
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are warned that the following contains images of deceased persons.
This week, Black Lives Matter protestors in Bristol toppled a statue of 17th Century British slave trader, Edward Colston.
The image of the monument tumbling into the city's harbour was splashed across front pages around the world; an evocative symbol of the anti-racism movement that's swelled since the death in custody of African American man George Floyd last month.
Asked for his thoughts about the statue's destruction and the possible removal of a London monument to Captain James Cook, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison made a strange claim: that Australia has no history of slavery.
"When you’re talking about Captain James Cook, in his time, he was one of the most enlightened persons on these issues you could imagine. I mean, Australia when it was founded as a settlement, as New South Wales, [it] was on the basis that there'd be no slavery," he told Sydney radio station 2GB.
"While slave ships continued to travel around the world, when Australia was established, yes, sure, it was a pretty brutal settlement... but there was no slavery in Australia."
This is commonly cited by those who want to distance Australia from the dark history of race relations in the United States — "we're not America," they say. But unfortunately it's not true.
Here's how to have a conversation with someone who denies Australian slavery.
'There was no slavery in Australia.'
Australia wasn't a formal slave state like US south was; that's true. But slavery practices still took place.
Here are just a few examples.
Between 1842 and 1904, more than 55,000 people from more than 80 South Pacific islands were brought to Australia to work as slaves on sugar and cotton plantations in Queensland and northern NSW. Many had been coerced into fixed-term contracts or even kidnapped; a process known as 'blackbirding'.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people weren't immune either. From the 1860s to the 1970s, men and boys were taken from their homes and forced to work on cattle and sheep stations across Australia.
Pearling Captain Henry Hilliard with his family and Aboriginal domestic servants c. 1900s. Image: WA Maritime Museum.