European settlement relied heavily on convicts, sent to Australia as punishment for crimes and forced into labour and often leased to private individuals. Many Aboriginal Australians were also forced into various forms of slavery and unfree labour from colonisation.
Australia's slavery started because other countries abolished it. Aboriginal people were blackbirded and used in the pearling, sugar cane and cattle industries. They suffered terrible abuse and were denied their wages.
Some 62,000 Melanesian people were brought to Australia and enslaved to work in Queensland's sugar plantations between 1863 and 1904. First Nations Australians had a more enduring experience of slavery, originally in the pearling industry in Western Australia and the Torres Strait and then in the cattle industry.
The islands were settled by different seafaring Melanesian cultures such as the Torres Strait Islanders over 2500 years ago, and cultural interactions continued via this route with the Aboriginal people of northeast Australia.
The British Parliament abolished the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 and passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. As such, there was to be no slave trade in Australia.
On February 1, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln approved the Joint Resolution of Congress submitting the proposed amendment to the state legislatures. The necessary number of states (three-fourths) ratified it by December 6, 1865.
Denmark became the first country to abolish chattel slavery on March 16, 1792. Haiti (then Saint-Domingue) formally declared independence from France in 1804 and became the first nation in the Western Hemisphere to eliminate slavery in the modern era, following the 1804 Haitian massacre.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders: Australia's First Peoples.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the first peoples of Australia, meaning they were here for thousands of years prior to colonisation.
It is true that there has been, historically, a small number of claims that there were people in Australia before Australian Aborigines, but these claims have all been refuted and are no longer widely debated.
The first recorded African-diaspora settlers were black convicts, eleven in number, transported by the British, on the First Fleet of 1788. On their release, many bought land and brought up families in the area of Pennant Hills in western Sydney.
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.
In his new book, The Story of Australia's People, Geoffrey Blainey writes that one of the reasons aboriginal tribes didn't effectively resist European settlement was that they were militarily weak. Indigenous tribes often fought with each other rather than launch coordinated attacks against settlers.
Australia's first people—known as Aboriginal Australians—have lived on the continent for over 50,000 years.
The oldest known slave society was the Mesopotamian and Sumerian civilisations located in the Iran/Iraq region between 6000-2000BCE.
There is no one Aboriginal word that all Aborigines use for Australia; however, today they call Australia, ""Australia"" because that is what it is called today. There are more than 250 aboriginal tribes in Australia. Most of them didn't have a word for ""Australia""; they just named places around them.
The first settlement, at Sydney, consisted of about 850 convicts and their Marine guards and officers, led by Governor Arthur Phillip. They arrived at Botany Bay in the "First Fleet" of 9 transport ships accompanied by 2 small warships, in January, 1788.
While Indigenous Australians have inhabited the continent for tens of thousands of years, and traded with nearby islanders, the first documented landing on Australia by a European was in 1606. The Dutch explorer Willem Janszoon landed on the western side of Cape York Peninsula and charted about 300 km of coastline.
The broad consensus now is that all modern humans are descended from an African population of Homo sapiens that migrated around the world but bred with local archaic populations as they did so.
The Kuku Yalanji people, Australia
Deep in the rainforests of Daintree, North Queensland, you can find one of the oldest civilisations in the world. The Kuku Yalanji people have made the area their home and lived in relative isolation for over 50,000 years!
Based on the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) projections, the number of Indigenous Australians in 2021 was estimated to be 881,600.
The transatlantic slave trade had its beginning in the middle of the fifteenth century when Portuguese ships sailed down the West African coast. The intention was to trade for gold and spices, but the voyagers found another even more valuable commodity—human beings.
Nat Turner's Rebellion
One of the most famous slave revolts in American history came in 1831 when Nat Turner led a bloody uprising in Southampton County, Virginia. Turner was deeply religious, and planned his rebellion after he experienced prophetic visions ordering him to gain his freedom by force.
What Is an Abolitionist? An abolitionist, as the name implies, is a person who sought to abolish slavery during the 19th century.