An explosive new look at Aussie history has exposed a shocking chapter that shaped the nation, but has been forgotten
Author Ryan Butta has shed a light on the Australian slave trade known as blackbirding
A dark 46-year chapter of Australia’s history in which 15,000 people died in conditions so horrific they were forced to eat putrid dugong meat and children were hanged on ships has been omitted from our schoolbooks in a disturbing case of “national amnesia”.
For generations, Australians have grown up with a comfortable national myth that while other nations built their empires on the backs of slaves, Australia’s hands remained clean.
Author Ryan Butta says that narrative is a lie.
In his new book, Blackbirding: A Reckoning with the Australian Slave Trade, Butta shines a light into one of the darkest, most deliberately forgotten corners of Australian history — between 1863 and 1904 an estimated 60,000 Pacific Islanders were coerced, kidnapped, or trick-contracted into hard labour on Queensland plantations.
Blackbirding: An estimated 60,000 Pacific Islanders were coerced, kidnapped, or trick-contracted into hard labour. Picture: Based on a map developed by the Australian South Sea Islanders (Port Jackson) Board and Advisory Team
Forced into contracts they could not read, unpaid until the end of their service and denied basic rights, they endured brutal working conditions that led to the deaths of thousands.
Even as an author of historical books, Butta admitted he remained in the dark about the horrors of Australia’s slave trade until he started researching the book.
In his research he came across words like ‘Kanaka’ – a colonial-era term used to refer to Pacific Islanders brought over to work on the canefields – and ‘blackbirding’, a word used to describe the coercing of cheap indentured labourers.
“We’ve all got an idea that maybe it’s a Queensland story, something to do with sugarcane, but I probably didn’t really know,” he told news.com.au. “I wanted to know what was hiding behind these words. And when you start to look under the bonnet, it’s like crikey.”
For Butta, the research hit surprisingly close to home.
“I came back to it because I was researching my own family history, which is Sicilian,” he said. “They were brought out in the 1890s to basically replace black labour, so it overlapped with my own family history. I just wanted to know more about it really, that’s what started it.”
The details in his book have left hundreds of thousands of Aussies shocked after a recent podcast he appeared on with the Betoota Advocate went viral – racking up over 1.5 million views.
Butta told news.com.au the last popular retelling of the Aussie slave trade was Edward Docker’s Black Birders, released in 1970, when the White Australia policy was still in effect. It means his book is the first to examine the trade in over 50 years and has alerted a whole new generation to the horrors of that period.
Workers forced to eat putrid dugong meat, mass death by dysentery
The figures unearthed in Butta’s research paint a chilling portrait of colonial greed and human suffering. Of the Pacific Islanders brought to Australia, around 15,000 perished on Australian soil — a mortality rate of 25 per cent.
“Some of the stories are just completely shocking — like children being hanged by these ship captains,” Butta said. “The mortality rates are one of the most shocking things. No migrant group in the history of Australia has ever died at the rate the Pacific Islanders were dying.
“Over a 30-year period, it was almost 10 times greater. European settlers were dying at about 10 per thousand. Pacific Islanders were about a hundred per thousand on average.”
Sugarcane workers in Queensland, 1877. Picture: State Library of Queensland
He said that at the Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR), a hugely popular brand at supermarkets to this day, the mortality rate on its plantation in Homebush, Victoria was 60 per cent.
Butta said plantation owners routinely claimed islanders died because they were “weakly”. But official government inquiries tell a far grimmer story of neglect and abuse — with dysentery being the leading cause of death among workers.
“You know why they’re dying of dysentery? If you look at the reports — and these are government inquiries — for example on the Robert Cran (a sugar tycoon) properties, there was a government inquiry there in 1880 and they found that there was no clean drinking water,” Butta said. “While they were working out in the field, the people were forced to drink from puddles. They found that the food was unfit, that these people were being fed putrid dugong meat.”
The physical labour was crushing. The vast, flat sugarcane fields across coastal Queensland today were manually cleared out of dense bush using heavy axes and hand tools.
The workers were also toiling in degrading conditions
“Robert Towns, who was the father of the trade, I suppose you could call him, gave testimony in 1869 in the Royal Commission held in NSW and he said, ‘I’ve just discovered that on the islands they only eat twice a day and it’s a pity I’ve only just discovered this because I’ve been giving them three meals.’ And what were they feeding them? Molasses, because you produce it from sugar cane,” Butta said.
Workers toiled in degrading conditions. Picture: State Library of Queensland
Butta said there had been attempts over the years to downplay the severity of the conditions the plantations.
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Morrison’s ignorance or attempt to rewrite history with a white blindfold was quickly demolished – forcing an apology
“There’s this sort of theory out that oh, it wasn’t that bad on the plantations because people re-enlisted,” he said. “But to believe that, you have to ignore what was going on in Queensland in the 1800s — and what was going on was a war of extermination against the First Nations population.
