Broome, also known as Rubibi by the Yawuru people, is a coastal pearling and tourist town in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, 2,046 km (1,271 mi) north of Perth. The town recorded a population of 14,660 in the 2021 census. It is the largest town in the Kimberley region.
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👉 Broome, Western Australia in the context of Blackbirding
Blackbirding was the trade in indentured labourers from the Pacific in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It is often described as a form of slavery, despite the Slave Trade Act 1807 and the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 abolishing slavery throughout the British Empire, including Australia. The trade frequently relied on coercion, deception, and kidnapping to transport tens of thousands of indigenous people from islands in the Pacific Ocean to Australia and other European colonies, often to work on plantations in conditions similar to the Atlantic slave trade. These blackbirded people, known as Kanakas or South Sea Islanders, were taken from places such as Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Niue, Easter Island, the Gilbert Islands, Tuvalu and the islands of the Bismarck Archipelago, amongst others.
The owners, captains, and crews of the ships involved in the acquisition of these labourers were termed blackbirders. Blackbirding ships began operations in the Pacific from the 1840s and continued, in some cases, into the 1930s. The demand for this kind of cheap labour principally came from sugar cane, cotton, and coffee plantations in New South Wales, Queensland, Samoa, New Caledonia, Fiji, Tahiti, and Hawaii. In Auckland, a small group of South Sea Islanders worked in flax mills. Examples of blackbirding outside the South Pacific include the early days of the pearling industry in Western Australia at Nickol Bay and Broome, where Aboriginal Australians were blackbirded from the surrounding areas. In Peru, Mexico, Guatemala, and elsewhere in the Americas, blackbirders sought workers for their haciendas and to mine the guano deposits on the Chincha Islands.
In this Dossier
- ⭐ Core Definition: Broome, Western Australia
- 👉 Broome, Western Australia in the context of Blackbirding
- Broome, Western Australia in the context of Pearling in Western Australia
- Broome, Western Australia in the context of South-West Land Division
- Broome, Western Australia in the context of Whirlwind
- Broome, Western Australia in the context of Cocos Malays
Broome, Western Australia in the context of Pearling in Western Australia
Pearling in Western Australia includes the harvesting and farming of both pearls and pearl shells (for mother of pearl) along the north-western coast of Western Australia.
The practice of collecting pearl shells existed well before British settlement. After settlement, Aboriginal people were used as slave labour in the emerging commercial industry, a practice known as blackbirding. After 1886, with the rise of 'hard hat' diving, Asian divers from coastal and island regions became most common, leading to the pearling industry being the sole exception to the White Australia Policy of 1901.
Broome, Western Australia in the context of South-West Land Division
The South West Land Division is one of five Land Divisions of Western Australia, a part of the cadastral divisions of Western Australia. It includes the cities of Perth, Albany, Bunbury, Busselton, Geraldton, and Mandurah. It also includes the regions of South West, Great Southern, Peel, most of the Wheatbelt, and the coastal areas of the Mid West.
The population of the division is about 2.2 million people, with 1.8 million living in the state capital, Perth, and a further 400,000 people living in the surrounding regional cities and rural areas. This leaves approx. 200,000 people living in the remainder of the state, most of them residing in the regional centres of Broome, Esperance, Kalgoorlie–Boulder, Karratha, and Port Hedland. Therefore, around 92% of Western Australia's population lives in this division.
Broome, Western Australia in the context of Whirlwind
A whirlwind is a phenomenon in which a vortex of wind (a vertically oriented rotating column of air) forms due to instabilities and turbulence created by heating and flow (current) gradients. Whirlwinds can vary in size and last from a couple minutes to a couple hours.
Broome, Western Australia in the context of Cocos Malays
The Cocos Malays are the majority ethnic group of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands territory of Australia. Today, many of the Cocos Malays can be found in the eastern coast of Sabah, Malaysia, because of diaspora originating from the 1950s during the British colonial period. There are also established diaspora communities in Western Australia, particularly in Broome, Geraldton, Kalgoorlie, Katanning, Perth and Port Hedland.
Despite that they all have assimilated into the ethnic Malay culture, they are named in reference to the Malay race, originating from different places of the Malay Archipelago such as Bali, Bima, Celebes, Madura, Sumbawa, Timor, Sumatra, Pasir-Kutai, Malacca, Penang, Batavia, and Cirebon, as well as South Africa and New Guinea.