Blackbirded at Bundaberg
A Novel of the Queensland Cane Fields

About this book:

In the sweltering holds of the schooner *Helena*, Kalo presses his thumb to a contract he cannot read, sealing a bargain struck in hunger and steel axes. He is one of eighty souls stolen from the volcanic shores of Tanna, bound for the "green hell" of Queensland's cane fields—where the grass grows higher than three men, bites like fire, and hides a wage paid in broken bodies. From the cruel calculus of the recruiting decks to the whip-crack rhythm of the harvest, *Blackbirded at Bundaberg* lays bare the human cargo behind the sugar trade, following Kalo and his brother Sione through a world where the law is a fiction written by the powerful, and survival means outlasting the overseer's shadow, the fever wards, and the rising tide of a White Australia policy that wants them erased.

As a Royal Commission looms and the cane fires light the night, Kalo navigates a labyrinth of secret testimonies, desperate escapes into the scrub, and the fragile solidarities forged between men from warring islands. With unflinching historical precision and lyrical force, this novel reconstructs a stolen chapter of the Pacific: the "blackbirding" trade that built an empire on the backs of islanders who were neither slaves nor free. Here, the ledger entries breathe, the trade boxes rattle with false promises, and the Burnett River runs thick with mud, blood, and the stubborn refusal to be forgotten.

*Blackbirded at Bundaberg* is a searing epic of displacement and endurance—*The Known World* meets *The Poisonwood Bible* in the Australian tropics. For readers who demand history that refuses to look away, this is the story of what it costs to harvest sweetness from bitter soil, and the price of a ticket home that may never come.