Blackbirding: A reckoning with the Australian slave trade

An important reckoning with Australia’s unspoken history of slavery.

From the author of the bestselling books The Ballad of Abdul Wade and The Bravest Scout at Gallipoli

As Australia becomes more willing to confront the violence and trauma of its colonial past, one chapter has remained largely hidden: the Australian slave trade known as blackbirding.

Between 1860 and 1906, more than 60,000 Pacific Islanders were brought to Australia to work the Queensland sugarcane fields. Men, women and children were taken from their homelands through coercion, deception or outright abduction. Forced into contracts they could not read, unpaid until the end of their service and denied basic rights, they endured brutal working conditions that led to the deaths of nearly 15,000 people.

In this immersive and meticulously researched work of narrative nonfiction, Ryan Butta confronts one of the least acknowledged episodes in Australian history. Exposing a deliberate ‘engineered forgetting’ that has kept these stories out of the national memory, this book brings the hidden history of blackbirding into the light and reckons with the enduring legacy of Australia’s forgotten slave trade.