The critical question of labour

Between 1863 and 1906 more than 60,000 Melanesian labourers were recruited for plantation labour in Queensland. Some 20,000 were recruited for work in Fiji between 1864 and 1914 and about 6,000 for work in Samoa between 1885 and 1913 (Newbury 1981: 6; Giles and Scarr 1968: 2). Of the 62,475 recruited for Queensland, 18,217 came from the southern and central Solomon Islands and Santa Cruz areas (Price and Baker 1976: 110–111 Table 1). The largest component of Solomon Islands recruitment was 17,033 from the southern islands of Malaita, some parts of Guadalcanal, the Florida Islands and Makira (Price and