Forgotten Australia

00:00 Forgotten Australia is written and produced by me, Michael Adams, without the use of AI, in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, on land traditionally owned by the Darug and Gundungara people. 00:11 I pay my respects to Aboriginal elders, past and present. 00:19 I'm Michael Adams and welcome to Forgotten Australia. When we think of slavery, we think of the American South and the Civil War. We don't think so much about the British slave trade that created this system and which trafficked some 3.5 million African people. We think even less of the Australian slave trade if we know of it at all. 00:41 Five years ago, I released a three-part podcast miniseries called Australia's Slave Ship Massacre, which looked at the 1871 murder of 70-plus men from Bougainville aboard the Brig Karl. I've re-released this miniseries as background to this Talking History episode. We're joined today by Ryan Butter. Ryan's an Australian non-fiction author. His previous books are The Ballad of Abdul Wade and The Bravest Scout at Gallipoli. Now he brings us Blackbirding, A Reckoning with the Australian Slave Trade. 01:14 It's a hard-hitting title for a hard-hitting book. Slave, we all know what that means. Reckoning has three meanings. It can be used to describe calculating numbers, passing judgment on past events, and somewhat more archaically, tallying up a bill that's due, or even long overdue. Ryan does an exceptional job on all fronts with his book. Ryan, welcome to Forgotten Australia. 01:41 Hello Michael, thank you for having me on the show. 01:43 You're welcome. Great book. Now, in every episode of Forgotten Australia, I examine people and events and systems that have been forgotten in Australia. I mean, it's right there on the tin. The reasons for forgetting vary story by story. But in the case of blackbirding, you propose engineered forgetting. Tell us why you believe Australia's slave trade is basically unknown due to engineered forgetting and how that worked, beginning with the word itself, blackbirding. 02:12 Yeah, it's an interesting question. And I'll firstly point out that that term, engineered forgetting, comes from an academic, Tracy Banavanua Ma, who sadly has passed away of Pacific Island descent, working here in Australia. 02:30 And it really struck me as that, yeah, like, why don't we know this? 02:34 And then you start to think, engineered forgetting explains it, that it's not by accident. You know, a society doesn't just happened to forget a really atrocious, dark part of our history. 02:47 And so then I sort of set myself the task to think, well, how did that engineered forgetting come about and what did it look like? And I think it starts with the words. 02:57 I think it starts with how the people involved in this trade and how the people defending this trade back in the day, how they were describing it. 03:07 And they weren't describing it for what it was because as you will know and your listeners will know, slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833. 03:17 So when it raises its head 14 years later in Australia, you can't call it slavery. 03:25 And so they call it blackbirding. They call it the Pacific labour trade. 03:30 They call it sometimes the Polynesian question when they're talking about it. And again, even that is a misnomer because the people weren't Polynesians. They were 95, percent or more melanesian and so the words start to cover up things and they start to create this unknowing and we inherit those words so today you know when i first started this project it was sort of about okay i'd come across the word blackbirding what what does blackbirding mean and and what's what's hiding under that word and when you trace it back um and i managed to trace the word back to 1825 And it was originally used in the African slave trade to describe men. 04:11 And the first use I found of it was a report saying that the ship was carrying so many blackbirds and the blackbirds are actually black people. 04:21 And so it's a way of saying something and doing something with actually saying it. And then that creates that as it comes down through the years and the decades and the centuries. 04:29 It gets to us here and we go, well, actually, what did that word originally mean? We've forgotten it. We've forgotten the people behind it. We've got the names of the people behind it. 04:38 But then I've been fortunate enough to speak and get to know many people in the descendant community. 04:46 And they have a very specific meaning for it. 04:49 And they know that it means kidnapped. 04:52 And they will tell you, my great grandfather was blackbirded from the beach. 04:57 And so they have a very, very accurate meaning for it in their own communities. But I think in the broader general public, there was a lot hiding behind that word that we didn't know. And it allowed us to forget what was hiding behind that word. 05:13 It allows us to forget what that meant in terms of a sequence as well, because blackbird equals kidnapping. Kidnapping at sea equals piracy. Piracy is punishable by the noose. So that's the level of crimes that were being committed systematically for more than half a century. affecting the lives of tens of thousands of people then and hundreds of thousands, even millions of descendants now in Australia and throughout the South Pacific. So that blackbirding, that word, it covers up an enormous amount. 05:46 And also the word itself, blackbird, it's an insignificant little animal, a pest. It's of no real value. So it really does start with a word, doesn't it? 05:55 Yeah, 100%. And then when you start to look, you start to come across other words, And so one of the ones was often used was passage money. 06:05 And so you could find a contract or something in Brisbane in the 1860s, 1870s, and it was talking about passage money. Well, the passage money was actually the price of a person. 06:18 And what they would say was the passage money was, no, you're just reimbursing the person who's kidnapped him and brought him to Australia for the cost of bringing him to Australia. 