South Sea Islander Wall

South Sea Islander Wall is a heritage-listed plantation at Grange Road, Mon Repos, Bundaberg Region, Queensland, Australia.

A relative latecomer to Bundaberg's sugar boom, Mon Repos Plantation was owned by Augustus Purling Barton.

He constructed a large home which he intended as a coastal retreat or town house, where his family could get away occasionally from station life.

They were not brought directly to Bundaberg until 1879, but prior to this planters obtained Islanders via Maryborough, whose sugar industry had been established in the late 1860s.

[1] Herbert Turner later wrote of the work of South Sea Islanders in clearing the land on Woongarra farms:[1][2] .

The large stones would either be drilled and blasted with dynamite to a convenient handling size, or snigged by horse team to the boundary line.

[1] The South Sea Islander Wall was listed on the Queensland Heritage Register on 1 October 2001 having satisfied the following criteria.

The wall is also important physical evidence of the manual nature of this contribution, for without the availability of indentured labour, Woongarra Scrub farmers could not have converted their lands to an activity as initially labour-intensive as sugar growing.

The boundary wall, which is over one and a half kilometres metres in length, survives as one of the longest, most intact examples of its type in the Bundaberg district, which around the turn-of-the-century was chequered with such structures.

The place is significant also for its potential to contribute to further study, and better understanding, of the role of South Sea Islanders in Queensland history.

Although diminished in length, what survives is substantially intact, and provides a good example of dry-rubble wall construction employed in the Bundaberg district in the late 19th century.

Importantly, it has a strong association for the present local South Sea Islander community with the experiences of their ancestors in Queensland.

[1] The place has a special association with the life or work of a particular person, group or organisation of importance in Queensland's history.

The place has an important association with the exploitation of the large South Sea Islands workforce employed in the Bundaberg district in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Horsedrawn cart at weighbridge in front of Qunaba Sugar Mill, 1909