The Global Legacy of Sugar Planting in Australia: Historical Archaeological Excavations of a South Sea Islander Dwelling in Ayr, Queensland

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Sugar, its cultivation, production, trade, and consumption, is intricately linked to past and present global colonial landscapes. In Australia, its growth and manufacture throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries held strong and often overlooked associations with the American Civil War, Atlantic slave trade and abolition of slavery. Consequently, tangible, intangible, remembered, and forgotten links have been formed between them. This paper presents the findings of archaeological excavations at the Pioneer Sugar Estate in Ayr, Northern Queensland. Here, thousands of South Sea Islanders, alongside foreign labour from China, Japan, Malaysia, and the South Pacific, were employed to plant and cut cane under indentured contracts between c1881 to 1906. Artefacts recovered from the site of a South Sea Islander dwelling reveal how they navigated a landscape heavily influenced by global plantation models, power, capitalism, discrimination, surveillance, and control.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SHA 2023 General Sessions   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow