A new history of ‘blackbirding’ favours moral condemnation at the expense of complexity

Islanders loading sugar cane near Childers, Queensland, 1896.

State Library of Queensland, Australia, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons In the second half of the 19th century, colonial agriculture and pastoralism in Queensland were hungry for labour, and people of the South Pacific supplied much of it.

Ryan Butta is not the first author to write the history of their maltreatment, but Blackbirding is a readable reminder of a shameful source of Queensland’s prosperity – he calls it “slavery” – that will make it known to new audiences.

Review: Blackbirding: A Reckoning with the Australian Slave Trade – Ryan Butta (Affirm Press) Butta’s “slave trade” story is richly descriptive because the inflow, service and, in some cases, return of these people fascinated and outraged contemporary observers.

Indeed, Queenslanders’ exposés, inquiries and regulatory efforts are as much the book’s subject as the “blackbirding” itself.

Early ventures Butta, a freelance researcher and writer, begins his account with the trade’s forerunner, entrepreneur Benjamin Boyd , who in 1847 attempted to bring Pacific Island labour to New South Wales to fill the gap left by Britain’s decision to cease convict transportation.

Boyd met resistance, including from Sydney’s Atlas newspaper, which predicted “pastures filled not with European Christians but with cannibals fresh from their last disgusting banquet”.

Benjamin Boyd (1796-1851).

State Library of New South Wales, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons To thwart Boyd, the New South Wales Legislative Council amended the Masters and Servants Act to make it impossible for him to enforce employment contracts signed by “any native of any savage or uncivilised tribe, inhabiting any Island or Country in the Pacific Ocean”.

Boyd departed for California in 1849.

Butta writes that little is known of those Boyd “at best lured, and at worst and most likely kidnapped” to work in NSW.

In the 1850s and 1860s, other Sydney-based entrepreneurs recruited Pacific Island men and took them to Natal in South Africa, Réunion and Peru.

These short-lived ventures exposed the difficulty, for regulators, of assigning culpability.

Did blame rest with the recruiting agent? The local chiefs who sold captured boys and women for muskets and calico? The ship’s captain? The employer who paid a recruitment and transport fee? The latter, Butta argues, was effectively the purchase of a person.