Emelda Davis is a former Sydney city councillor, community advocate and second-generation descendant of blackbirded South Sea Islanders. Otherwise known as enslaved people.

Australia has often sought to reassure itself that at least the nation is untainted, unlike Britain and the US, by a heinous history of slavery. But “the evidence of the Australian slave trade through blackbirding is everywhere – it hides in plain sight”, Davis says.

She has written the foreword for a new book by Ryan Butta, Blackbirding, A reckoning with the Australian slave trade. The book’s release aligned with the landmark June 2026 bilateral Nakamal agreement between Australia and Vanuatu, in which Australia formally acknowledged, for the first time, the legacies of blackbirding.

“Blackbirding is a term that comes directly from the African slave trade, then into the West Indies and the US,” Butta says. “It’s a term that’s sort of been hidden behind [in Australia] and a lot of people go, ‘Oh, it was something that just happened up in a small part of Queensland to do with sugar cane.’ But most of Australia has had no concept of the scale of it.”

Between 1860 and 1906 up to 62,000 Pacific Islanders were shipped to Australia to work primarily in sugar cane and cotton farming. They also worked on the Sydney docks and in other maritime industries, and as labourers in civic projects.

Butta writes: “The Pacific Islanders came, they died, they were buried like dogs and more were sent for.”

But one of the most troubling things he documents is that remains of Pacific Islanders continue to be held in Australian museums and collections to this day.

‘He was just 12 years old’

As a former member of Sydney city council, Davis was central to ensuring that it acknowledged the city’s seminal links to Australia’s blackbirding history. She says Butta’s book is a potential watershed in Australia acknowledging that blackbirding was slavery.

In the late 19th century, when Australian blackbirding was at its height, her grandfather was taken from the island of Tana (part of today’s Tafea province of Vanuatu) to labour in the Queensland sugar cane industry – one of colonial Australia’s biggest wealth creators.

“He was just 12 years old and one of a great many South Sea Islander children who were stolen – and he never returned home,” she says.

Ironically perhaps, Davis, the chair of Australian South Sea Islanders Port Jackson, lives in inner Sydney’s Pyrmont, her house overlooking the historic “sugar wharves” managed by the Colonial Sugar Refining Company – transformed into today’s tranquil harbourside parklands. The CSR sugar refinery, a relic of one of the colony’s leading companies and most totemic brands – is acknowledged as part of the park’s urban history.

“It pays homage to the refinery and its products – but about what happened to us?” Davis says. “There’s nothing. We need our own monument on the sugar wharves.”

What little is acknowledged about blackbirding tends to focus on the canefields of north Queensland but Butta’s book, centred on the wharves that Davis’s house overlooks, tells a different story – one that focuses on how a who’s who of colonial Sydney profited from the capture and sale of Pacific Islanders and from the products, especially sugar, produced with their enslaved labour.

From the 1860s Sydney’s docks, and the ships of some of the city’s prominent merchant traders, social and political leaders, formed the hub of a slavery industry that traded in tens of thousands of Pacific Islander men and boys sent to work, often unrewarded, on Queensland plantations where at least 15,000 died. Men, women and children were coerced, deceived to “sign” work contracts they couldn’t understand, abused and often kidnapped.

The “contracts” stipulated they would be rewarded in kind at the end of their indentured terms and repatriated. Many were neither rewarded nor returned. Their living and employment conditions were frequently appalling, with malnutrition and disease rife.

Following the money

Butta, of Sicilian-Australian heritage, did not set out to write the Pacific Islander experience of blackbirding – although the book recounts many appalling episodes of ill treatment of enslaved people, including mass murder and the rape of women. He believed he did not have cultural authority to do so.

Instead, he exposes the Australian business of enslaving Pacific Islanders from the top (the shipowners, sugar planters, importers, stock and station agents who sold them) to the bottom (those like Henry Lewin, infamously of the Peruvian slave trade) who enticed or coerced Pacific Islander people to work in Australia for virtually nothing.

After Britain abolished slavery in 1833 its parliament granted £20m compensation (£300bn-plus today) to former enslavers for lost income. Prominent British families who moved to the fledgling colonies established themselves on the proceeds of slavery’s abolition, most prolifically in South Australia, which has prided itself on being the free state, devoid of obdurate convict stains.

“I was surprised that so many of the people connected [to blackbirding] had links back to that [family] money they received when they were compensated for the freeing of their slaves during abolition, and how that money found its way to Australia,” Butta says.

His research follows the money to map how political, legal and mercantile vested interests protected Australia’s trade in human flesh.

The founding father of Australian slavery

Davis is right about the truth being in plain sight.

It is incarnate in the landscape of Sydney and monuments elsewhere. From what was the CSR refinery site near her home, I walk to the old “rotten row” – today’s Towns Place Wharf. There is a plaque lionising the prominent Sydney merchant and shipowner Robert Towns and another trader, Henry Moore – men “who imported and exported every commodity imaginable: sugar, rope, salt, sandalwood, horses and skins, sperm and black oil, and later wool”. But no mention of humans.

Towns (after whom Townsville was named, though he barely set foot there), was a prominent New South Wales politician, a notorious cheapskate and, Butta declares, a “criminal scoundrel”.

