Sugar plantations

The sugar plantations of Queensland were a contested frontier of the White Australia policy, comparable in many ways to the pearl-shelling industry of northern Australia. Both required a large, disciplined, and inexpensive labour force — and plantation owners were convinced that non-white workers were better suited to this demanding and poorly paid work. White labourers, by contrast, generally shunned such physically arduous and low-paid employment.

As a result, Queensland, where most of the sugar industry was concentrated, became something of an outlier among the Australian colonies and later states. It resisted strict enforcement of the White Australia policy, much to the concern of other states such as New South Wales, which were far more zealous in excluding non-European workers. The sugar industry was not exclusively Chinese: Japanese labourers and Pacific Islanders, often referred to as “Kanakas,” were also employed in significant numbers. Yet all these groups became targets of the same wave of anti-coloured sentiment that swept through Australian society at the turn of the twentieth century.

Employers sought the productivity of these workers but wanted their presence to remain temporary. They were welcome as labourers, not as settlers or landowners. Indeed, many of the same plantation owners who had relied on imported Asian and Pacific labour later became prominent advocates for ensuring these workers could not remain in Australia once their contracts expired.

One particularly distinctive feature of Queensland’s response was the introduction of its own state-based dictation test, parallel to the better-known Commonwealth version. This local test was aimed less at excluding entry and more at preventing non-white workers from acquiring land or owning plantations themselves. Unlike the federal test, Queensland’s version was not entirely a sham: it could be appealed, and in some cases, was used to regulate rather than simply exclude. Nevertheless, it served its purpose — discouraging non-white residents from moving beyond the role of hired labourers.

QLD version of the DT

Immigrant labour - Chinese, Japanses, Italians

Ownership and discrimination