06:27 But what was quite easy to find from the records was was that the passage money fluctuated depending on how many ships had arrived in port. 06:34 Exactly. 06:35 It quickly tells you it's not the cost. Simple economics is telling you supply and demand is putting up and down the passage money. Now, if it was passage money, that shouldn't fluctuate at all. So then you have other words to describe the men and the women and the children. Now, Kanaka. 06:53 How many people today could tell you what that actually means? And the word comes from the Hawaiian language and means man. 06:59 But, of course, back then it was used to say Kanaka to describe everyone. 07:04 And I think there's a really pernicious thing going on when we label people and we strip them of their identity, we strip them of their individuality. And I've seen that in other books I've written of this era, and a particular one was the case of the Afghans that came in the late 1800s. Now, they were all called Afghans, but very few of them were from Afghanistan. 07:28 And there's a number of reasons of that. One, because people were probably ignorant of all the different places these people came from, modern-day Pakistan and scattered through modern-day India. 07:36 But also, Afghanistan wasn't a British territory, and so they couldn't be here. But everybody else could be here because they were also British subjects. 07:49 And so by labelling some Afghans, you strip them of their right to be here. And so in this case, if you're a Kanaka, What rights does a Kanaka have? What is a Kanaka? 07:59 As you show, they had no rights. So for those who don't know, tell us how blackbirding worked both in benevolent theory and in barbaric reality. 08:11 Yeah, and it is important to remember that there probably were Pacific Islanders that came to Australia voluntarily and wanted to come here. My argument is that the system they were coming into allowed for complete barbarity and... 08:27 In a strange way, the ones that were voluntarily here and who ended up working with humane people probably allowed all the bad stuff to happen because they could be pointed at. 08:38 Yeah. 08:39 And still today, people do that. Well, it couldn't have been that bad because people volunteered. 08:44 But my point always is that the system was barbaric. So at its worst, and there's numerous documented evidence of this, and you've got to remember the time we're operating in, it's the 1860s when it really kicks off. There's a colonial project to colonise Queensland, which was founded as a colony in 1859. Large tracts of stolen land have been given to wealthy politicians and business people to go out and depopulate of their First Nations custodians and turn it into farmland. 09:14 And so they needed cheap labour. And so these boats started to go off into the Pacific and recruit people, in scare quotes, but coerce, deceive, kidnap. 09:26 techniques that they'd learnt from the Peruvian slave trade, which ended a month before the first boatloads started to arrive in Australia, so intimately connected, and how they got them on board. They would very simply, sometimes they would say, come on board and have a look at the calico or tobacco or rifles down in the holds. And when the people came in, they'd just shut the hatches and sail off. Sometimes they pretend to be missionaries to lure them on board ships. Sometimes they pretend to trade with them and come out again. Once they were on the ship, they were sort of shut in and gone. 09:58 And you made the good point earlier about piracy and the death penalty. And one of the things was that if you were caught on the high seas with shackles or chains on your ship, you were considered to be in the slave trade. So they didn't have shackles or chains on these ships. 10:14 They were just kept in holds that were covered by iron grates. 10:18 The Melanesian people were brought aboard ships by fraud or by force. 10:24 They were kidnapped and if they refused being kidnapped, they were often killed. 10:28 That's the reality. 10:30 That's 100% the reality. And there's a, Another, maybe when you were researching the cull, you might have come across a story about the young Australia, such a hopeful name. 10:39 And they brought some people on board. They tried to get away. 10:45 The men were in the water and they were actually hooked out of the water with a boat hook through the cheek. I mean, just absolutely barbaric. And there was numerous reports through the years of people being captured and then trying to escape. 11:00 uh, and being shot and thrown overboard, whether they're dead or alive. Um, so it was completely barbaric, um, in how they were taken if they resisted. Um, also to, you know, the other ways they were buying people. And so obviously in these, these islands, neighboring islands, even within the islands, um, warring clans, warring tribes, sometimes people would be captured and sold. 11:27 Um, there's testimony from missionaries, um, you know, to this extent as well. But they were also, the traders or the slave traders were also encouraging locals to kill the missionaries and said, you know, we won't trade guns with you unless you kill the local missionaries because the missionaries were reporting what was going on. 11:45 So really bloodthirsty people involved in this trade. And a lot of them had come out of the sandalwood trade, which again was another bloodthirsty trade, which I think we know very, very little about here in Australia. 11:58 So anything was possible. You know, if you've sailed a boat, from Australia out into the Pacific, you need to bring back people to make that voyage pay. 12:07 This started in 1847 in Australia with Ben Boyd's first failed attempt. Even then, that far back, critics in the newspapers denounced this as the revival of slavery. So there was this pride that there was no slavery in the British Empire and all of a sudden Ben Boyd is indulging in exactly that under a different name. So what arguments against the charge of slavery were used by Ben Boyd and then Robert Towns, their fellow profiteers and assorted apologists? How did they justify what they were doing as not being slavery? 