Exhibition recognises sugar's Pacific foundation

Updated June 19, 2013 17:21:27

Audio: Queensland Art Gallery curator of Pacific art Ruth McDougall talks about the 'Sugar' exhibition. (ABC Rural)

The earliest days of the sugar industry and its dependence on workers, willing and unwilling, from the Pacific are on show in Brisbane.

Postcards, photographs, music and recorded anecdotes have been pulled together to mark 150 years of Australian South Sea Islander contributions to Queensland.

Ruth McDougall is the Queensland Art Gallery's curator of Pacific art and says some of the postcards in the collection date from the 1870s.

"These were lithographs majorly produced for sending overseas to really promote Queensland as a destination for investors and sugar was a major part of that promotion exercise.

"And you see from those very early images that the South Sea Islanders are right in there, that they are part of the story of sugar from the beginning."

The workers came from islands in Melanesia, including Vanuatu and the Solomons, and from Polynesian and Micronesian islands such as Samoa, Tuvalu and Kiribati.

Ms McDougall says some were contracted to work in Australia but most, including young children, were kidnapped.

"The term that South Sea Islanders use is 'blackbirding'.

"Quite often they were enticed from the beach onto the ships and when they arrived they were adopted and worked as domestics or were taken out to cattle stations to work as well."

Frank Robert Boah, known as Bobby, from Mackay features in one of the recordings which forms part of the exhibition.

He's visited the village where his grandfather was born and heard how he was taken from a reef.

"The ones that were close to shore, they ran away up into the scrub or the forest.

"But me grandfather was too far out and they caught him.

"There's a lot of people don't know, they think we're Aboriginals because of course we're dark.

"But we've got a different history altogether."

Ms McDougall says after Federation in 1901, and the start of the White Australia Policy, all bar 1600 of the South Sea Islanders were deported.

The exhibition called 'Sugar' is running until October 7 in Brisbane.

Topics: sugar, history, immigration, brisbane-4000, pacific

First posted June 19, 2013 10:24:02