BLACKBIRDING was SLAVERY!

Australia has such a dark past where its treatment of people are concerned from the beginning of colonization onwards, it still hasn't stopped not for one day, not at all.

Black-birding as it was known as is just another one of those grim practices thrust upon a people who never asked for it and who were lied to and cheated and treated abhorrently by their captives.  Those white men from Australia who scourged the islands for men for their labor force in the cane fields back on the East coast of Queensland and Northern New South Wales especially around the Tweed and Cudgen areas of Northern New South Wales were the cruel men who blackbirded.

Northern NSW Coastline

In the late 1800s thousands of Melanesian Islanders were removed from their homelands, locked in boats and carted to Australia to work in Queensland's cane fields. It was virtually slavery.   George Negus

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Melanesian's were black-birded to cut cane in North Queensland and the NSW North Coast.  This is slavery, genocide and theft of a humans life without a doubt.  Most died because of the conditions but some survived and then in turn those who survived the cruel treatment from land owners  had to beg for work as the years went on and the labor force changed as the government instituted the White Australia Policy and paid farmers a dividend if they employed white labor on farms instead of Kanakas as they were known as. 
There is still a huge population of people in around the North Queensland towns of Mackay and Sarina who are from Vanuatu and those surrounding islands.  Their families are largely unknown to them and their true heritage stolen from them just the same way as the Aboriginal people were abused when this land was stolen by the British colonists.

What happened to the descendants of those people?  Did they intermingle with local aboriginal tribes to form a new race of aboriginal that combined the genetics of a time once forgotten from when these people were all one and there was no ocean between them.  A time when dry land and kangaroos grazed areas of the Pacific Ocean as we have it today.   I think they were all one people once and were separated after the last cataclysm by the rising seas cutting off their land bridges.

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This is something those governments and monarchists would not have considered in the day when they stole these people from their islands to enslave them as indentured workers on cane farms.  Work they clearly needed lots of labor for and clearly  they wanted to pay the least amount out for this
. 

 Slavery was alive and well in Australia in the early 1900's.

 

This is the century I was born in, the 20th Century bore slavery in this country and tried like crazy to cover this up to the world.  But the truth always floats to the top.  There are people who desire to be reunited with their cousins and kin and the Australian Government should see to it that these people are reunited at the cost to the crown, not the Australian people.  The Australian people did not do this act of genocide.  The crown committed this act allowing it in the first place and condoning it after 1901 when Australia became federated and the states and territories were formed.

George Negus did a fascinating story on one such family and you can read the transcript to this HERE at GNT 

Kanakas -  "Kanaka", sometimes used as a derogatory name, originally referred only to native Hawaiians, called kānaka ʻōiwi or kānaka maoli in the Hawaiʻian language.

Pacific Ocean ... across that ocean was their home.

Images @ Eminpee Fotography