Information AboutBlackbirding |
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''Blackbirding'' refers to the recruitment of people through alleged trickery and Kidnapping s to work on plantations, particularly the Sugar Cane Plantation s of Queensland, then a self-governing British colony in northeastern Australia and from 1901 a state of the Commonwealth of Australia. Over a period of 40 years, from the mid- 19th Century to the early 20th Century , labour for the sugar cane fields of Queensland , Fiji , New Caledonia , and the Samoan Islands included an element of coercive recruitment and Indentured Servitude . Some 62,000 South Sea Islanders were taken to Australia. These people were referred to as ''', mainly the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu , with a small number from the Polynesia n and Micronesia n islands such as Samoa , Kiribati and Tuvalu Loyalty Islands . In the article on the History Of Vanuatu , it states that: :During the 1860s , planters in need of laborers encouraged a long-term indentured labor trade called "blackbirding". At the height of the labor trade, more than one-half the adult male population of several of the Islands worked abroad. The question of how many Islanders were kidnapped or "blackbirded" is unknown and remains controversial. The question of whether or not Islanders were legally recruited, persuaded, deceived, coerced or forced to leave their homes and travel by ship to Queensland is a difficult one to answer. Official documents and accounts from the period often conflict with the oral tradition passed down to the descendants of workers. Stories of blatantly violent kidnapping tended to relate to the first 10–15 years of the trade. The majority of those abducted to Australia were repatriated between 1906-08 under the provisions of the Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901 ( {Link without Title} ). Rapanui (Easter Islander) society experienced similar upheavals when most of the adult males were abducted and enslaved by Chileans and Peruvians in the middle of the 19th century.. SEE ALSO |
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