speak out

Melanesian Australians speak out

The Forgotten People. By Matt Peacock. Published by the A us tralian Broadcasting Com mission. Distributed by Hodder & Stoughton (Aust) Pty Ltd. $ A 3.95.

In 1847 Benjamin Robert Boyd, described as a ‘cool

scamp’ in Sydney society

circles, brought 65 New Hebrideans into Sydney har bour on a sandalwood ship and transported them to the Riverina where they worked as shepherds. Because of the cold winters they all died. In Britain organisations concerned with slave trading around the world began to raise objections, but their protests did not affect Boyd’s activities in the Pacific and he continued his trade in the lives of Pacific Islanders for a few years until he was mur dered on a visit to the Solomon Islands.

Strong anti-slavery protests

from Britain finally contribu ted to the American Civil War.

Cotton prices then boomed on the world market, and one Captain the Honourable Robert Towns, an enterprising Sydney businessman and member of the Legislative Council, quickly got into the cotton industry and started a plantation outside Brisbane. A village sprang up and it was called Townsvale.

Towns was well acquainted with the method used by Boyd to bring the people of the Pa cific to Australia, and lost no time developing one of the most lucrative trades in the lives of men and women for plantation labour in the north.

This book furnishes the evi dence of a trade that enslaved and killed many thousands of Pacific Island men and women.

Their descendants may be the smallest of all minority groups in Australia today. They are the Melanesian Australians and are now in their fifth gener ation. This book relates their

story as it was told to Matt Pea cock of the Australian Broad casting Commission’s Science Unit. It was broadcast in a three-part series. The book has been edited by Clive Moore of the James Cook University, Queensland.

Some families are now pre pared to have their stories recorded, stories of their fore bears’ customs and traditions, and their own lives as lived out in Queensland. They told Pea cock about growing up in the small towns of the northern State and how the attitudes of the business people affected their lives by forcing them into segregation in tightly knit com munities.

Telling the author of the suf ferings of their fathers, one Islander said: ‘Some of the old Kanaka men worked here for 50 years, and when they died they were carted away. Even in death they didn’t even want us.

They took us to a part in the cemetery they called “heathen ground”. In the “heathen

ground” they buried Chinese,

Japanese, Malays, Indonesians

and Islanders . . . My father was a lay preacher and buried many people. Many people in unmarked graves in the canefields.’ And later with a ring of justifiable anger and bitterness he told Peacock how it is for his people today: ‘This is what we have to put up with.

We couldn’t get a house in town. You go and ask your real estate agent, go up to him, and even right this very moment when I am talking to you in the year 1977. If a black man goes up to a real estate agent in this town and says, “I want to rent that house you’ve got adver tised,” he says “Oh, no. It’s just been taken. Come back later”.’

This book may not be liked by the assimilationists because Peacock has revealed a people who in the face of racial dis crimination of all forms for over a century, have emerged independent and strong, sur viving as a people proud of their history and battling to leam and retain their ancestors’ culture by saving their hard earned money to visit their ancestors’ islands in the warm

Pacific.

Faith Bandler