“For over forty years, the cotton and sugar plantations of Queensland were worked by indentured labour recruited from the South Sea Islands. Recruited? Kidnapped would probably be a more accurate word, though many of the Kanakas, as the islanders were called, were merely lured away by false promises and bribes of cheap trade goods. The men who recruited this coloured labour were known as blackbirders. They were a tough band of international adventurers, on the whole brutal, callous and completely unscrupulous in their methods of recruiting, concerned only with fulfilling a contract or supplying virtual slaves to whoever was prepared to buy them. This is the story of the blackbirders and of the blackbirding era, which began with Robert Towns’s importation in the 1860s of the first of the Kanakas for his cotton plantation near Brisbane and ended with the repatriation of the last of the natives after the labour trade was discontinued by Act of Parliament in 1904”

First Edition. 289 pages illus., maps. 25 cm. #121221