Indentured Labour in Australia

Nearly 120 years have passed since the New South Wales magnate Ben Boyd started in 1847 the traffic in Pacific islanders' lives and labour which gives this lucid, absorbing and scholarly book its title; more than one hundred years since in 1863 the eminent Captain Robert Towns, M.L.C. (N.S.W.), shipowner, merchant and plantation owner, 'recruited' the first of more than 60,000 islanders blackbirded, cajoled or otherwise contracted on to plantation work in Queensland in forty years. Apart from the minority murdered en route from the Islands to Queensland ports (but the natives got their own back on Ben Boyd, killed on Guadalcanar in 1851), many islanders died on the Queensland canefields from un accustomed long and arduous work, the mortality rate among them exceeding 6 per cent in several years in the 1870s and 1880s, 8 per cent per year on several other annual counts, and stopping just short of 10 per cent in 1885 after an all-time high of 147 per 1,000 in 1884

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