12:41 Yeah, there was a number of ways. And what's quite interesting, a lot of the arguments came directly from the slave trade as practice in the United States. 12:50 And the big one there was that, no, we're actually civilizing these people. 12:54 How could it be slavery? We're bringing them into the British Empire. They're going to be civilised. They're going to learn how to be shepherds. This is going to be great for them. And you get that real sense of that racial superiority of the white settler. We're going to help these people by enslaving them. 13:12 But these are just covering myths, really. Obviously, they don't believe this. 13:17 Sometimes the ones that came into Queensland, they'd be defended as, well, these are just free colonists. Anyone can come to the colony and work. which was true, but nobody was subjected to what the Pacific Islanders were subjected to in terms of their stripping of their rights and their servitude they were placed into. But, you know, there were Germans coming and Irish were coming, etc. So that was one of the excuses. 13:38 One of the arguments was that they wanted cheap labor. Without cheap labor, the Queensland colony couldn't prosper. But they actually had a law in place to bring in, if they wanted to, Chinese and Indian labor, then known as coolies. So why weren't they bringing in Chinese and Indians? 13:57 That was cheap labor, but it was cheaper labor. 14:00 It wasn't cheap enough labor. 14:02 And the Indian and Chinese people would also be able to organise and stand up for themselves, correct? They'd be able to sign contracts they understood. 14:11 Well, they were looked after because they were home governments. And this is a really important point you raise, Michael, because where these people were collecting the Pacific Islanders from, there were no governments. 14:22 Now, China had the government. In India, there was the British government. Now, there was already an indentured system that had a that had come about following the abolition of slavery to get workers into the West Indies to replace the emancipated people that were enslaved. 14:38 And so that that system was already working. And you're right. They tried to or they did. They implemented that law in Queensland, which would allow the same thing. But under that law, you need to have a migration, an emigration agent in India, which would oversee everybody at the point of the embarkation in India, make sure they understood the contract. 14:59 make sure they're provided with the right clothing, make sure there's a doctor on board the boat. These were all provisions within that law. 15:07 Now, it proved too costly because no one wanted to pay for it. 15:10 Now, Robert Towns, who started the whole practice in Queensland, he had been heavily involved in bringing Chinese workers over in the 1840s. And again, awful death rates there as well on ships just through neglect, poor feeding, poor clothing. Because if you have to clothe someone for the trip, a cost he had the same experience with indian laborers he'd sort of found a loophole in the system and brought over something like 60 indian laborers in the 1840s some of them died through neglect no feeding in proper clothing so these people knew what they were doing and so that law which would have allowed them it was one of the arguments used against it well there's a law to bring in under a proper system and that was regulated by the government and What's interesting about the blackbirding system, it was completely unregulated by the government. 16:00 And from 1863, when it started to really become an industrialized type system, until 1868, so five years with absolutely no law, run by middlemen and profiteers. 16:12 There aren't many heroes in your book pretty much every time we encounter an anti-slavery activist. It's because they're actually against slavery because they're so for white purity of the race. They believe that the Melanesian people are savages and that whites will be degraded by exposure to them. Were there any people you came away from writing Blackbirding that you actually admired as being genuinely concerned with the well-being and health of 16:41 the Pacific Island people yeah that's a great observation particularly relevant because of some emails I've received this week which I'll tell you about but I think probably Reverend Patton John Patton was a missionary I think he was consistent in looking out for the Pacific Islanders best interests now was there a paternalistic element to that given the time most likely but he was consistent over a period of 40, 50 years of denouncing this trade. 17:13 And he was making trips to Australia to talk against it. He was writing letters to talk against it. And I think he was genuinely disgusted by this trade in humans. So he was probably one. There was another gentleman called Alfred Davidson, who was part of the Aborigines Protection Society in Brisbane. 17:32 And because a lot of these people would talk about, you know, we've got to end slavery, as you say, because they didn't want black people in the colony. 17:39 Alfred Davidson actually ran a safe house or a halfway house in Brisbane. He took people to court and tried to help them out. I think another one would be Richard Sheridan. 17:53 He was the Polynesian inspector at Maryborough. Again, there were no Polynesians, but he was the Polynesian inspector. He often brought cases against plantation owners to great personal cost to himself and that he was ridiculed and dragged before certain inquiries. But Not many. 18:12 But again, you know, I'm sure there were people out there who employed these people and did it humanely. But there was nothing to say that actually happened or that they had to. And I think the majority of them were squeezing these people to death. 18:27 There are plenty of villains in the book. What struck me as being common to all of them is what we now call extractive capitalism in that they were determined to wring every last penny out of whatever resource it was they were using. And in this case, it just happened to be human beings. 