“So people that want you to believe that these people were treated well on the plantations want you to believe that during the day, squatters were going out and clearing their area and exterminating First Nations people, but then they’d come back and look after their Melanesian workers.”
Stolen off beaches, drugged with rum and opium
Butta said that while it was true some islanders voluntarily enlisted to work in Australia, many had no idea what awaited them, and thousands were abducted outright. Recruiters routinely targeted young, fit males, with children as young as 12 or 14 taken off beaches.
“The descendant community, they will tell you their great-grandfathers were taken off the beach. And sometimes their children, 12 years old,” Butta said. “I’ve got numerous examples in the book of cargoes of kids arriving, 12 to 14 years old. They were targeted. They wanted the young, fit, strong males to come over here.
“Sometimes they would look aboard to say, ‘Come down and have a look at the rifles on the boat, come and look at the calico.’ And then they’d just shove the hatches on them and sail off. Sometimes they’d mix opium with rum, intoxicate them, drug them, get them. Sometimes they’d sink their canoes and scoop them up.”
South Sea islanders outside a plantation building. Picture: State Library of Queensland
Once in Australia, workers were bound by three-year indentured contracts written in a language they could not comprehend.
“They couldn’t read English. They couldn’t write English. They couldn’t understand their contracts,” Butta said. “Again, you could buy a 12-year-old boy in Brisbane with a signed work contract in a language he couldn’t read or write.”
The racist paradox that ended the trade
Butta said the trade did not end because of a moral awakening or humanitarian outrage. It was brought to a halt by Federation in 1901 and the immediate introduction of the White Australia policy.
“Federation, the first bit of legislation through federal parliament was the White Australia policy,” he said. “And so it came to an end, not because it was this inhumane, cruel practice. It came to an end because NSW, Victoria, South Australia didn’t want black people coming into Australia. They’d seen what had happened in the United States, and they felt that if you have this black population, it might revolt.
“They saw Queensland as a backdoor for not just Pacific Islanders, but Chinese and other dark-skinned people. So it was really the ultimate piece of racist legislation that stopped slavery in Australia.”
South Sea islanders on a labour boat. Picture: State Library of Queensland
What followed was a cruel campaign of forced mass deportation.
“Then it moves into this form of ethnic cleansing where they deport thousands and thousands of Pacific Islanders, and a lot of them have been here most of their life in Australia,” Butta said.
“They’ve married women. Some of them have been able to escape or get out of the indenture contracts and form small businesses. And then they were sent back. They were going back to islands so that sometimes their village no longer existed. Families, they had no families left. The kinship groups were now in Australia and they were forcibly deported.”
‘It is not our story to forget’
Despite extensive records and multiple Royal Commissions, the story of blackbirding was largely erased from mainstream Australian consciousness.
Butta said acknowledging this history is an obligation white Australia owes to the South Sea islander community.
“When we don’t remember that part of history which we were so involved with and which we did these actions as white Australia, as the Australian government, then it sits on the descendant community to keep that story alive,” he said.
“And I think there’s a real burden. You can imagine if you have a very traumatic history and you’ve got to keep telling it because no one else remembers it, you feel like you’ve got to keep it alive.
“When white Australia or the government doesn’t remember and acknowledge that history, we’re actually putting it on someone else to remember that.
“I think we need to stand with the Australian South Sea islander community, remember alongside them, and carry that. We carry that history together. White Australia, black Australia, we’ve got this shared entwined history and we each need to carry our part.”
Author Ryan Butta
Blackbirding is the first popular book written on the trade in over 50 years
Blackbirding: A Reckoning with the Australian Slave Trade by Ryan Butta is available now
Reflecting on his role as a white author tackling the subject, Butta said it was not his story to tell what it was like for the Pacific Islanders at the time of the trade.
“I don’t try to imagine what it was like for them,” he said. “Those stories are told. There are oral histories. But I’m Australian and this is Australian history, and there were a lot of white people involved in what was happening. In fact, you’d say they were the ones doing this.
“And so I think it’s not my story to forget. When things are hard it might be great to say, ‘Let’s just forget about it, let’s put it behind us.’ But it’s not our story to forget. We were part of that, and we need to remember that.”
One lingering reminder of the trade for everyday Australians sits right in the pantry: CSR Sugar.
Originally established in 1855 as the Colonial Sugar Refining Company, the corporate giant built much of its early wealth during the blackbirding era.
While the brand remains a household name, the ownership behind it has since shifted.
In a statement to news.com.au, a spokeswoman for Wilmar Sugar Australia acknowledged the complex history bound up in the industry’s roots.
“Wilmar acquired the sugar assets from CSR Limited in 2010,” the spokeswoman said. “Wilmar recognises the significance of our industry’s history and the contribution of the people and communities that helped shape it. Today, we remain committed to operating responsibly, ethically, and with respect for human rights.”
August 9, 2026
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