Sugar cane has been grown in Queensland for more than 150 years. Harvesting the sugar plantations was backbreaking work, and the owners soon began to employ ‘blackbirders’ to recruit labour for them. These unscrupulous characters sailed for the Solomon Islands, where they simply rounded up the natives and brought them back to Queensland to work as virtual slaves.

Wages and working conditions on the Queensland cane plantations in the 1860s were pitiful. Slavery on the British West Indian sugar plantations had been abolished as early as 1805, and the continuing campaign of William Wilberforce ensured that slavery as such was outlawed throughout the British Empire in 1825. Yet more than half a century later something suspiciously resembling slavery was flourishing in remote Queensland. This practice was not eliminated until the 1880s, and then only because of widespread white unemployment and growing racism. Blackbirding was then outlawed, and the Solomon Islanders were simply despatched home. Over the following decades their place was taken by cheap immigrant labour from southern Europe, and today the towns in the Queensland sugar belt have long-established communities from such distant spots as Calabria and Sicily in Italy, and the Mediterranean island of Malta.