18:45 What other things did these guys, guys like Robert Towns and Ben Boyd and Dr. Murray have in common, do you think, personally? 18:54 There were cheapskates, a lot of them. 18:58 Robert Towns famously said, you know, someone asked him if he'd risk his boat on a certain voyage, and he said, I'd sail it a hell and back if there was profit in it, which sort of shows how he was thinking. 19:10 Robert Towns has another awful quote of his, but as a writer, you come across it and you go, that's a great quote. He gave testimony to the Royal Commission into kidnapping in 1869, which was held in Sydney. 19:25 And he says, I'll paraphrase him here, but he says he's just learned that on the islands they only eat twice a day. 19:33 And it's a great regret to him because he's been feeding them three times a day. 19:37 And he could have had, you know, great savings if he'd known they only eat twice a day. He was feeding them molasses on his properties, molasses and sweet potato. 19:47 Yeah. 19:47 So they wouldn't feed them meat. They wouldn't give them the right clothes. There's an eyewitness testimony here. from a woman called Marion Disney who visits the cane fields in the 1890s. 19:58 And she reports that when they die, they're just buried in a hole in the field, wrapped in a blanket. But if times are tough, they actually take the blanket back as well. 20:09 So Queensland is associated with blackbirding, but it was actually an intercolonial network based out of Sydney. Was that a surprise to you? 20:19 It was because, you know, I'm from New South Wales. And to me, if I knew anything about blackbirding, it was a Queensland story. It was a sugar cane story. 20:28 And then one of my very first meetings with Imelda Davis, who's the president of the Australian South Sea Islanders, Port Jackson. 20:36 And I discussed my idea for this book. 20:39 And she said to me, when you write it, make sure you expose Sydney's role. 20:46 And I thought, oh, I didn't know anything about Sydney's role. But then when you start to look into it, Ben Boyd sat in the New South Wales Parliament. 20:57 There was a group of Frenchmen operating out of Sydney who tried to start a mini trade into French possessions. Then there was a fellow called Burns, and he started the Peruvian trade. He'd come out of Sydney. 21:11 You know, James Burns from Burns Philp, he was based in Sydney. Robert Townes, New South Wales parliamentarian, he's based in Sydney. Big name in Sydney, married into the Wentworth family, famous lawyers and explorers, and the Colonial Sugar Refining Company. 21:26 Shareholders, John Fairfax, who then goes and sits on the commission, Royal Commission into Kidnapping. 21:33 By coincidence then, the Sydney Morning Herald soft-pedals the whole idea that it's slavery and that anything can be done about it. 21:40 Well, it was an interesting series of events because... colonial sugar refining company, they're refining sugar grown with this labor for many years, but it's only until the 1880s that they actually go into managing plantations. 21:54 And the death rate on their plantations is 60%. It's just unbelievable. And the Sydney Morning Herald sends up a reporter to do a special report and basically blames the workers. They were too shy to ask for help. It was their fault. They were sick. They were weakly. 22:10 And then to sort of I juxtaposed those comments. I then went and had a look at CSR's plantations in Fiji. Death rates there were over 50% with different workers. So yeah, the Fairfaxes benefited enormously from their shareholdings in colonial sugar. 22:28 That's one thing about the book. For me, there was a jaw dropper on every page and often in every paragraph. Individual incidents such as the Carl or the Hopeful are appalling. I think probably more appalling is the system that was built around it. Even when laws were enacted supposedly to reform the trade and provide some regulation, all they did was protect the Blackbirders and make things worse. 22:53 Yeah, the laws were an attempt to pull the wool over everyone's eyes that this was a regulated system and nothing nothing was wrong in it and the best quote i found to describe that was from mark twain and the celebrated author and he said you know every law they pass in queensland is just a confession of what's going on so if they pass an anti-kidnapping law it's because people are being kidnapped if they you know they they pass a law that you've got to feed them a certain amount it's because they're not feeding them a certain amount And everything was regulated, how much they were given in food to the weight. 23:27 There's a story from the Polynesian inspector who I mentioned earlier at Maryborough, where he tells the story of young men from the sugarcane plantations walking nine miles with their ration of bread so he could weigh it to see if it was in line with the government regulation. Imagine that, a young boy, 14, 15 years old, walking nine miles to have someone weigh his ration of bread because they're starving, basically. 23:55 Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson were both critical of the Australian slave trade. It might be forgotten now, but it was well known at the time. From 1847 onwards, we see slavery in the newspapers. 24:10 It's in letters. It's in diaries from the time. It's in courts. It's in royal commissions. Put simply, everybody knew and nothing was done for decades. Was it surprising to you that you didn't have to dig that deep to find so much incredible detail? 24:28 Not really because of my previous work. You know, I always say to people that we've done some really nefarious things in Australia in our past. but we're very good at documenting it. 24:41 There's this belief that everybody was racist back then. And I mentioned earlier an email I received. 