<
https://theconversation.com/unpapering-the-cracks-sugar-slavery-and-the-sydney-morning-herald-202828>
"In a splash of articles published over the past two weeks, the British
Guardian has acknowledged and apologised for its historical links with
slavery. The Scott Trust, owners of the newspaper that became a global news
website, outlined how the
Guardian’s founders were linked to transatlantic
slavery and announced a programme of restorative justice.
John Edward Taylor, the journalist who founded the
Manchester Guardian in
1821, profited from partnerships with cotton manufacturers and merchants who
imported raw cotton produced by enslaved people in Jamaica and in the Sea
Islands along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia.
In Australia, our oldest surviving newspaper has its own historical links to
the shameful practice of slave labour.
In 1841, John Fairfax (1804-1877) became the first of five generations of
Fairfax family owners of the
Sydney Morning Herald, which had been founded in
1831 as the
Sydney Herald.
The Fairfax family also became major shareholders in Colonial Sugar Refining
Company (CSR). CSR was founded in Sydney in 1855 by Edward Knox, but it
descended from the Australasian Sugar Company, established in 1842. The precise
date on which the Fairfax family became sugar investors is not known, but the
family was certainly involved by 1855, when John Fairfax’s daughter, Emily,
married the general manager of CSR.
In the 1870s and 1880s, CSR expanded into milling cane in Queensland and Fiji.
It profited from the use of what was effectively slave labour through the
abduction and importation of tens of thousands of South Sea Islanders, who were
disparagingly called “Kanakas” (a Hawaiian word meaning “man”).
According to the Australian Human Rights Commission, between 1863 and 1904, “an
estimated 55,000 to 62,500 Islanders were brought to Australia to labour on
sugar-cane and cotton farms in Queensland and northern New South Wales”. They
were forced to perform backbreaking labour in appalling conditions.
Most came from Vanuatu and Solomon Islands, but they also arrived from more
than 70 other Pacific Islands. CSR chartered ships for the express purpose of
“recruiting” labourers from these islands. Men, women and children, some as
young as nine, were forced, coerced or tricked into coming to Australia. The
practice of kidnapping them was known as “blackbirding” (“blackbird” was
another word for slave).
Although a system of indentured labour was later established, Pacific Islanders
were still exploited, denied basic rights, and paid miserable wages. In 1901,
two acts of parliament facilitated their mass deportation as part of
establishing the White Australia Policy."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
