Kanaka (Pacific Island Worker) - Australia

Australia

According to the Macquarie Dictionary, the word "kanaka", which was once widely used in Australia, is now regarded in Australian English as an offensive term for a Pacific Islander. In part, this is because most "Kanakas" in Australia were people from Melanesia, rather than Polynesia, and included few Hawaiians. The descendants of 19th century immigrants to Australia from the Pacific Islands now generally refer to themselves as "South Sea Islanders", and this is also the term used in formal and official situations.

Most of the original labourers were recruited from the Solomon Islands and New Hebrides (Vanuatu), though others were taken from the Loyalty Islands, Tonga, Samoa, Kiribati and Tuvalu. Some were kidnapped ("blackbirded") or otherwise induced into long-term indentured service.

Reflecting European prejudices of the time, the men were generally referred to as "Kanakas" (boys). Islander descendants regard this term as a pejorative and insulting reminder of their ancestors' exploitation at the hands of white planters and their recruiters. In Australia, South Sea Islanders were often unfree labour, of the specific form known as indentured labour. It is often alleged that their employment in Australia was a form of slavery, due to the belief that many people were recruited by "blackbirding", as the enslavement of Pacific Islanders and indigenous Australians was known at the time.

However, one historian, Keith Windschuttle (in his book The White Australia Policy), disputes this, claiming all evidence of blackbirding is anecdotal. Another historian, Adrian Graves, in a ground-breaking 1983 article in Past & Present (see reference list below), documented how some Pacific Islanders were paid truck wages and actively sought to work in Australia.

Of the more than 60,000 Islanders recruited from 1863, the majority were to be "repatriated" (that is, deported) by the Australian Government between 1906-08 under the Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901 legislation prompted by the White Australia policy. Some were exempted on various grounds, including marriage to Australians. These and others who escaped deportation remained in Australia and their descendants today form Australia's largest Melano-Polynesian ethnic group. Many Australian South Sea Islanders are also of mixed ancestry, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for whom they are often mistaken. In consequence, Australian South Sea Islanders have faced similar forms of discrimination meted out to Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.

The Australian South Sea Islander Community was recognised as a unique minority group in 1994 after a report by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission found they had become more disadvantaged than the indigenous Australians.