WARNING: This story contains distressing details <\/p>\n
A dark 46-year chapter of Australia\u2019s history in which 15,000 people died in conditions so horrific they were forced to eat putrid dugong meat and children were hanged on ships has been omitted from our schoolbooks in a disturbing case of \u201cnational amnesia\u201d.<\/p>\n
For generations, Australians have grown up with a comfortable national myth that while other nations built their empires on the backs of slaves, Australia\u2019s hands remained clean.<\/p>\n
Author Ryan Butta says that narrative is a lie.<\/p>\n
In his new book, Blackbirding: A Reckoning with the Australian Slave Trade, Butta shines a light into one of the darkest, most deliberately forgotten corners of Australian history \u2014 between 1863 and 1904 an estimated 60,000 Pacific Islanders were coerced, kidnapped, or trick-contracted into hard labour on Queensland plantations.<\/p>\n
Forced into contracts they could not read, unpaid until the end of their service and denied basic rights, they endured brutal working conditions that led to the deaths of thousands.<\/p>\n
Even as an author of historical books, Butta admitted he remained in the dark about the horrors of Australia\u2019s slave trade until he started researching the book.<\/p>\n
In his research he came across words like \u2018Kanaka\u2019 \u2014 a colonial-era term used to refer to Pacific Islanders brought over to work on the canefields \u2014 and \u2018blackbirding\u2019, a word used to describe the coercing of cheap indentured labourers.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve all got an idea that maybe it\u2019s a Queensland story, something to do with sugarcane, but I probably didn\u2019t really know,\u201d he told news.com.au. \u201cI wanted to know what was hiding behind these words. And when you start to look under the bonnet, it\u2019s like crikey.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Butta, the research hit surprisingly close to home.<\/p>\n
\u201cI came back to it because I was researching my own family history, which is Sicilian,\u201d he said. \u201cThey were brought out in the 1890s to basically replace black labour, so it overlapped with my own family history. I just wanted to know more about it really, that\u2019s what started it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The details in his book have left hundreds of thousands of Aussies shocked after a recent podcast he appeared on with the Betoota Advocate went viral \u2014 racking up over 1.5 million views.<\/p>\n
Butta told news.com.au the last popular retelling of the Aussie slave trade was Edward Docker\u2019s Black Birders, released in 1970, when the White Australia policy was still in effect. It means his book is the first to examine the trade in over 50 years and has alerted a whole new generation to the horrors of that period.<\/p>\n
Workers forced to eat putrid dugong meat, mass death by dysentery<\/p>\n
The figures unearthed in Butta\u2019s research paint a chilling portrait of colonial greed and human suffering. Of the Pacific Islanders brought to Australia, around 15,000 perished on Australian soil \u2014 a mortality rate of 25 per cent.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome of the stories are just completely shocking \u2014 like children being hanged by these ship captains,\u201d Butta said. \u201cThe mortality rates are one of the most shocking things. No migrant group in the history of Australia has ever died at the rate the Pacific Islanders were dying. <\/p>\n
\u201cOver a 30-year period, it was almost 10 times greater. European settlers were dying at about 10 per thousand. Pacific Islanders were about a hundred per thousand on average.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said that at the Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR), a hugely popular brand at supermarkets to this day, the mortality rate on its plantation in Homebush, Victoria was 60 per cent.<\/p>\n
Butta said plantation owners routinely claimed islanders died because they were \u201cweakly\u201d. But official government inquiries tell a far grimmer story of neglect and abuse \u2014 with dysentery being the leading cause of death among workers.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know why they\u2019re dying of dysentery? If you look at the reports \u2014 and these are government inquiries \u2014 for example on the Robert Cran (a sugar tycoon) properties, there was a government inquiry there in 1880 and they found that there was no clean drinking water,\u201d Butta said. \u201cWhile they were working out in the field, the people were forced to drink from puddles. They found that the food was unfit, that these people were being fed putrid dugong meat.\u201d<\/p>\n
The physical labour was crushing. The vast, flat sugarcane fields across coastal Queensland today were manually cleared out of dense bush using heavy axes and hand tools.<\/p>\n
The workers were also toiling in degrading conditions<\/p>\n
\u201cRobert Towns, who was the father of the trade, I suppose you could call him, gave testimony in 1869 in the Royal Commission held in NSW and he said, \u2018I\u2019ve just discovered that on the islands they only eat twice a day and it\u2019s a pity I\u2019ve only just discovered this because I\u2019ve been giving them three meals.\u2019 And what were they feeding them? Molasses, because you produce it from sugar cane,\u201d Butta said.<\/p>\n
Butta said there had been attempts over the years to downplay the severity of the conditions the plantations.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s this sort of theory out that oh, it wasn\u2019t that bad on the plantations because people re-enlisted,\u201d he said. \u201cBut to believe that, you have to ignore what was going on in Queensland in the 1800s \u2014 and what was going on was a war of extermination against the First Nations population. <\/p>\n
\u201cSo people that want you to believe that these people were treated well on the plantations want you to believe that during the day, squatters were going out and clearing their area and exterminating First Nations people, but then they\u2019d come back and look after their Melanesian workers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stolen off beaches, drugged with rum and opium<\/p>\n
