1/16 In the UK four men who pulled down the statue of a slaver have been acquitted. Australians are renaming Ben Boyd Park because Boyd was a slaver. Here in NZ we have a number of place names that are forgotten relics of the Pacific slave trade.
2/16 2 Brissenden Stream flows into the Waitakere River a kilometre or so from Te Henga/Bethells Beach on Auckland's West Coast. The stream is named for businessman Edward Brissenden, who brought Melanesian slaves to Auckland in 1870.
3/16 In 1869 Brissenden leased 400 acres of land in Te Henga, & built a flax mill there. Flax was a booming business in NZ. But Brissenden needed workers. He paid a man named Young to take the recently built schooner to Melanesia to find them.
4/16 4 By 1870 thousands of Melanesians had been brought to Queensland to work on sugar plantations. Many were kidnapped. NZ boats & crews were involved in what became known as the blackbirding trade. Brissenden wanted to extent the trade to NZ.
5/16 In April 1870 the Lulu stopped at the islands of Aneityum, Tanna, & Efate. Locals refused to sign on as labourers. They had heard about the conditions on white plantations. When the Lulu reached Pentecost island it was attacked, & retreated from a rain of arrows.
6/16 The Lulu returned to Efate, where Young paid a bribe to local chiefs who promised to find labourers. 27 men eventually boarded the vessel. They had reputedly signed contracts promising to work for 3 years for ten pounds worth of trade goods.
7/16 The Lulu returned to Auckland in May. The Southern Cross & NZ Herald both published articles ridiculing the idea that the men on the Lulu had boarded voluntarily. Wellington's Evening Post called them slaves.
8/16 The papers that denounced the Lulu's mission did not do so out of sympathy for the Efateans on board. They feared that Melanesians would racially contaminate NZ, & also discourage British immigration by driving wages down.
9/16 The Efateans arrived in Waitakere to find Brissenden closing his mill, after the legality of his land lease was contested. For a time, they faced starvation, & tried to live off the land.
10/16 In September the NZ Herald published an article called 'Disgusting Results of Imported South Sea Labour', in which it called the Melanesians at Te Henga 'woolly barbarians' whose 'habits & manners' were an 'outrage'.
11/16 The Herald's article suggests the Efateans were struggling to survive at Te Henga. It claimed that the islanders were exhuming dead animals to eat, & that they had 'scoured the creeks & feasted on putrid carrion'.
12/16 The Efateans were eventually divided into two groups. Some were sent to work in a flax mill in the Hokianga; others went to Puriri, near Thames, to work in a mill Brissenden owned
13/16 n late September a fire so bright it could be seen in Auckland destroyed the mill at Puriri. The Efateans who had been toiling there were sent to work at the Kohimaramrara property of the businessman JS Macfarlane, who was a friend of Brissenden.
14/16 In June 1871 photographer Daniel Mundy visited the Hokianga mill where Efateans were working. They appear in several pictures he took there. Mundy's became some of the first images of Melanesians to be shown in Europe.
15/16 In December 1871 one of the Efateans working in the Hokianga died. In 1872 Auckland policeman John Thompson went to report on their situation, & relayed their complaint that they had been working in NZ 'too long'.
16/16 The surviving Efateans finally went home in June 1873. I'm not sure when the stream at Te Henga got the name Brissenden, but it flows through the property the businessman owned & joins the Waitakere River near where his mill stood.
PS: I said the Colston four were all men, but one of them, Rhian Graham, is a woman. Apologies.
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