History of The Act
Beginning in the 1860s, tens of thousands of Pacific Islanders were brought to Australia as low paid labourers. By the early 1890s, 46,000 labourers had arrived in Queensland, and up to 62,000 labourers arrived in all. Many of these people were forcibly removed from their homes, in a process called "blackbirding", by which Islanders were either kidnapped or deceived into travelling to Australia. They were brought to fuel the growing need for cheap labour in the sugar industry, since white labour was scarce and expensive. The majority of labourers were employed under indentured labour arrangements, whereby they received either no pay or extremely small amounts of pay. By 1880, Queensland legislation prevented Pacific Islanders from working in higher paid jobs in sugar mills and other industrial areas, and limited them to manual agricultural labour.
Read more about this topic: Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901
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