The Blackbirders by Edward Wybergh Docker

The Blackbirders

The Recruiting of South Seas Labour for Queensland, 1863-1907

by Edward Wybergh Docker

Angus & Robertson, 1970, [First Edition], ISBN 0207120382, black and white photographic plates, hardcover, dustjacket

Very Good Condition, some edge and shelf wear, some rubbing and bumping to edges and corners, no inscriptions, price-clipped dustjacket shows some edge and shelf wear with rubbing, bumping, chipping, creasing and small tears to jacket (see photographs)

“This is the story of the blackbirders and of the blackbirding era, which began with Robert Towns’s importation in the 1860s of the first of the Kanakas for his cotton plantation near Brisbane and ended with the repatriation of the last of the natives after the labour trade was discontinued by Act of Parliament in 1904.
It is a lively and colourful account of the period, flavoured with extracts from newspaper reports and personal letters and journals, and with a fine selection of contemporary illustrations and six maps.  It brings to life the personalities involved – recruiters, missionaries, politicians, ship-owners, plantation-owners, rabid abolitionists and equally rabid supporters of the trade, and the islanders themselves, whose way of life, interestingly described here, was irrevocably changed during this turbulent period.”