gairloch

Two Australian South Sea Islander servants and child at Gairloch, Queensland

from State Library of Queensland

• Vesna Verencevic said:

  Between 1842 and 1904, more than 55,000 people from more than 80 South Pacific islands were brought to Australia to work as slaves on sugar and cotton plantations in Queensland and northern NSW. Many had been coerced into fixed-term contracts or even kidnapped; a process known as 'blackbirding'. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people weren't immune either. From the 1860s to the 1970s, men and boys were taken from their homes and forced to work at cattle and sheep stations across Australia. And from the early 1900s, women and girls were forcibly removed from their families, placed in domestic training facilities and then, once they turned 15, dispatched to homes as domestic 'help'. According to NITV, their weekly income "had an approximate buying power at the time of [one] ice-cream cone or two apples." Between 1897 and 1972, Queensland law, for example, saw the wages of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers held in government trust. It's estimated that $500 million has never been repaid. Particularly in the pastoral industry, where some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander laborers were bought and sold along with the land they'd been dispatched to work on. The pearling industry also has a dark past in this regard. Source: www.mamamia.com.au/australia-slavery/