Syrup, damper and sugar slaves

We have been in and around Innisfail for a week, now, waiting for a part to arrive for the motorhome from Melbourne.  Despite that, we have been busy, even though most of the time it has been raining.   We’ve been learning about growing banana and sugar in the tropics, soaking up what stories and history we can in the time that we have.  

We were not allowed in to any actual banana plantation at the moment as most, here and East Palmerston, where we have been staying, are in a biosecurity lockdown of sorts, attempting to stop the spread of disease, but we were able to see banana plants in various stages of growth — many, with coloured translucent plastic bags over the bunches protecting them from bats, birds and flying foxes, but still allowing sunlight to penetrate hastening the ripening process.  

We discovered much from a group of Ukranian workers living in wooden plantation houses along Pulloms Road, surrounded by the bananas they have planted and nurtured.   They were on their day off but full of smiles, quite happy to talk about their work, and their time in Australia.  They had been here two years already, and were able to stay longer as their boss had acquired visas for them.  They seemed keen, though there were ten in one house and more in others further down the winding road.  They were young men.  It was a day free from work.  They looked happy enough to us. 

But, our history of using cheap labour from across the seas for banana and sugar growing has not been a happy one.   Particularly for the workers.  The Chinese are a case in point and we have been exploring their plight for weeks now, especially in the gold fields up here.  

The others, of course, are the South Sea Islanders.  Or “Kanakas”,  as the early colonials pejoratively called them.  They were ‘recruited’ to do the work that early settlers could not, or would not, do.  Though, some would argue many islanders were kidnapped, or “black-birded”,  as there are tales of workers from the islands wearing chains here, their ankles permanently scarred from dragging the ball as they moved from one plantation to another.  Hardly willing labour.  

From 1863 onwards,  recruitment ships were sent from our eastern coast to the islands — including Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, the Solomons, Fiji and New Caledonia, with all sorts of goods and wares, labelled ‘trade’.   Every recruit who signed up to return by ship to Queensland as a field labourer was allowed to present his family and friends to receive presents from the trade laden ship recruiter.  There was a limit, of course.  Up to a value of one to three pounds was seen as sufficient.  Giving presents, they were not called bribes, was ‘a standing rule of the trade’. 

“A typical gift (trade present) consisted of 400 sticks of tobacco, 3 axes, 2 dozen fish hooks, lengths of fishing line, 4 knives, a belt sheath and knife, a pair of scissors, clay pipes, a dozen boxes of matches and some cloth”.  [Manning Clark, historian]

The recruits had to sign a work contract, an agreement. Most couldn’t, of course, as they could not read or write, so placed their finger print on a document that was binding, though it is doubtful how much any of them might ever have understood about what was entailed in the doing.  All they likely saw were the presents their family and friends were being blessed with.  How could the blessing not continue?  They could hardly have comprehend what lay ahead of them.

Their work in the sugar fields involved clearing the rainforest and scrub, digging out the roots, ploughing the furrows, planting the setts, cutting and loading the harvested cane for processing. For twelve long back-breaking hours each and every day.  When you remember, that in their island lives they looked after their gardens: plowed when nature demanded, planting just enough for themselves and their family.  Not large expanses on a commercial basis.  

Typically, those recruited, were paid around £6 a year, often only at the end of their contract. They were given weekly rations, but their rations were as variable as their employers’ temperaments.  As rations they received: 

“…potatoes and pumpkin and damper and black tea.  They never got jam and syrup and things like that [as rations].  They worked for nothing.  They got very little money, and just the food….They had things to buy…You had to pay nine pence for a shirt in those days.  Jam was cheap and they [ones with families] used to buy a tin and live on that.  They found syrup was good with damper…and this was our daily diet. Syrup and damper.”   [Esther Henaway at Ayr, ABC, The Forgotten People, 1979]

Many of them died here.  There were no hospitals for them, no doctors, no health care.  Along with their depleted health from poor rations, the germ pool with its unusual European diseases, was lethal for many.  The death ratio of Islanders to Europeans was 4:1.  

Arguments over the presence of South Sea Islanders in Queensland caused chaos in the press and in politics for long decades.  Folk from New South Wales complained about the idle vagrants coming south from Queensland attempting to take their jobs.   Then, with federation in 1901, power lobbies finally enacted legislation to stop recruitment, and to deport workers who had been recruited.  Libertarians cried foul, so loudly and so long that the old, the weak and the needed, were allowed to stay.  But, some 9,000 were shipped home.  Barely 1,000 were allowed to stay.  

Some forty years of ‘sugar slavery’ had finally ceased. Mal Maninga, as it happens, is a descendant of one of those who was allowed to stay. One hopes that the lives of the Ukrainan banana workers that we are recruiting these days is a happier and healthier one.  

I remember, though, coming across dozens of Polish fruit workers in Scotland not two years ago. Their living conditions were a mind-numbing scenario. They were stacked on top of each other in a field of static caravans surrounded by barking dogs, mud and uncut grass. Not one of them was smiling. We felt we had come upon a prison yard,  and were quickly shunted out of there by the overseer.  So, it is hard not to be concerned. 

Camped in the old East Palmerston school yard, where a darling friend
went to school

A hill overlooking a banana plantation near Josephine falls

The bags tell us when to harvest, our Ukranian workers told us

The workers built their own grass huts to live in while here

A recruitment ship loaded with workers

Josephine falls.  Just a few kilometres away.  I hope our Ukranian workers can make it this far on their day off.  True rainforest, especially on a wet day!