24:50 One of the people who fought against this really hardly at the very early onset and went up against the Queensland Parliament, went up against Robert Towns, was a guy called Robert Short. Well, it seemed that he held some really abhorrent views on race and racial purity. Now, I received an email from his great-great-granddaughter, this week and she said yes he did hold those views but I think he genuinely did want to end slavery and she said those views were held by everyone at the time and I can understand the difficulty of someone trying to reconcile that in your family but I made the point to her I weighed his views against other people who didn't hold those views and there were people that didn't hold those views and so we're very fortunate that we get those letters to the editor you know People saying, no, this is wrong. 25:40 We should be treating these people as humans. Such a crazy concept, no? 25:45 So I've always been aware that you can find those contemporary reports in the newspapers, in the Royal Commissions. And we are lucky that people, so someone like Robert Short documented a whole lot of it, and then you can go and cross-check that with others. So yeah, he did hold those awful views, and he's, I don't know how you weigh it up, but something really interesting to try to reconcile, that the most racist people in the colony probably stopped slavery. 26:12 Saying that they didn't know any better at the time is just incorrect. 26:16 Yeah, I'm coming to that conclusion myself. And I've been thinking about this. I was chatting on another podcast about this very issue. Can we hold people to that standard? 26:25 And I didn't answer at the time, I think, very convincingly because I'm unsure. And a lot of times we don't have, even as writers and people thinking about this, we don't have all the answers. I think that's okay. I think the important thing is that we're having conversations like this and talking it through. 26:38 coming away from that previous conversation i thought well what's in the western world what is even today sort of the you know the the north star of moral um or ethical behavior now it might be the bible maybe in in western anglicized countries um they had the bible but 27:03 They were calling themselves Christians, and there's nothing in the New Testament that actually endorses any of this behavior in the slightest. 27:12 No. So actually, then I started to think, well, actually, they had back then the same document that probably is a real moral guide today. I don't know if there's a higher one, maybe? Maybe like the UN Human Rights Charter? I don't know. But the Bible is still a pretty good way that people align their behavior to or judge behavior against. These people had that. 27:33 Yeah. Your chapter on the Carl is shocking because it was an absolutely awful crime. 27:40 But your book really opened my eyes to the case of the hopeful, which is even arguably more appalling because it happened more than a decade after the Carl. And it was also pretty much government sanctioned. Tell us what happened there and what the fallout was such as it was. 27:56 Yeah. The hopeful is really interesting because also just before I start on the details of it, There was an argument that always ran, oh, there used to be atrocities in the early days of the trade, but now it's regulated. And you've got to remember what we're about to discuss happened 20 years after the trade started. 28:18 So early 1880s, it's becoming more difficult to get people from the traditional grounds of Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands. 28:27 Ships are going out for six months and coming back with just six people. It's becoming unprofitable. 28:32 In 1883, Queensland attempts to annex Papua New Guinea. 28:36 They just send a policeman over from Bathurst Island to plant a flag and say it's now part of Queensland. That gets shot down by the imperial government in London because they see it as Queensland trying to create a slave state. 28:47 And then so in 1883, Burns Philp, a really big and important trading company in the Pacific, part owned and founded by Robert Philp, who at this stage is a member of the Queensland Parliament, later becomes queensland premier they arrive that one of their ships arrives in uh queensland it's only been gone a couple of weeks and it's got 180 people or 170 people on board and immediately there are rumors that there was kidnapping and murder on this voyage but the captain denies it um but a whistleblower actually tells the truth and and seven of the people from that ship uh are tried and found guilty of murder two are found guilty of murder um and then the other ones are put away for a couple of years. 29:32 That sets off a royal commission about what was actually going on. And probably in a period of two years, there was many, many voyages, but the Queensland government investigates eight voyages, only eight. 29:46 They interviewed between 400 and 500 people from Papua New Guinea had been brought on these voyages. 29:53 Not a single person they interviewed knew why they were coming to Queensland. 29:58 They were all forcefully recruited or coerced into coming. But that actual one voyage that they investigated of the hopeful, they never actually found out the true numbers, but they estimated somewhere between 35 and 40 people were murdered, people resisting being taken on board the ship. 30:16 There were stories of one ship crew was cut off a person's head. 30:22 They left the little boy to drown. They just threw him overboard because he was too small to bring back to Australia. 30:28 And so they just threw him into the ocean and watched him drown. So absolutely horrific, murderous voyage. And I said two of them got sentenced to death and they got up a petition in Queensland to save them. They had 28,000 signatures to save these guys because they said, and there was a delegation from the parliament who went to Samuel Griffiths, the premier, and said, you have to save these men. They've done nothing wrong. They've only done what everyone's been doing for the last 20 years and it wouldn't be fair. 30:57 that these guys go to the gallows. It's just the custom of the industry was the way they described it. 31:03 And they didn't, did they? 31:06 No. 31:07 The only person who served a life sentence was the government agent, but that's only because he died in jail because he was a drunk. 31:13 Everybody else was released. 