In the second half of the 19th century, colonial agriculture and pastoralism in Queensland were hungry for labour, and people of the South Pacific supplied much of it. Ryan Butta is not the first author to write the history of their maltreatment, but Blackbirding is a readable reminder of a shameful source of Queensland’s prosperity – he calls it “slavery” – that will make it known to new audiences.

Review: Blackbirding: A Reckoning with the Australian Slave Trade – Ryan Butta (Affirm Press)

Butta’s “slave trade” story is richly descriptive because the inflow, service and, in some cases, return of these people fascinated and outraged contemporary observers. Indeed, Queenslanders’ exposés, inquiries and regulatory efforts are as much the book’s subject as the “blackbirding” itself.

Butta, a freelance researcher and writer, begins his account with the trade’s forerunner, entrepreneur Benjamin Boyd, who in 1847 attempted to bring Pacific Island labour to New South Wales to fill the gap left by Britain’s decision to cease convict transportation.

Boyd met resistance, including from Sydney’s Atlas newspaper, which predicted “pastures filled not with European Christians but with cannibals fresh from their last disgusting banquet”.

To thwart Boyd, the New South Wales Legislative Council amended the Masters and Servants Act to make it impossible for him to enforce employment contracts signed by “any native of any savage or uncivilised tribe, inhabiting any Island or Country in the Pacific Ocean”.

Boyd departed for California in 1849. Butta writes that little is known of those Boyd “at best lured, and at worst and most likely kidnapped” to work in NSW.

In the 1850s and 1860s, other Sydney-based entrepreneurs recruited Pacific Island men and took them to Natal in South Africa, Réunion and Peru. These short-lived ventures exposed the difficulty, for regulators, of assigning culpability. Did blame rest with the recruiting agent? The local chiefs who sold captured boys and women for muskets and calico? The ship’s captain? The employer who paid a recruitment and transport fee? The latter, Butta argues, was effectively the purchase of a person.

The disruption of the global cotton industry by the American Civil War (1861-65) was an opportunity for British-born sandalwood trader and landowner Robert Towns to grow cotton in Queensland and import Asian workers to pick it. Towns had form. In 1854, a Select Committee on Asiatic Labour, chaired by Henry Parkes, had found evidence that Towns’ Chinese workers had been deceived and maltreated.

Towns acquired land in the new colony of Queensland, which had separated from New South Wales in 1859. The colony’s first governor, George Bowen, attempted in the Coolie Labour Act 1862 to regulate what would otherwise be a “deluge” of “barbarians”. Towns supported the act because it enabled the regulated inflow and outflow of cheap labourers.

In 1863, Towns turned to the Pacific as his source, encouraged by the apparent ease with which Peruvian ships were getting men from the islands. When Queensland Legislative Assembly member Theophilus Pugh demanded to know the terms of the recruits’ consent, Towns made public his written instructions to his recruiter Henry Ross Lewin, an........

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