After almost 160 years, apology for ‘blackbirding’ ripples from Bundaberg

Descendants of the South Sea Islanders forced or duped into a form of slavery on Australian plantations hope a historic apology from the mayor of Bundaberg will set a national precedent and provide the catalyst for atonement at the highest reaches of government.

Jack Dempsey will on Friday become Australia’s first elected leader to formally say sorry to Pacific Islanders for the indentured labour trade – known as “blackbirding” – that from the second half of the 19th century until 1904 helped enrich the fledgling Queensland region and its sugar cane barons.

Waskam Emelda Davis.Credit: Rhett Wyman

In a moment long denied to campaigners, Cr Dempsey, once a minister in Campbell Newman’s LNP state government, will use a speech on Vanuatu’s independence day to “extend a sincere apology on behalf of the Bundaberg region community for the abuse” in the time of blackbirding.

“Our sugar cane industry was built on the backs of Pacific Island labour, along with much of our infrastructure such as rock walls, which are still visible today,” Cr Dempsey says in his draft speech.

“Although slavery was abolished in the British Empire at the time, the practice of forcing indentured labour into Queensland cane fields was equivalent to slavery and abhorrent.”

Bundaberg mayor Jack DempseyCredit: Harrison Saragossi

More than 50,000 South Sea Islanders worked in appalling conditions, mostly in Queensland, under the pretence of labour contracts that gave plantation owners cover from laws that prevented slavery like that in the US.

People who absconded the sham deals could be whipped and returned in chains.

It is estimated 15,000 people died of disease and their unpaid wages were later used by the Queensland and Commonwealth governments during the White Australia Policy to help deport many people settled on the mainland.

Some workers were tricked into coming to Australia with contracts they had neither the cultural nor educational background to comprehend. Others, like Moses Topay Enares, were stolen.

His granddaughter (Waskam) Emelda Davis said Moses was kidnapped in the late 1800s alongside two playmates from a beach in the Tafea Province of Vanuatu and shipped to Bundaberg, never to return.

There are no formal records and his story has survived through oral tradition.

Emelda's grandfather, Moses Topay Enares.

“This is overwhelmingly exciting,” said Ms Davis, the Sydney-based chair of Australian South Sea Islanders (Port Jackson), about the first formal apology.

“It’s allowing us to breathe, really, because it’s been a constant [feeling] for Australian South Sea Islanders that we are the forgotten people.

“When we talk, it’s ‘Oh, but that happened years ago. Don’t worry about it’. For Jack Dempsey to do this, he’s setting a precedent and hopefully it will have a domino effect.”

Ms Davis said the effect should extend into discussions about strategic investment in programs and services as reparations for stolen wages and other birth rights she said was valued at between $38 million and $200 million in today’s money.

South Sea Islander labourers hoeing a field, Herbert River, Queensland, c. 1902. Credit: SLQ

In 2000, then-premier of Queensland, Peter Beattie, moved a statement of recognition that acknowledged Australian South Sea Islanders as a distinct cultural group and “the considerable hardship and disadvantage suffered by the community since first being brought to Queensland”.

But gaining a formal apology from a prime minister or premier for this often-forgotten chapter in Australia’s considerable book of colonial racism had been harder going, Ms Davis said.

“This country doesn’t want to know about the pain, the hurt and the atrocities,” she said. “It’s hard enough dealing with First Nations mob without bringing in us mob – 50,000 odd: that’s a heavy scene. That’s a big pill to swallow, especially when your Prime Minister is saying there’s no slavery in Australia.”

Ms Davis was referring to Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s remarks on radio last year, amid global Black Lives Matter marches, that dismissed the notion of slavery ever existing in Australia.

Mr Morrison later apologised for the offence.