31:15 In the wake of all of that, there was a further tightening of regulations in Queensland. And then North Queenslanders decided that if that's the case, we should secede from Queensland and create a slave state. I did not know this until I read your book. 31:31 Yeah, that was off the back of the Royal Commission to the hopeful and they sort of knew what was coming. And so one of the tightenings was that there's all these different restrictions will come in, but also Griffith announced that by 1892, there'll be no more people allowed into Queensland from the Pacific Islands. And that's when the Separationists start the Separationist League, headed up by Maurice Black, who was a sugarcane planter and a parliamentarian. And they went round and they petitioned the imperial government. 32:00 And the general impression in London was that if we allow them to secede, it's going to be like the southern states of the US. It'll be a slave state. 32:12 And so it was heavily put down by the British government that wouldn't allow it. But I think that idea, I couldn't find a point where that idea didn't go away. It was always floating around that, well, Brisbane doesn't understand us and no one understands what it means to work in the tropics and only black people can work in the tropics. And so we need to have a new state in far North Queensland. Townsville would have been the capital named after Robert Towns. 32:41 A very silly name when you think that Ville means town. 32:45 So effectively, town's town. 32:46 You also spent all of three days there and hated the place. 32:50 Correct. Correct. Had very little connection to it. So, yeah, that was the separationists. And they were going to break away and form this state where they could do what they want with black labour, far from Brisbane, far from these meddling regulations. The people today will tell us it was heavily regulated. Nothing was going wrong. But these people were saying, no, there's too much regulation. We're going to form our own state. 33:11 it would have put a real spanner in the works for Federation, which then brought its own twist to the tail of the Blackbirders and the Blackbirded people. What happened after 1901? 33:24 So the first bit of legislation basically through that parliament is the White Australia policy. 33:30 But even leading up to it, leading up to Federation, the colonies were saying to Queensland, this needs to stop. 33:38 And obviously, as I mentioned, Samuel Griffith had, legislated that it would stop by 1892. But come 1890, there's a depression on, the sugarcane industry is on its knees, and they decide that the only way the sugarcane industry can survive, and the sugarcane industry is propping up the Queensland economy, the only way that industry can survive if they continue with slave labour. And so Griffith overturns his own legislation to prevent it and to outlaw it, and they keep it going. 34:06 And this really perturbs the other states because, again, not for any humanitarian reasons, they don't want to have a federated country that allows black people in and so they put all this pressure on queensland they have the referendums it goes through and then when this white australia policy goes through queensland are completely blindsided and by now robert philp who was the owner of the vessel involved in the hopeful the owner of the hopeful he's queensland premier And he starts this letter writing campaign saying, well, hang on, we thought we were going to have 15 years to phase out this. 34:43 And then sort of starts backtracking and says, well, the senators that we sent to the federal parliament, they don't represent Queensland. They don't know what's going on. 34:51 They're really blindsided. And they're told that, no, by 1904, no more people can come. So they had three years. And by 1906, which is the truly barbaric bit of the story, they will deport all of the Pacific Islanders from Queensland. 35:06 Not send them back to the islands they came from, just to islands. 35:12 Well, who knows? Who knows where they ended up? It's very hard to find information of where they ended up. 35:16 And what we do have, though, are petitions that the Pacific Islanders presented to various prime ministers. And they said, we are genuinely fearful for our lives because we don't know we're going to be landed on the same island. 35:30 We don't know if we will be received. Just landing on the wrong side of the actual island could have been dangerous for them. Many had families in Australia. There were children that were born here that were sent back. 35:44 One of the other really tragic aspects is that they actually sent Aboriginal people back. 35:50 And so in the islands today, there are communities of Aboriginal descendants because they'd married Pacific Islanders in Australia and they were also deported. 36:01 So a really, really barbaric policy. 36:06 I think the official government records say that almost 4,500 were deported. 2,500 managed to stay either by fleeing, like leaving Queensland, or there were certain carve-outs if you'd been here prior to 1879, for example. You've got to remember, some of these people they brought over were 8-, 9-, 10-year-old children when they came. 36:28 And so then to deport them 30 years later, they don't know where their family is. They don't know where their home island is. They don't know these things. They've grown up here and then they've been ripped out. And then the final tragedy was that who would pay for the deportation? 36:46 And under the law, every Pacific Islander that came into Queensland, the person bringing them in had to pay a five pound bond for their passage home. 36:56 So the other states said to Queensland, well, you've been collecting the money, you should have enough money to go home. 37:03 But in addition to collecting the money from that bond, they were also taking the wages of the islanders that died. 37:11 So they were basically stolen wages. But when it came to pay for this voyage home, they actually had no money and they'd spent it. So they'd stolen the wages, they'd stolen the bonds and used it for other things. 