He married into the establishment Wentworth family and became, Butta writes, “the founding father of Australian slavery”, so many Islanders did his leaky ships transport courtesy of his chief kidnapper, Lewin. Many coerced men also worked on rotten row and onboard Towns’ ships.

From Pyrmont it’s not far to the elaborate federation-romanesque sandstone Burns Philp building in Bridge Street, constructed in 1899 when the mercantile firm was fattening on blackbirding profits.

Burns Philp was heavily involved in “recruiting” labourers from New Guinea to work on the rapaciously labour-intensive CSR canefields (at one point 8,000 worked on plantations in Townsville alone).

After the introduction of the White Australia policy in 1901 – when blackbirded Pacific Islanders and their descendants were deported – Burns Philp profited on the repatriations of Islanders to disparate parts of the Pacific. The voyages were funded by the unpaid wages of blackbirded Pacific Islanders who had perished on the plantations.

“The other way this story hides … is that it’s supposedly a ‘Queensland story’,” Butta says. “But Fairfax, he was in Sydney. James Burns of Burns Philp, he was in Sydney. Robert Towns was in Sydney. Even the guys involved in the [earlier] Peruvian slave trade, they were in Sydney.”

The sugar hit spread further than just a handful of names: “Anyone who was anyone in Sydney had CSR shareholdings.”

‘The stock now being humans’

In 1869, after French complaints that Australian ships were kidnapping people in the Pacific where France had extensive colonial interests, NSW established a royal commission.

It was led by a prominent Sydney businessman, financier and NSW parliamentarian Jacob Montefiore (from a family of wealthy enslavers in Barbados who shifted their fortune to Australia) and John Fairfax, the owner of Australia’s oldest newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, and a significant investor in CSR.

The inquiry found no incriminating evidence.

Guardian Australia contacted CSR for comment. The company – long since absorbed into a multinational, Wilmar – makes no public mention of its historical reliance on blackbirding but Wilmar told Guardian Australia: “Wilmar acquired the sugar assets from CSR Limited in 2010. Wilmar recognises the significance of our industry’s history and the contribution of the people and communities that helped shape it. Today, we remain committed to operating responsibly, ethically, and with respect for human rights.”

Like NSW, the Queensland parliament was conflicted when it came to Islander labourers because, Butta writes, “planters were politicians and politicians were planters”.

He writes about how in 1867 a ship, the King Oscar (heavily armed with a large supply of muskets and pistols) was chartered to coerce or kidnap Pacific Islanders to Queensland to work on plantations.

“The King Oscar was chartered by Messrs WD White and G Mylne … William Ducket White, Graham Mylne, Gordon Sandeman and William Walsh were all members of the Queensland Legislative Assembly. George Raff had resigned from the Legislative Assembly a few months prior to the arrival [in Brisbane, laden with blackbirded Islanders] of the King Oscar.”

Once the ship docked, the stock and station agent Fenwick & Co – “the stock now being humans” – sought expressions of interest from others wanting to use their labour.

John Fenwick founded Fenwick & Co. His business partner was Robert Mackenzie. At the time of the King Oscar’s arrival in late 1867 Mackenzie was also Queensland’s premier.

‘We are not properly seen’

The infrastructure of colonial Australia which became that of the new federation, and its rural industries, emerged partly on the back of Pacific Island slavery at a time when First Nations people (sometimes in chains) were also being forced to work in the pastoral industry and on civic projects.

Western Australia’s Canning stock route – on whose construction Aboriginal people, some chained, were forced to work – is a prime example.

Sometimes the forced labour of Indigenous people and blackbirded labourers overlapped. Pacific Islander and Aboriginal labourers worked together, for example, to build Queensland’s Cape Bowling Green Lighthouse in the 1870s. Today it stands in Sydney’s Australian National Maritime Museum collection after being moved there in 1994.

Another terrible shared legacy of Australian colonisation’s inhumane impact on First Nations peoples and blackbirded South Sea Islanders can be found in the collections of their remains in Australian public institutions.

Davis and Butta estimate that body parts in Australian collections belong to at least 1,000 blackbirded Pacific Islanders. They are in the collections, among others, of the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, Sydney’s Australian Museum (the country’s oldest), and Queensland Museum. All of which have also held collections – some extensive – of Australian First Nations remains.

Butta references an 1852 article in the Sydney Morning Herald “noting that the Sydney Museum [later the Australian Museum] had set up a display of a human skeleton – one of the northern islanders imported by the late Mr Benjamin Boyd”.

These collections are a profound characteristic of the inhumanity and eugenics that underpinned slavery. Even if they do exist in a country that denies its slavery history.

“Recognition of what happened to us, what was done, is critical,” Davis says. “We are not properly seen – and we need to be seen. Repatriation of [South Sea Islander] remains and cultural artefacts is central to that.”

Negotiations between South Sea Islander representative organisation, governments (including Vanuatu’s) and collecting institutions has begun. But repatriation is slow and painstaking because the provenance of human remains is frequently difficult – or impossible – to determine.

In the meantime, an official Australian apology would be inordinately meaningful for Australian South Pacific Islanders, Davis says.

“What’s in the word ‘sorry’ – it means don’t do it again?” she says. “But, you know, a prime minister stepping up and really apologising for what occurred would be a big step.

“We can’t change the past. But it’s about being seen.”