Bulimaen and hard work indenture, identity and complexity in colonial North Queensland

© 2000 Dr. Tracey Banivanua-MarThe following thesis is about the Western Pacific Islanders who came to Queensland as part of the indentured labour trade which operated formally between 1868 and 1904. Approximately 63,000 Islanders from New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji, and other islands of the Western Pacific were brought to Queensland during this time to produce sugar for a tropical industry that was considered fatal to European labourers. Although Islanders never constituted much more than four percent of the colony's population they were the subject of much discussion, and extensive statistical and physical surveillance. However, this mass of information, which came from official colonial channels, as well as the many travellers, recruiters, administrators, and planters who wrote about Pacific Islanders and their supposedly innate and racial characteristics now constitutes the majority of information available to historians attempting to reconstruct the life Islanders led in the nineteenth century. This has had distorting implications for the more authoritative histories that have been produced on the strength of these sources, particularly during the second half of the twentieth century. Hence, while this study attempts to recover some of the aspects of Islanders' everyday lives in the sugar districts in the nineteenth century, I have argued that this can only be done after the colonial context of Queensland has been scrutinised, and the sources re-situated within the historical and social context within which they were produced. This thesis therefore begins with an analysis of colonial discourse and representation. The purpose of this is not just that of identifying the ways in which Islanders were racially and ethnically constructed by colonial imaginings. While it is important that colonial knowledges of colonised peoples are thoroughly scrutinised, racial discourses have been, and are increasingly being, analysed and critiqued. The purpose of discourse analysis in this study is to shed more light on the ways in which such representation enabled and necessitated some of the most violent of colonial ideologies and practices. In doing so, the first half of this study elaborates on the mechanisms of colonial control in Queensland during the nineteenth century, and the theme of violence, or rather the mores and moralities that governed it, is used to navigate through such a complex and not easily summarised area of inquiry. There are many reasons, on which I elaborate, to explain why violence has been a central theme of this study. But perhaps the most immediate is the way in which the force and coercion that were so present in the colonial world, were projected onto "Natives" on colonial frontiers, in colonial settlements, and at any point where control over them intensified. Recognising this is a methodological necessity in recovering their autonomous histories from racialised and distorting colonial records. For although there are limits to the value of these sources, they nevertheless record detailed snapshots of the individual stories and experiences of Islanders' contact with, survival of, negotiation with, and adjustment to colonialism in nineteenth-century Queensland