Community celebrates its recognition in Australia

AUSTRALIA – The South Sea Islander community may not be well-known by wider Australian society, but this is not the case in central Queensland.

This month has marked 16 years since the Queensland Government officially recognised Australian South Sea Islanders as a distinct cultural group.

This year also marks the first year Australian South Sea Islanders were included on the national census.

The Rockhampton community has been celebrating recognition for three weeks, with market days and exhibitions, and finished with a special Recognition Week lunch on Thursday.

Rockhampton’s Robbie Mann, who belongs to a group called Linking the Generations, said recognition in mainstream Australia was very important.

“We’re a small community here in the nation of Australia, so it’s important that other people know who we are, how we came here,” Mann said. “Many people don’t know about us.”

The community’s history includes some 50,000 men from the Pacific islands being kidnapped or lured onto ships and transported to Australia to be used as indentured labour in the 1800s.

Mann said Australian South Sea Islanders were important to the development of the Queensland economy, through the sugar, cotton and cattle industry.

“A lot of it was developed and supported by the indentured labourers, of the Islanders,” he said.

There is also evidence that lost wages of 15,000 workers who died were not paid back to families in the islands, an amount estimated to be worth almost $40 million today.

“We hear about the stolen wages of the Aboriginal community, and that also happened with the South Sea Islander community,” Mann said.

“All those old people back then who were indentured labourers or slaves,they have all passed on.”

Mann’s ancestors came from Vanuatu and New Caledonia and his family’s history has been passed down through generations.

“The stories on my mum’s side are of her great-grandfather being taken from a beach in Vanuatu as a young teenager, taken on a ship and then brought through to Queensland,” he said.

“This is very similar to many other families and their stories about young people being out on the beach at that time, or going to look at the big ship that was coming in, and being lured on to those ships, being enticed, and then being brought to Australia.”

Through his mother’s side, Mann has connected with family from West Ambrym, Vanuatu, and makes an annual trip back.

That connection was years in the making as the family in Vanuatu had assumed their ancestor taken to Australia had died, but the families now have a strong connection – and reconnecting was a very emotional experience.

“For them, they had never heard from her again and they just presumed she had died, and nothing came about until people started reconnecting, started looking and started reconnecting with those communities,” Mann said.

“Some families have never been able to trace their family back because they were given a Western name and they have lost their custom name.”

In Rockhampton, the close-knit South Sea Islander community lived around Creek Street, and was well-known for its market gardens and fruit trees.

“They used to call it Kanaka Town,” said community elder Neville Wooly, who was born and bred here.

Wooly was one of the hundreds to attend the Rockhampton Australian South Sea Islander Community’s 2016 Recognition Market Blo Komuniti – or community market day.

“Recognition Day is important, and at this market day, people have come from Bundaberg, Mackay and even Townsville,” he said.

His great-grandfather came from Vanuatu and married a girl from Mackay.

“When the old fellas came over from the islands, some stayed and some went back,” Wooly said.

“Those who wanted to stay got jobs, working out on the cattle stations, ringing around here, the railway, main roads.”

Elder Boysie Little’s ancestors came from Banks Island, Vanuatu, and he grew up near Creek Street.

In the early years, he said people did not realise South Sea Islanders were a distinct people.

“Just because we were dark-skinned people every one thought we were the same –they thought we were one race of people, but we have always known who we are,” he said.

As a boy growing up, Little said there was no recognition but some elders fought hard for it.

“Uncle Joe Leo and them went down to Brisbane when they first brought in the recognition for South Sea Islander people, and I thought it was great,” he said. “It makes me proud to be a South Sea Island man. A lot of our people have come such a long way since those days.

“I have nephews and nieces today who are in the police force, they are doctors.

“Our people never had that before – they never had that opportunity.”

This year Rockhampton’s market day was opened to the wider community to throw a light on Rockhampton’s Australian South Sea Islander heritage.

Organiser Tomasina Bickey, whose ancestors came from Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, said her parents always recognised their culture but younger people may have lost some of this.

“I think that’s what my passion with the association is – to learn myself and to teach others, and to get knowledge from the older people so we can all learn together,” she said.

“I’d like to see more cultural programmes throughout the year, not just on significant dates.” - ABC