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Period: White Australia »
Commentary on: Queensland’s Island trade »
Prof Andrew Jakubowicz.
Text Commentary
The growing resentment among Europeans against non-Europeans, focusing in Queensland on the Chinese, the South Sea Islanders and to a lesser extent the Japanese, had already found expression in the 1885 Election Act. This law declared that "no aboriginal native of Australia, India, China, or of the South Sea Islands shall be entitled to be entered on the roll except in respect of a freehold qualification" – meaning if they owned property. The Japanese were exempted as part of wider British Empire relations with the Japanese Emperor.
A critical part of the building of "race" as a social category can be found in the recruitment, management and ultimate expulsion of South Sea Islanders. The first of these men and women had been recruited by Joseph Towns in 1863, as cotton plantation labourers, in new ventures triggered by the closure of the British cotton trade with the USA during the Civil War. The labour model was slavery, though as this was illegal in the British colonies, an indentured labour form was used.
The employment of islanders spread rapidly, including to the Torres Strait where pearl-shell diving masters moved in the 1860s after the shell was exhausted in the seas around Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands. Islanders who had been divers in their home waters followed their masters to the new fields.
In the 1890s anti-Kanaka sentiment and active white labour unionism prompted the colonial government to outlaw any further recruitment of Islanders. Those islanders who remained were able to continue to work and an informal immigration continued.
However one of the first decisions of the newly elected Commonwealth Government in 1901was to pass the Pacific Islander Employment Act, expelling Kanakas. The following week it passed the Immigration Restriction Act which in 1902 banned any further immigration of non-Europeans, and in conjunction with other legislation, led to the expulsion of many South Sea Islanders. Even so significant numbers of Islanders remained in Australia, where they formed communities, often marrying into Indigenous families, or with Indians and Chinese.
Over one hundred years of "hidden settlement" began to be reversed in 1994, when the Federal Government first recognised them as an ethnic community with rights to cultural recognition and preservation – Queensland implemented its own recognition in 2002. The Islanders reflect the special diversity issues of Queensland – they were English-speaking but black, black but not Indigenous, and far too long established to be considered "migrants".