Australian schoolchildren learn about that journey.

CLIVE MOORE: Most Australians are puzzled that there are Australian SSI's, descendants of what were called kanakas the Pacific Island laborers who were and the word is still used “blackbirded” and brought to Australia.

So there's not a general Australian consciousness that they exist unless you live in the same towns as them and that means if you live on the Queensland coast or the coast of northern NSW. So that for most Australians they don't exist. They don't appear in history books or in the school curriculum in the way that they should. But largely they want Australians to know that they are here and to acknowledge their histories many of them were brought illegally.

NANCE HAXTON: Because there's that disconnection isn't there that Australia South Sea Islanders, also the islands they came from are no longer home either.

CLIVE MOORE: No. They can't. A few of them have tried to go back and live in the islands but they're Australians, they don't fit, they look as if they fit but they don't. It's a bit like saying to someone who is of European descent well why don't you go back to Ireland. I'm not certain I would fit back into Scotland or Ireland these days.

NANCE HAXTON: Young Australian South Sea Islanders are also now coming to grips with their past who and what they are.

Zac Wone is one of them.

We meet in Sydney at what is known as the Sugar Wharf at Pyrmont, where boats used to unload the sugar cane for processing.

ZAC WONE: I'm a descendent from Malaita Solomon Islands from my great great grandfather he was kidnapped at the age 15 and brought to Mackay. One of the main I guess sugar hubs of Queensland yeah and I've been really the last few years just retracing back that story and you know it actually ended up with me going to the village where he was from in the Solomon’s last year and meeting up with the mob over there.

So yeah I've been on my own journey as well since I started working with Australian South Sea Islanders Port Jackson and I can see there's others in my generation as well who are really keen to start to learn more about our connections to the Pacific.

NANCE HAXTON: Is this a story that you were told as you were growing up?

ZAC WONE: No actually. My father didn't really know much about the story himself so I've actually been helping him and my brothers and sisters as well to recover that hidden history in our family.

NANCE HAXTON: And what about when you went back to the Solomon Islands that must have been really difficult I imagine?

ZAC WONE: Yeah. I think it was a great relief as well. Obviously, you're feeling these powerful emotions but overall just a feeling of great relief that I was able to reconnect and after all these centuries that they also had been looking for the descendants who had been brought to Queensland so it was on their side as well, it was very meaningful for them now we've got those connections now we can move into the future.

(SINGING) Breathe, just breathe.

NANCE HAXTON: For Luana Pitt, her song is a reminder for her that Australia's blackbirding past still resonates through the generations.

And she wants other South Sea Islanders to find their voice on the subject and remind Australians that it shouldn't be forgotten.

LUANA PITT: I believe that we'll be able to be stronger and empowered more if we stand together without being separated, we have to stand together because we have to be a voice for each and every one of us because there's a lot of hidden agendas in Australia.

NANCE HAXTON: Would you like to see more Australians know more about this chapter of our history?

LUANA PITT: Definitely every Australian should learn about it. And know about it. Because this is a part of history. Not a good history, but still we should be told about it. And it shouldn't be hidden.

(SINGING)

SONG LYRICS:

We're here to say
We have strength to carry on
So let's keep out culture strong
Whispers of our ancestors they breathe
Breathe
Breathe
Just breathe
I said the whispers of our ancestors they breathe
Breathe
Breathe
Just breathe

NICK GRIMM: Luana Pitt there, wrapping up Nance Haxton's story about a slice of Australian history that's been overlooked for too long.

That's all for another Audio Current Affairs Summer Special.

I'm Nick Grimm, thanks for listening in.

Goodbye.