What’s in a name? If that name happens to be Townsville, the coastal north-east Queensland city, the answer is: slavery.

While he scarcely went to the place that still bears his name, Robert Towns, the 19th century British-born Australian colonist, has largely been warmly and sentimentally regarded as a genteel, civic-minded merchant and entrepreneur. Like so many bastards of Australian colonisation, history has coddled him in soft biography, and continues to celebrate him in nomenclature and statuary.

But for some years now the veil has slowly been lifted on Towns and other “pioneers” of colonial Australia who profited hugely from the forced or coerced migration for labour of “blackbirded” (read enslaved) Pacific Islanders – mostly men and boys.

Incidentally the Scot John Mackay, after whom another Queensland city was named, was also a blackbirder.

It’s worth remembering that the term “blackbirding” is not distinct from other forms of slavery that stain British and American history. It comes directly from the African slave trade, and was applied to the no less heinous trafficking by men such as Towns and Mackay of about 62,000 Pacific Islanders to Australia between 1860 and 1906. Many were forced to work in colonial Queensland’s sugar industry in appalling conditions (15,000 died on the plantations whose product was........

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