Faith Bandler: Exposing CSR & Australia’s slave trade, aka 'Blackbirding' (part 2)

Referendum won, tick. Next up, Faith has a new fight on her hands: one that includes exposing the sugar giants who profited from her father’s abduction and unpaid labour. Watch out. 

But first, she must return to the island paradise where her father grew up: Ambrym. What she finds there will spur her on for decades of fighting. 

Alecia and Leigh get fired up as they retrace Faith’s staggering journey for justice and connect Australia’s 1800s slave history to farming practices still in operation today. 

SOURCES

Marilyn Lake, Faith Bandler, Gentle Activist, Allen and Unwin, 2002  Ryan Butta, Blackbirding, Black Inc, 2026 

Tracey Banivanuar Mar, Stabilising violence in colonial rule: Settlement and the indentured labour trade in Queensland in the 1870s, Liverpool University Press, 2017 

Tracey Banivanuar Mar, Decolonisation and the Pacific: Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empire, Cambridge University Press, 2016   Faith Bandler and Len Fox, The Time was ripe: a history of the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship (1956-69), 1983 

Faith Bandler oral history interview by Carolyn Craig, MLOH 307, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales 

Ryan, M. D. J. (2024). ‘A great many of them die’: Sugar, race and cheapness in colonial Queensland. Journal of Agrarian Change, 24(2), e12574.

• Hosted by Alecia Simmonds and Leigh Boucher
• Supervising Producer: Hannah Reich
• Producer: Hannah Jose
• Video producer: Christian Harimanow
• Executive Producers: Clare Rawlinson and Eric George
• Head of ABC Audio on Demand: Jessica Radburn
• Theme: Martin Peralta
• Artwork: Gabriel Virata-Alves