One of the first acts of the Australian federal parliament in 1901 was the Pacific Island Labourers Act, which prohibited further recruitment of Islanders after 1904 and required those in Australia to be deported after 1906, part of the legislative package known as the White Australia policy. Most of those affected were ni-Vanuatu and Solomon Islanders who had been recruited, sometimes by deception or force, for the Queensland sugar industry; some had lived in Australia for thirty years, had married and had children born in the colony. About 7,000 to 7,500 were removed on chartered ships between 1906 and 1908, in some cases landed on islands other than their own, where returnees without kin or language faced real danger; a campaign by churches and Islander petitioners secured exemptions for around 1,600-2,500. Those who stayed became the Australian South Sea Islander community, which the Commonwealth formally recognised as a distinct cultural group in 1994 and Queensland in 2000. The recruitment side of this history is covered by the atlas's entry on the Pacific labour trade; this entry concerns the state expulsion that ended it.
The new Commonwealth of Australia ended Pacific Islander labour recruitment and deported most of the Islanders living in Queensland
The 1901 Commonwealth census counted about 9,300 Pacific Islanders in Queensland out of roughly 10,000 in Australia, the surviving residue of some 62,000 recruitments to the sugar plantations between 1863 and 1904. Under the Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901 about 7,500 were deported between 1906 and 1908; roughly 1,600-2,500 were exempted and allowed to remain, forming the Australian South Sea Islander community.
There was no mass death toll in the deportation itself. Contemporary missionary reports record deaths among returnees landed on unfamiliar islands, but these were not counted.
Commonwealth legislation and deportation records document the compulsory removal of long-resident Islanders and their exclusion from Australia.
Australia, Vanuatu, Solomon Is.