Blackbirding is the coercion of people through deception or kidnapping to work as slaves or poorly paid labourers in countries distant from their native land. The practice took place on a large scale with the taking of people indigenous to the numerous islands in the Pacific Ocean during the 19th and 20th centuries.
South Sea Islanders were deployed to the Torres Strait Islands from New South Wales ports as early as the 1860s with the treacherous 'blackbirding' trade. This involved the inhumane removal and mistreatment of mainly men, but some women and children, from their island homes, who were then shipped en masse to Australia.
The colonial governments tried to regulate the trade, and the British navy was active in pursuing the worst of the blackbirders. With the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, the law that underpinned the White Australia policy, such overseas indentured labour practices came to end.
Blackbirding was a term given to the trade of kidnapping or tricking Pacific Islanders on board ships so they could be carried away to work in Australia. Boyd instigated this practice in the late 1840s, bringing the first group of Pacific Islanders to work on land in the Australian colonies.
blackbirding, the 19th- and early 20th-century practice of enslaving (often by force and deception) South Pacific islanders on the cotton and sugar plantations of Queensland, Australia (as well as those of the Fiji and Samoan islands). The kidnapped islanders were known collectively as Kanakas (see Kanaka).
[1] These labourers were called 'Kanakas' (a Hawaiian word meaning 'man') and their recruitment often involved forced removal from their homes. This practice of kidnapping labour was known as 'blackbirding' ('blackbird' was another word for slave).
Etymology. From blackbird + -ing, suggestedly from the putative slang blackbird (“indigenous Pacific islander”).
One example is the kidnapping and coercion, often at gunpoint, of indigenous peoples in Central America to work as plantation labourers in the region. They are subjected to poor living conditions, are exposed to heavy pesticide loads, and do hard labour for very little pay.
This and related practices of bringing in non-white labour to be cheaply employed was commonly termed "blackbirding" and refers to the recruitment of people through trickery and kidnappings to work on plantations, particularly the sugar cane plantations of Queensland (Australia) and Fiji.
Slavery in Australia has existed in various forms from colonisation in 1788 to the present day. European settlement relied heavily on convicts, sent to Australia as punishment for crimes and forced into labour and often leased to private individuals.
The labourers also suffered a high death rate. Around 30 per cent of arrivals died at the plantations due to exposure to European diseases, malnutrition and mistreatment. Most were buried in mass unmarked graves, some of which are still being uncovered today.
Slavery has been illegal in the (former) British Empire since the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade of 1807, and certainly since 1833. Slavery practices emerged in Australia in the 19th century and in some places endured until the 1950s.
While the forced labour of Aboriginal people by the Federal and state Governments formally began in the late 19th Century, the system didn't end until up to the 1970s. This means that there are number of people in our community today who lived through this experience.
About 60,000 Pacific islanders were blackbirded to Australia in the late 1800s to work primarily in the sugar cane industry. About 7000 were deported back to Melanesia in the early 20th century after the introduction of the White Australia policy.
Australia, like many countries, is a signatory to 7 core International Human Rights Treaties, which include the right to freedom from slavery and forced labour; under article 8 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
Those exempted from repatriation, along with a number of others who escaped deportation, remained in Australia to form the basis of what is today Australia's largest non-indigenous black ethnic group. Today, the descendants of those who remained are officially referred to as South Sea Islanders.
In the 1860s, Victoria became the first state to pass laws authorising Aboriginal children to be removed from their parents. Similar policies were later adopted by other states and territories – and by the federal government when it was established in the 1900s.
Because fewer British migrants came to Australia than expected, Calwell slowly began to change the White Australia policy to allow other groups of people, made homeless by the Second World War, to come to Australia.
The Stolen Generations
In Australia, between 1910 and the 1970s*, governments, churches and welfare bodies forcibly removed many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. These children became known as the Stolen Generations.
It is hardly surprising, then, that First Nations peoples in Australia were forced into indentured servitude and had their wages stolen. Another example of slavery was the practice of “blackbirding” Pacific Islander people for work on Australian sugar plantations.
Kanaka, (Hawaiian: “Person,” or “Man”), in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, any of the South Pacific islanders employed in Queensland, Australia, on sugar plantations or cattle stations or as servants in towns.
'Blackbirding', or slave trafficking, involved the kidnapping or questionable recruitment of people for their labour. Between 1863 and 1904, approximately 55,000 to 62,500 South Sea Islanders were taken to Australia to serve as labourers on sugar cane and cotton farms in northern New South Wales and Queensland.
The name Australia derives from Latin 'australis' meaning southern, and dates back to 2nd century legends of an "unknown southern land" (that is terra australis incognita).
The name Australia (pronounced /əˈstreɪliə/ in Australian English) is derived from the Latin australis, meaning "southern", and specifically from the hypothetical Terra Australis postulated in pre-modern geography.
The term Aboriginal has been in the English language since at least the 19th century, formed from the 16th century term, Aborigine, which means "original inhabitants". It derives from the Latin words 'ab' (from) and 'origine' (origin, beginning).