Violence and Colonial Dialogue

The Australian-Pacific Indentured Labor Trade

Tracey Banivanua-Mar

Publication Year: 2007

During the post-abolition period a trade in cheap and often cost-neutral labor flourished in the western Pacific. For more than forty years, it supplied tens of thousands of indentured laborers to the sugar industry of northeastern Australia. Violence and Colonial Dialogue tells the story of its impact on the people who were traded. From the beaches and shallows of the Pacific’s frontiers to the plantations and settlements of Queensland and beyond, a collective tale of the pioneers of today’s Australian South Sea Island community is told through an abundant and effective use of materials that characterize the colonial record, including police registers, court records, prison censuses, administrative reports, legislative debates, and oral histories. With a thematic focus on the physical violence that was central to the experience of people who were voluntarily or involuntarily recruited, the history that emerges is a powerful tale that is at once both tragic and triumphant. Violence and Colonial Dialogue also tells a more universal story of colonization. Set mostly in the British settler-colony of Queensland during the last forty years of the nineteenth century, it explores the brutality embedded in the structures of a colonial state, while attempting to recover the stories that such processes obscured.

Published by: University of Hawai'i Press

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Acknowledgments

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pp. ix-x

THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN and prepared with the financial support of an Australian Research Council grant and the collegial support of the Department of History at the University of Melbourne. Large sections of the book are derived from my PhD, during which I was fortunate enough to receive the finest supervision from PatrickWolfe and Patricia Grimshaw, who were so unshakably supportive that I could not have finished without them.Without Patrick I would...

Introduction: Violence, Language, and Colonial Dialogue

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pp. 1-19

FROM 1863 AROUND sixty thousand men, women, and children from diverse islands in the southwestern Pacific labored for bonded periods of at least three years in the burgeoning sugar industry of the young British colony of Queensland. In the aftermath of the abolition of slavery, these laborers provided the essential cost-neutral, coercible, and colored labor that was deemed essential to the economic viability of white settlement in the tropical belt...

1. The Frontiers: Savages, Going Native, and the Rightness of Might

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pp. 20-42

ON 13 SEPTEMBER 1871, an unknown number of Buka Islanders who had been recruited for service in the Pacific’s indentured labor trade on plantations in Fiji were massacred on board the labor vessel Carl in the northwest Pacific. The massacre would become an infamous indictment on the worst atrocities of the labor trade. It would stand as testament to what was seen as the notoriously savage...

2. Survival, Arrival, and Growth: The World Islanders Built

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pp. 43-69

THE TESTIMONY ABOVE was delivered by Dayanammo in the trial of Bernard Williams of the Hopeful for murders committed during the 1885 massacre discussed in chapter 1. His testimony reminds us that incidents of frontier violence were survived by those who often went on to undertake contracted labor on Queensland plantations before being returned home. In the case of those who survived...

3. The Settler Colony: Kanakas, Blacks, and Racial Borderlands

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pp. 70-100

DURING THE 1889 sitting of Queensland’s legislative assembly, Samuel Grimes, the member for the district of Oxley, which covered the region bordering Queensland’s capital town of Brisbane and what was then known as Bunyah Mountain, brought to the assembly the question of the ‘‘Bunyah Black’’. Deriving his name from the area, the Bunyah Black was ‘‘at large’’ in Mount Bunyah and was suspected of ‘‘committing atrocities’’ such as stealing...

4. South Sea Islanders Resisting Kanakas: Identity, Consciousness, and Community to 1906

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pp. 101-120

WHEN THE ANTI-ISLANDER sentiments that predominated in Queensland culminated at the turn of the nineteenth century in abolition and the compulsory deportation of Islanders, it was widely assumed that this simply meant a disconnected and temporary population would be returned to their homes. But for the bulk of the Islander population, deportation meant uprooting settled...

5. The State: Inside Colonial Violence, Law, and Order

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pp. 121-148

IF WE PAUSE at the outset of this chapter to take stock of the image that has emerged so far of Queensland’s sugar districts during the nineteenth century, we see a world where Islanders were increasingly exercising a level of autonomy and developing honed skills in manipulating their situation to their advantage. We have also seen the responding efforts of planters, colonial administrators...

6. Bulimen, Hardwork, and Muscular Tension

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pp. 149-174

FROM THE COLLECTION of stories in preceding chapters, many of which were fleeting registers in the colonial record with no ending or conclusion, we have seen communities of Islanders emerging on the plantations and in surrounding sugar districts of Queensland. These were communities fractured by displacement but galvanized by their context. Our concentration to date has been...

Conclusion: Structural Continuity and the Violence of Forgetting

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pp. 175-186

IF, IN THIS STUDY, we have been following any kind of chronological direction, we come to an end with the arrival of the twentieth century. This is not because of the arrival of a new century, but because it ushered in a new era when Islanders would face deportation and, as the culmination of their time in Queensland, be forgotten. The engineered forgetting of their presence, service, and treatment during the nineteenth century was contested, but the campaign...

E-ISBN-13: 9780824865467
Print-ISBN-13: 9780824830250

Publication Year: 2007

Violence and Colonial Dialogue

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Violence, Language, and Colonial Dialogue

1. The Frontiers: Savages, Going Native, and the Rightness of Might

2. Survival, Arrival, and Growth: The World Islanders Built

3. The Settler Colony: Kanakas, Blacks, and Racial Borderlands

4. South Sea Islanders Resisting Kanakas: Identity, Consciousness, and Community to 1906

5. The State: Inside Colonial Violence, Law, and Order

6. Bulimen, Hardwork, and Muscular Tension

Conclusion: Structural Continuity and the Violence of Forgetting

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Subject Headings

Welcome to Project MUSE

Connect with Project MUSE

Cover 1

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Cover 3

Violence and Colonial Dialogue

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Violence, Language, and Colonial Dialogue

1. The Frontiers: Savages, Going Native, and the Rightness of Might

2. Survival, Arrival, and Growth: The World Islanders Built

3. The Settler Colony: Kanakas, Blacks, and Racial Borderlands

4. South Sea Islanders Resisting Kanakas: Identity, Consciousness, and Community to 1906

5. The State: Inside Colonial Violence, Law, and Order

6. Bulimen, Hardwork, and Muscular Tension

Conclusion: Structural Continuity and the Violence of Forgetting

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Recommend

Subject Headings

Related Content

Welcome to Project MUSE

Connect with Project MUSE

Cover 1

Cover 2

Cover 3