The first 67 South Sea Islanders were landed at Brisbane in 1863 to work cotton and then sugar. Over the next four decades more than 62,000 people were brought to Queensland; the National Museum of Australia records that many were kidnapped - 'blackbirded' - or deceived about the length and conditions of their service. Queensland legislated repeatedly, in the Polynesian Labourers Act 1868 and the Pacific Labourers Act 1880, setting shipping standards and prohibiting forced recruitment, but enforcement was inconsistent and inspectors were sometimes bribed. Mortality among labourers in Queensland was several times that of the settler population. The trade ended not from concern for the labourers but from the White Australia policy: the Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901 provided for deportation, and between 1906 and 1908 over 7,500 people were removed, with about 2,500 permitted to remain. Queensland recognised Australian South Sea Islanders as a distinct ethnic group in 2000. The activist Faith Bandler, whose father had been taken from Ambrym, maintained that it was a form of slavery, while noting that in later years some signed three-year contracts.
Labour recruiters and planters took Pacific Islanders, by kidnapping, deception and contract, to work the sugar and cotton plantations of Queensland, Fiji and Samoa
No defensible denominator exists. Recruiting drew on the New Hebrides (Vanuatu), the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia and the Loyalties, the Gilberts and parts of island New Guinea, and pre-contact population estimates for these archipelagos differ by an order of magnitude - the New Hebrides alone has been put anywhere from 100,000 to 650,000 before the depopulation of the nineteenth century. The first reliable counts postdate the trade by decades, after epidemic collapse had already occurred.
No total was compiled. Deaths occurred during raids and recruiting incidents in the islands, on the voyages, and above all on the plantations, where mortality among Pacific Islander labourers ran at several times the rate for the European population of Queensland, chiefly from respiratory and gastrointestinal disease among people newly exposed to introduced pathogens. Queensland immigration records register deaths inconsistently and the island end of the trade was not recorded at all.
The National Museum of Australia documents kidnapping and deception in recruitment, including of women and children, and the plantation labour regime, drawing on Queensland government immigration records, parliamentary inquiries and the testimony of Australian South Sea Islander descendants.
Australia, Vanuatu, Solomon Is.