It's often said that North Queensland is a different country. But, writes Tom Orsag, ultra-conservative MP Bob Katter's recent call for North Queensland to become a separate state has it roots in the region's past, when slave labour was used to build up the sugar industry.

In the nineteenth century, Queensland's colonial rulers tied the development of agriculture in the north to its plundering of the South Pacific for cheap labour and resources.

Australian slavers kidnapped Pacific Islanders to work them as slaves on North Queensland sugar plantations and on Australian-owned plantations in Fiji. This was quaintly known as "blackbirding".

Big Australian companies like Burns Philp and CSR enriched themselves on this Pacific plunder.

Sugar coated history

Australia's sugar industry began in North Queensland in 1863. Intensive labour was needed to grow sugar cane. Plantation owners wanted cheap labour delivered as fast as possible.

It was stolen by Australian slave traders ("blackbirders" or "recruiters") who, for example, took over 29,000 Solomon Islanders.

As one history put it, "Satisfying the demand for labour was a major commercial activity from the 1860s."

Peter Coriss wrote, "From the 1860s until the second decade of [the twentieth] century the islands of the western Pacific Ocean acted as a vast labour pool for European enterprise in Queensland, Fiji, Samoa and New Caledonia.

"About 100,000 Islanders, drawn from every kind of Pacific environment…left their homes to work on the colonies' sheep and cattle stations, in the mines and on copra and sugar plantations.

"The business of recruiting and returning the island labourers was never free from violence and controversy. In the 1860s many hundreds of New Hebrideans [Vanuatans] were forced or deceived into entering the recruiters' boats, the same was true in the Solomons ten years later and yet again around New Guinea and the adjacent islands in the 1880s."

Copra, extracted from coconuts, was used for oil and fats in soap and margarine. Britain's Lever Brothers, forerunner to the modern Unilever, owned coconut plantations in the Solomons. It was also used in cattle feed.

"Shoot every one of them."

Australia's slave trade begun when the Carl sailed to Bougainville in 1871. The commander of the ship, Dr James Murray, kidnapped 85 Buka island men.

In Slavers of the South Seas, Thomas Dunbabin wrote: "If resistance was offered, the wretched Buka men were knocked on the head with oars, slingshots, clubs, or anything else that lay handy."

Edward Docker wrote that when a boatload of Islanders rebelled on board the ship, "Dr Murray called out, "Shoot them, shoot them, shoot every one of them."

The second mate Lewis asked Murray, "What would people say to my killing 12 niggers before breakfast?" To which Murray replied, "My word, that's the proper way to pop them off."

One history states, "The murderous Murray ordered the more badly injured islanders to be bound and thrown overboard to drown. The ship was then whitewashed to conceal the bloodstains."

News of the massacre on the Carl eventually came to light. The public outcry in Sydney in favour of the ship's crew saw "the worst offenders amongst the crew being acquitted".

Another slaver was Captain Robert Towns, after whom Townsville is named. Australian ships kidnapped Pacific Islanders from Vanuatu, New Caledonia, the Solomons and Bougainville.

Towns, was a shipowner, merchant, director of the Bank of NSW (forerunner of Westpac) and a member of the New South Wales Legislative Council. He married into the powerful NSW Wentworth family.

Another company, CSR, directly owned slave plantations for over 10 years. It sold the plantations but still used sugar from slave plantations for its refining and distilling.

The economic benefits won by Australia's colonial rulers in the Pacific led to pressure on the British to seize direct control on new territories on the colonies' behalf.

The British did not go as far as the colonial rulers wanted—but they were prepared to smash resistance in the colonies. For example, in 1892, the HMS Royalist, a British warship, leveled every village in Roviana Lagoon in what is now the Western Province

of the Solomons.

The British seized the Solomons as a protectorate in 1893, largely at the insistence of Australia's Colonial Premiers.

The Solomons' island of Malaita had 9,000 people seized as slaves between 1871 and 1903. Not surprisingly, Malaitians soon distrusted whites and killed any who landed on the island.

The business of imperialism

Burns Philp, the Sydney-Townsville grocery, general trading and shipping company provided the ships to carry slave labour.

In four months of 1884, Burns Philp sold 501 Pacific Islanders at an average 23 pounds a head for a profit of 11,500 pounds. 

James Burns wrote to his business partner Robert Philp, "I think we should retract back into bona fide business but no doubt the labour traffic is a temptation."

Even the official company history of Burns Philp, written by Ken Buckley, states the people for Vanuatu were treated "as a source of cheap labour for plantations and mines in Queensland, New Caledonia and Fiji."

The profits accumulated by major companies like Burns Philp had a big influence on Australia politics at the time. For example, Robert Philp became Queensland Premier in 1899 and in 1907.

Burns Philp received subsidies from the NSW and Victorian governments, and later from the Federal Australian government, for ‘delivering mail' to the South Pacific Islands.

It was, of course, unprofitable for Burns Philp to ship goods to the Islands without bringing anything back. Kanak slave labour made the homebound journey 'profitable'.

If there was any trouble in the region, "The [British] Royal Navy's Australian station sent regular patrols which from time to time inquired into clashes between Islanders and traders, exacting reprisals when in the judgment of the young officers on the spot, they seemed both justified and likely to be effacious."

In 1865 HMS Curacoa, commanded by William Wiseman, "sailed about the western Pacific displaying the British flag with instructions to investigate alleged depredations against English lives and property."

One history wrote, "The warship's cannon pounded villages [on Tana] and from a cutter rockets were fired into the crowds of Islanders on the beaches.

"The naval bombardment of Tana and Eromanga caused a public furore in NSW. The Presbyterian missionaries who had accompanied the warship came in for severe criticism."

The Presbyterian missionary, John Patton, admitted that he found himself "probably the best-abused man in all Australia, and the very name of the New Hebrides Mission stinking in the nostrils of the people."

A Commission of Enquiry into Queensland ‘labour recruiters' said their activities represented "one long record of deceit, cruel treachery, deliberate kidnapping and cold blooded murder."

A division among racists

North Queensland separatism was born from the fight between two racist schools of thought in Australia.

The big cities of the south, including Brisbane, wanted an ‘Australia for the White Man', as a means of binding workers to the colonial settler state project.

George Reid, the Free Trade Premier of NSW, introduced a bill in the late 1890s to create a ‘White Australia' as part of an Australia-wide plan to complete the defences against "coloured immigration".

But this position contradicted the influx of Islander immigration in the north. By the early 1880s, Bowen, Cairns, Mackay, Rockhampton and Townsville, saw ‘White Australia' as undermining the sugar industry.

The sugar planters chaffed at the legal restrictions and criminal court cases against recruiters' treatment of Islanders.

When rumours spread that Queensland Premier Samuel Griffith was going to outlaw the Kanak labour trade altogether his effigy was burnt ‘up in the sugar towns' and there was talk of secession.

That secession did not occur is testimony to the virulence of the White Australia ideology among Australian ruling class as a whole.

So Bob Katter's call for secession is a reactionary pipe dream today as it was in the late 1800s.

Further Reading:

Ian C Campbell A History of the Pacific Islands

Edward W Docker The Blackbirders: The Recruiting of South Seas Labour for Queensland 1863-1907

Thomas Dunbabin Slavers of the South Seas

Gordon Greenwood Australia: A Social and Political History

Kerry R Howe Where the Waves Fall

B J Mundy and J R Grigsby Mainstreams in Australian History

Joe Rich Asia's Modern Century

Myra Willard History of White Australia Policy to 1920