- Islanders: Between 1863 and 1909 some 62,000 South Seas Islanders, mainly from what is now Vanuatu, were kidnapped/blackbirded to Queensland's sugar plantations. Mortality rates were high due to overcrowding, poor food, bad water and the absence of medical care.
- Convicts: The rural enclosure movement in Britain resulted in extreme rural and urban poverty causing many to turn to crime in order to survive. Government's response was to pass a number of acts (Riot, Vagrancy, etc.) with 220 offences that could result in either hanging or transportation to Australia.
- Aboriginees. Britain claimed Australia terra nullis, a land empty and belonging to no one, when it brought the first convict ship to Botany Bay in 1788, yet there were at least 200,000 Aboriginees in Queensland in 1880, so many, in fact, that mounted police were charge to "disperse" them, resulting in 40,000 killed. One white Queenslander commented “The sooner the weaker is wiped out the better".
Australia's first prime minister Edmund Barton said in 1901 Australia had only ever had “limited slavery” — in the Queensland sugar cane fields.He also outlined the shocking philosophy upon which he considered Australia based:
I do not think either that the doctrine of the equality of man was really ever intended to include racial equality. There is no racial equality. There is basic inequality. These races are, in comparison with white races – I think no one wants convincing of this fact – unequal and inferior. The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman. There is deep-set difference, and we see no prospect and no promise of its ever being effaced. Nothing in this world can put these two races upon an equality. Nothing we can do by cultivation, by refinement, or by anything else will make some races equal to others.
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