Butta said that while it was true some islanders voluntarily enlisted to work in Australia, many had no idea what awaited them, and thousands were abducted outright. Recruiters routinely targeted young, fit males, with children as young as 12 or 14 taken off beaches.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe descendant community, they will tell you their great-grandfathers were taken off the beach. And sometimes their children, 12 years old,\u201d Butta said. \u201cI\u2019ve got numerous examples in the book of cargoes of kids arriving, 12 to 14 years old. They were targeted. They wanted the young, fit, strong males to come over here.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes they would look aboard to say, \u2018Come down and have a look at the rifles on the boat, come and look at the calico.\u2019 And then they\u2019d just shove the hatches on them and sail off. Sometimes they\u2019d mix opium with rum, intoxicate them, drug them, get them. Sometimes they\u2019d sink their canoes and scoop them up.\u201d<\/p>\n
Once in Australia, workers were bound by three-year indentured contracts written in a language they could not comprehend.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey couldn\u2019t read English. They couldn\u2019t write English. They couldn\u2019t understand their contracts,\u201d Butta said. \u201cAgain, you could buy a 12-year-old boy in Brisbane with a signed work contract in a language he couldn\u2019t read or write.\u201d<\/p>\n
The racist paradox that ended the trade<\/p>\n
Butta said the trade did not end because of a moral awakening or humanitarian outrage. It was brought to a halt by Federation in 1901 and the immediate introduction of the White Australia policy.<\/p>\n
\u201cFederation, the first bit of legislation through federal parliament was the White Australia policy,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd so it came to an end, not because it was this inhumane, cruel practice. It came to an end because NSW, Victoria, South Australia didn\u2019t want black people coming into Australia. They\u2019d seen what had happened in the United States, and they felt that if you have this black population, it might revolt.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey saw Queensland as a backdoor for not just Pacific Islanders, but Chinese and other dark-skinned people. So it was really the ultimate piece of racist legislation that stopped slavery in Australia.\u201d<\/p>\n
What followed was a cruel campaign of forced mass deportation.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen it moves into this form of ethnic cleansing where they deport thousands and thousands of Pacific Islanders, and a lot of them have been here most of their life in Australia,\u201d Butta said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019ve married women. Some of them have been able to escape or get out of the indenture contracts and form small businesses. And then they were sent back. They were going back to islands so that sometimes their village no longer existed. Families, they had no families left. The kinship groups were now in Australia and they were forcibly deported.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018It is not our story to forget\u2019<\/p>\n
Despite extensive records and multiple Royal Commissions, the story of blackbirding was largely erased from mainstream Australian consciousness. <\/p>\n
Butta said acknowledging this history is an obligation white Australia owes to the South Sea islander community.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we don\u2019t remember that part of history which we were so involved with and which we did these actions as white Australia, as the Australian government, then it sits on the descendant community to keep that story alive,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I think there\u2019s a real burden. You can imagine if you have a very traumatic history and you\u2019ve got to keep telling it because no one else remembers it, you feel like you\u2019ve got to keep it alive.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen white Australia or the government doesn\u2019t remember and acknowledge that history, we\u2019re actually putting it on someone else to remember that. <\/p>\n
\u201cI think we need to stand with the Australian South Sea islander community, remember alongside them, and carry that. We carry that history together. White Australia, black Australia, we\u2019ve got this shared entwined history and we each need to carry our part.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reflecting on his role as a white author tackling the subject, Butta said it was not his story to tell what it was like for the Pacific Islanders at the time of the trade. <\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t try to imagine what it was like for them,\u201d he said. \u201cThose stories are told. There are oral histories. But I\u2019m Australian and this is Australian history, and there were a lot of white people involved in what was happening. In fact, you\u2019d say they were the ones doing this.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd so I think it\u2019s not my story to forget. When things are hard it might be great to say, \u2018Let\u2019s just forget about it, let\u2019s put it behind us.\u2019 But it\u2019s not our story to forget. We were part of that, and we need to remember that.\u201d<\/p>\n
One lingering reminder of the trade for everyday Australians sits right in the pantry: CSR Sugar.<\/p>\n
Originally established in 1855 as the Colonial Sugar Refining Company, the corporate giant built much of its early wealth during the blackbirding era.<\/p>\n
While the brand remains a household name, the ownership behind it has since shifted.<\/p>\n
In a statement to news.com.au, a spokeswoman for Wilmar Sugar Australia acknowledged the complex history bound up in the industry\u2019s roots.<\/p>\n
\u201cWilmar acquired the sugar assets from CSR Limited in 2010,\u201d the spokeswoman said. \u201cWilmar recognises the significance of our industry\u2019s history and the contribution of the people and communities that helped shape it. Today, we remain committed to operating responsibly, ethically, and with respect for human rights.\u201d<\/p>\n