37:21 And then the final disgrace was that the company that got the contract to take these people back to the islands was Burns Philp, the same company that operated that I hoped for. 37:36 Australians love their true crime. Why is it that we don't love hearing about this sort of true crime? 37:43 15,000 people died. It's a huge number if you consider 60,000 came here. Some people say 50,000. Some people say 70,000. 15,000 died. They died from overwork. 37:55 from undefeating, from medical neglect. 37:58 They were young men, mainly. 38:01 They came out here fit, healthy young men, and they were dead. It's just unbelievable. 38:06 One of the reasons I think that we don't know about this, or we don't remember it, is because as soon as they were on that boat, they were stripped of their identity. They had no names. They were named after the island. So you see the records, and it's Tommy Tanner, Jimmy Malata. They've lost their identity. They're buried in holes where they fall, many of them, just in the fields. 38:31 And there's a reason for that because they were not paid until the end of their three-year term. 38:36 And at the end of their three-year term, they would have been due 18 pounds. So it would have cost the planter 18 pounds plus the ship home another five, six pounds to 24 pounds. 38:50 If the person lived to three years, if they died, it would cost 10 pounds to buy another one. 38:56 So that's one way of explaining the death rates. 39:00 They were worth more dead than alive to the companies. We also need to remember, of course, that in addition to the 15,000 people who died in Australia, hundreds at least, probably thousands, were murdered or died before they even got here. 39:15 Before they got here or on the way home as well. So I always think those poor men on the car, are they counted in that 15,000? I don't think they would be. 39:26 George Morrison, he went undercover as a journalist on a ship going home, and he reported numerous beasts being thrown overboard even before they were dead. Again, why? Because if you could throw someone overboard early, you didn't have to pay for their food or medicine. 39:41 A lot of them died because it costs, I think, like 10 shillings a day to take them to the local hospital. So they allowed them to die rather than take them to the hospital because it was a saving. 39:51 And that fact I gave you about it's cheaper to let them die, that accusation was being made in 1876. It was in their economic interest to let them die. So that's not me looking back. 40:04 And then a government inquiry in 1880 found that of something like the 400 Pacific Islanders that had died around Maryborough in a certain period, not one had a death certificate because you could only get that if they'd been to the hospital. 40:19 They wouldn't take to the hospital. So I think that to circle back to your original question is you strip them of their identity, they become numbers. That's very hard to remember. Now I've been contacted by people since the book came out saying my great grandfather sailed on ships. He was in 1860 and he was captain such and such and he married Mrs. such and such and he was born here and he died there and he got married there. And there's a name. 40:45 And it makes it feel very close because it actually is very close. But when you say 15,000 people died, and remember, we don't even call them people, 15,000 Kanakas, it just doesn't feel real. And that's the trick of language. That's the real pernicious bit about this language and this forgetting. We're forgetting that it's very close. And when you meet the descendant community, they're talking about their great grandparents kidnapped off a beach. It's very, it's not far ago. It's not long back. 41:17 Um, and I think what is happening in Queensland, they are discovering mass graves in cane fields and that's, you can search the internet and see those stories. And cane farmers are working with the descendant families to preserve those graves and have them listed as heritage sites. 41:33 Um, But it's very easy to forget people when you don't have a name or a date of birth or a date of death and you've stripped them of their identity. And it's the reason, I think, that we still have the remains of over 1,000 Pacific Islanders sitting in our museums in vaults. 41:49 And if you think, if that was your great-grandfather, imagine how you would feel. Who would accept that? 41:55 Nobody. But these people are forced to accept that. And these people, I say they've been kidnapped a second time because they'll probably kidnap the first time they came here. And now they're still being held here after death. I think it's disgraceful. 42:07 So as we've said, reckoning means counting up and passing judgment. It also means paying what's owed. So what do you think we owe in view of this emerging information, thanks to you and to others, about the Australian slave trade? 42:24 I will just say, as you said, there have been a lot of people who have written on this subject, academic world and, um, not in sort of a narrative non-fiction form, but there has been a lot of work looking at this. So I'm just not sure why that hasn't gone into the wider community. 42:38 In terms of your question, reparations, for sure. If you look what's going on in the United Kingdom, actions are being brought by Ghana, by the Caribbean countries, by Jamaica, reparations for certain. 42:53 The return of stolen wages. 42:57 I mean, that's all documented in the Queensland archives. There are stolen wages that were taken from people who died. The law was that if you died, any wages accruing or owing goes to your next of kin. 43:10 That money has to be returned in some way or form to those people, to those countries. I think we also have a... We owe something to the... The general public owes something to the descendant community the australian south sea islanders because we have left it to them to carry this memory by refusing to remember it by allowing it to be forgotten and that's not fair that this is everybody's history we all benefit from it we're all going down to the shop to buy csr sugar today all that land that's been cleared for agricultural use in queensland who cleared it We're benefiting from that cleared land today. 