The Making of A Blackbird

2012 – In the Queensland town of Bundaberg, a name synonymous with sugar and rum, an elderly ni-Vanuatu man stands on stage at the local civic centre and makes a tearful apology.

He is Richard David Fandunamata, a Paramount Chief from Tongoa in the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu. He hands a ceremonial club to a local Aboriginal elder, Jason Browne. The club is symbolic of the murders his grandfather was forced to take part in more than 100 years previously when he was brought to Bundaberg to toil on the sugarcane plantations. Like thousands of other men and women, known pejoratively as Kanakas, he was caught up in a widely condemned type of slavery known as ‘blackbirding’.

I met Chief Fandunamata shortly after he made his heartfelt apology. I couldn’t believe what I had heard. It was a history I knew nothing about.

I was in the audience that hot Good Friday because I hoped to show a short documentary about my exploration of South Sea Islander labourers in Queensland. I had been researching the workers, sometimes called ‘slaves’, sometimes ‘indentured labourers’, but always pejoratively dubbed ‘Kanakas’. I thought I knew a fair bit about the appalling excesses that these young men and women were subject to, but I had never read or heard that they had been forced to kill local Aborigines.

With the ignorance of a new member of any community or group, I asked the nearest person to help me meet the Chief and ask to hear his story again. The man I asked was Tom (soon to be the only person in Bundaberg that saw my documentary at that time, and then the generous producer of my current documentary-in-progress

) and he found the best person to introduce me. Ralph Reganvanu – a Minister in the ni-Vanuatu government – introduced me to Chief Fandunamata. The Chief very generously told this complete stranger his story, and Mr Reganvanu was equally generous enough to translate it for me from Bislama. The story was no less explosive the second time. It stayed with me.

A day or two later, the Chief and I were on the same tour of Bundaberg, led by local Australian South Sea Islander descendant Matthew Nagas. I took some photos and video of him and some of the other ni-Vanuatu delegates.

The old building is the last barracks, that had been built for the Islanders to live in. CSR (Colonial Sugar Refinery) refused to restore it, but graciously agreed not to pull it down. When I returned earlier this year, it was gone – so much for their word. The man pointing to the barracks is Chief Simon, one of the ni-Vanuatu elders.

Chief David is wearing a yellow neckerchief in the third photo. He was telling us the stories his grandfather had passed on to him about the significance of the area we were standing on. Bislama, the pidgin language based on English, was apparently created in the area, as the Islanders had no common language to communicate in. Bislama is no spoken throughout Melanesia. The last photo is of me, cry in the cane fields.