Dr Henry Reese, as a Harry Gentle Visiting Fellow, investigated a public scandal that rocked Queensland at the close of the nineteenth century. In 1895, the sea captain Joseph Vos and six other men of the labour recruiting ship William Manson faced trial in the Supreme Court. They were charged with kidnapping several people from Malaita, in the Solomon Islands, and forcibly bringing them to Queensland to work as indentured labourers in the sugar industry. The William Manson trial was the last major labour recruiting scandal of the nineteenth century. While ‘irregularities’ and ‘outrages’ (colonial euphemisms: violence, deception, exploitation) were ever-present in the labour trade, a public reckoning of this scale had not been seen in Queensland for a decade.
https://harrygentle.griffith.edu.au/projects/
