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Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s attempts to quash the Black Lives Matter protests has resulted in him revisioning Australian history today, after declaring that there was “no slavery in Australia”.
Queenslanders as a whole have kept pretty quiet on this one, with not one of his LNP colleagues working up the courage to tell him he probably shouldn’t die on that hill.
These comments arose during a press conference today, as the Prime Minister called for future protesters in Australia to be charged for breaching COVID-19 health orders.
However, his comments about slavery have overshadowed the ‘lock em up’ soundbite that he was hoping to make headlines.
Historians have been quick to correct the Prime Minister’s suggestion that Aboriginal, Chinese, Irish, Italian Polynesian and Melanesian people were never forced to work for free in the early years of Australian settlement.
Morrison has also been criticised for ignoring that whole slave trade that was running between the Pacific and North Queensland in the 1800s.
For the good part of a century, sugar cane farmers in Queensland engaged labour firms to obtain young men from Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and New Caledonia.
The descendants of these people are now known as ‘South Sea Islanders’ and they are very fucking good at rugby league.
Pacific islanders were shipped to Australia, a practice known as “blackbirding” to provide labour, with many tricked into rum and kidnapped from their homelands before the journey.
One prominent colonial ‘blackbirder’ who was involved in this shameful chapter of Australian history was the villainous Scotsman, John Mackay, of which the Queensland sugarcane town of Mackay is named after.
Townsville is also named after a controversial slave master by the name of Robert Towns, who was so keen to have a town named after himself that he tacked ‘ville’ onto the end of his own name, which basically translates to Townstown.
However, this century of human rights violation mustn’t have made it into the 1970s curriculum at Bronte Primary School in Sydney’s Eastern suburbs, because Scotty has never heard of blackbirding.
“Oh” said the PM, after being bailed up by an NITV reporter whose got family up that way.
“I thought that the sugar cane was cutting itself haha” he said trying to laugh it off.
“Nah nah nah!!!”
“Maybe the sugar cane was being cut by the Mackay Cutters. Haha. That’s the league team up there. Hahah. How good is footy”
