Historical Information Sheet No 6: Mortality and Pacific Islander Migrants in Colonial Queensland 

Numbers 

62,475 indenture contracts were issued for Pacific Islanders to work as labourers in Queensland between 1863 and 1904.  Given the rate of re-enlistments from the islands it seems likely that there were about 50,000 individuals. The vast majority (95 per cent) were healthy adolescent and young adult males.  

First-Indenture Labourers and Acclimatization 

The average crude death rate declined as the labour trade progressed, mainly because their numbers included a decreasing proportion of first-indenture labourers, not from any European-inspired improvement in working or living conditions.  Over time, three more categories emerged: re-enlistments from the islands; time-expired labourers and ticket-holders.  Re-enlistments occurred onwards from the late 1860s, and by the early 1890s more than one-quarter of the newly-arriving labourers were re-enlisting: in 1897, 230 of the 934 recruits (24.6 per cent) had previously served terms of indenture—116 in Queensland, 24 in Fiji, 5 in New Caledonia and 40 in Samoa. Time-expired labourers were those who had completed one three-year agreement but opted to stay in Queensland and entered new agreements. The time-expired segment of the Islander work force grew increasingly important over the four decades of immigration.  By 1895, time-expired Islanders made up 65 per cent of the Melanesians in the Mackay district and could be found in similar proportions in other districts.  Ticket-holders were 835 Islanders who had resided in Queensland for five years before September 1884, who had no restriction on the types of work they undertook. In 1892 there were 716 ticket-holders, 704 in 1901 and 691 in 1906. Expressed as a proportion of the overall Islander population in Queensland from 1885 to 1906, in any one year ticket-holders constituted between seven and eleven percent of the Islander poopulation. The present-day Austalian South Sea Islander population is largely descended from the time-expired and ticket-holder Islanders. 

Mortality 

At home, Pacific Islanders lived in an isolated disease environment lacking many of the common diseases of large land masses.  They were unused to regulated field work, the climate from which they came had no winter, most were not used to wearing clothes which caused health problems when they continued to wear damp garments, the food they received was quite different from food in the islands, and there were large conceptual differences between nineteenth-century European and Pacific Islanders views of causes of sickness and death.  These things were not primarily responsible for the high mortality rate but they certainly exacerbated it.  A large poportion of the Melanesians who died in Queensland were first-indenture labourers—those who had not previously participated in the labour trade.  Ralph Shlomowitz’s statistical analysis clearly shows that the longer a Pacific Islander lived in Queensland, the more chance they had of a normal life expectancy.  However, the labour trade was not designed for immigration; rather it was a circular-migration over three years, which only compounded the death rates.  Respiratory tract infections are the most frequent minor illnesses of humans.  For Islanders, particularly those newly arrived in Queensland, tuberculosis, pneumonia, bronchitis and pleurisy were more than minor illnesses—they were major killers. 

Death Rates 

Government records show that in excess of 14,564 Islander labourers died in Queensland between 1868 and 1906.  There are some gaps in the statistics: the total figure is probably closer to 15,000.  This is 24% of the total number of indentured contracts and an even higher percentage of the actual individuals involved.  Tuberculosis, pneumonia, bronchitis, pleurisy, dysentery,  measles and chicken pox were the major killers 

The estimated death rate of Islanders in the first year of their indenture was 81 per 1,000, over three times the estimated crude death date for the rest of the Islander population, which was 26 per 1,000.  It was always the newcomers, the first-indenture labourers, who suffered worst in Queensland. 

Comparison with European Death Rates 

The death rate amongst Europeans in Queensland over similar years—of all ages—was 15 per 1,000. The death rate amongst European males in Queensland of similar age to the predominantly male Islander population, was closer to nine or ten in every 1,000.  The general Queensland mortality rate was average for colonial Australia and acceptable by world standards.  The Queensland Pacific Islander mortality rate, which at its height in 1884 was 147 per 1,000, was unacceptable by humane standards anywhere. 

The Burden of Guilt 

Exposure to the new disease environment was the fundamental cause of death.  Neither employers nor government can be blamed for the initial high death rate, nor for failing to foresee it.  But they can absolutely be blamed for persisting with the system for forty years when it had become clear that the death rate was the price.  There is a heavy burden of guilt borne by the colonial Queensland Government and those it represented.