449 GUbert and Ellice Islanders on Queensland Canefields, 1894-1899 by Doug Munro Presented at a meeting of the Society 26 September 1991 During the mid-1890s the arrival of a labour recruiting vessel at a Queensland port would have caused no great excitement in the normal course of events. By then the labour trade in indentured Pacific Island or 'Kanaka' workers (overwhelmingly Melanesians) had been in progress for over thirty years involving more than 650 recruiting voyages; during that time some 50,000 three-year contracts of indenture had been entered into by Pacific Islanders, who formed the mainstay of the Queensland canefields labour force.' The vast majority were prevented by legislation from working in any capacity other than unskilled field labour in the sugar industry, and were supplemented by Asian labourers. Even the problem of labour turnover and finding replacements for the workers whose three-year contracts had expired was to some extent overcome by the numbers who opted to stay on and serve out further contracts. Known as time- expired workers, they comprised between one-half and two-thirds of the Pacific Islander population for most of the 1890s.and formed a sort of Kanaka "aristocracy of labour".^ Why, then, did the arrival of the three-masted schooner May at Bundaberg in January 1895 with a mere 74 labour recruits from the Gilbert and Ellice Islands arouse such widespread interest? On the face of it the sugar industry had all the labourers it needed, and an additional 74 labourers would make no appreciable difference to the 8,000 or so Pacific Island labourers were already in the colony. It may seem that the sugar industry had all the labour it was ever likely to require, but not so. Competition from planters in Fiji, Samoa, New Caledonia and the New Hebrides made labour more difficult and expensive to obtain; old recruiting grounds such as the northern Solomons and the Bismarck Archipelago were now out of bounds for various reasons; the prohibition on British recruiters supplying firearms and ammunition to Pacific Islanders worked to the direct advantage of French and German recruiters whose goveriunents imposed no such restrictions.' There was no guarantee that numbers would hold up and there had already been attempts to ban the further importation of Pacific Island workers. In the circumstances it was Dr Doug Munro is Reader in History/Politics at the University of the South Pacific.