43:55 So we all have a direct benefit. My family are migrants. I still benefit from it. Just because your family wasn't involved doesn't mean you're not benefiting from what happened. We all benefit from it. But we owe that debt to stand alongside the community and remember alongside them. And I think that's extremely important because when we deny their history, we deny their oral histories, we're putting it on them to keep this history alive, which means they've got to keep retelling it. 44:21 They've got to keep telling people what happened to their great-grandparents to their grandparents. And I don't think that's fair. So I think that's probably one of the easiest things we can do is to stand alongside that community and acknowledge them. And the book, it isn't black armband history. It's not hitting anyone over the head. 44:37 I'd like people to see the book as an invitation to remember alongside the community and carry our part of this history. 44:44 You use William Faulkner's quote, the past isn't dead, it's not even past, as a motif through the book. I think to which we could add George Satanyana's, those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it, in the sense that there are remarkable and horrible similarities between the Australian slave era then and the Australian slave era right now. In particular, what's happening under the Pacific Australian labour mobility scheme. 45:14 Are we seeing the same sort of arguments made by those who defend this scheme and the same sort of legal veils being drawn over the reality once again? 45:23 Yeah, the similarities are remarkable. 45:25 I'd say one of the big differences is that if you were bringing in Pacific Islander workers in 1870, you needed a licence. 45:34 If you're a middleman today bringing people in, you don't need a licence. 45:38 So that's one of the completely unregulated in that sense. 45:42 Look, again, it's a system that can be exploited, and people are using it to exploit people in slave-like conditions. That's not me saying that. That's the United Nations saying that. That's the New South Wales Anti-Slavery Commissioner saying that. 45:56 Donald Trump is even saying that. And if he can get his mind across it, why can't we? And yeah, there's some great people doing some great reporting on this in ABC and The Guardian, and it needs to be exposed because we have these people coming here. They're being exploited. You read the UN Special Rapporteur's report on this, and what's happening is exactly what was happening 150 years ago. People are signing contracts they don't understand, being coerced into signing contracts they don't understand. They get here, they're being exploited. Their wage is being deducted without any knowledge. They have no medical coverage. 46:27 People are dying. There's been something like 60 deaths. 46:30 There are families in Vanuatu today who've had someone die here, and no one can tell them how they died. 46:36 So when people read your book, I think the next thing they should do is then go and watch the recent Four Corners special and look at the recent Guardian reporting on this issue because there's a direct line from one to the other. 46:49 Yeah, I would encourage your listeners to go and watch that and then sit down and write to their local MP and raise their objections to it. And on the same letter, they can say, and let's send back the remains of those Pacific Islanders to their homes and to their islands. 47:02 Because there are things we can still do today, Michael, and I think we need to think about how we do that. And I will also add in terms of doing things, it's so beautiful to see the Australian South Sea Islander community today are really advocating, particularly through Imelda Davis and SCPJ in Sydney, to help protect and look after the rights of workers who are coming into Australia from the same countries that their forefathers and mothers were brought from. And there's a real... 47:31 beautiful link of solidarity there but they're probably doing again they're doing that heavy lifting by themselves and if we're all going to go down we're going to buy our sugar we're also going to buy our fruit and meat and it's the meat packing and it's the fruit industries that are exploiting this labor more than anywhere else in australia and some of the stories are horrific and particularly women um the way that you know they come in and they're tied to an employer they can't complain against that employer without risk of losing their visa and being sent home and their families at in the islands are relying on them and this money that they're sending home. 48:02 They're just in this awful position that's just so easily exploited. 48:06 We don't want our grandchildren and great-grandchildren to have to say about us, oh, well, they didn't know because we didn't. 48:12 Everyone thought that way back then. 48:14 Exactly. Ryan, it's been an absolute pleasure. Congratulations again on the book. I recommend everybody go and buy it. It's a real eye-opener. 48:23 And thanks so much for being on Forgotten Australia. 48:25 Thanks very much for having me on, Michael. I've really enjoyed our chat. 48:31 Many thanks again to Ryan Butter for that interview. Just a reminder, I've re-released the three-part Forgotten Australia miniseries, Australia's Slave Ship Massacre. So that's available now and it looks at the villainous Dr. James Patrick Murray and the slaughter he directed aboard a ship called the Carl in 1871. 48:51 I've re-released the episode as I recorded it in 2021. This was before Ben Boyd National Park was renamed Biawa National Park, the word coming from the Yuan people's language for orca or killer whale. 49:07 This was to acknowledge that the National Park should not bear the name of a man who was a slave trader. It was a meaningful step towards a greater recognition of this part of our history. 49:18 I hope you find the Carl story interesting, and if you've not heard it before, I do believe you'll find it quite shocking. 49:26 I'll be back with a new episode very soon. In the meantime, thanks for listening, reading and supporting.