Pacific

Blackbirding in the Pacific and the search for lost family

05:03 am on 11 June 2018

There are calls for a formal system to help the descendants of blackbirded Pacific Islanders find their relatives.

In the Pacific, more than a million people are thought to have been blackbirded, meaning tricked, coerced or forced into indentured labour or slavery, a practice that ended over a century ago.

Their descendants Australia, known as South Sea Islanders, have long sought assistance to trace their lineage.

But now the legacy of Blackbirding has led ni-Vanuatu to look for Aboriginal family in Australia.

Ben Robinson Drawbridge has more.

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About 60,000 Pacific Islanders were taken from their mainly Melanesian homelands to Australia in the 1800s to work on plantations. Photo: State Library of Queensland