Sydney’s sugar rush: how the colony’s most powerful profited from Australia’s slave trade

Australia likes to think its history is untainted by slavery but a new book traces how a who’s who in the NSW capital profited from the capture and sale of ‘blackbirded’ Pacific IslandersEmelda Davis is a former Sydney city councillor, community advocate and second-generation descendant of blackbirded South Sea Islanders. Otherwise known as enslaved people.Australia has often sought to reassure itself that at least the nation is untainted, unlike Britain and the US, by a heinous history of slavery. But “the evidence of the Australian slave trade through blackbirding is everywhere – it hides in plain sight”, Davis says. Continue reading...