Local Pasifika communities, in Far North Queensland, have joined together with PALM Scheme participants, and South Sea Islanders for Innisfail's annual Pasifika Celebration.
The Innisfail festival offers a chance for recent arrivals with the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility, or PALM, Scheme to meet up with other workers from their home islands.
Enjoy as a PacificInoke Dreudreu
Inoke Dreudreu has come from Fiji to work at an Innisfail banana plantation on a nine-month contract. SBS Our Pacific caught up with him while he was cutting open coconuts for thirsty festival goers. "We are happy to put away some job time and we come and enjoy as a Pacific," he said.
Dreudreu represents a new wave of Pacific Island contracted labour in Queensland. More than 60-thousand Pacific Islanders were brought to Australia during the latter part of the 1800s. Many worked in the Queensland sugarcane industry. That indentured labour system was known as Blackbirding. But a law passed in 1901 spelled an end to the scheme, setting in motion a series of forced deportations, with only a couple of thousand managing to stay.
Tanna is in my soulSonja Budd
Sonja Budd traces her South Sea heritage back to Tanna Island, in Vanuatu. A descendent of the Nauta and Corowa clans, she says her extended Australian family has undertaken development projects in Vanuatu. "Tanna is in my soul. Yeah, it's who we are. It's our identity," she said.
Love the different diversities herePastor Eterei Vaele
For many Pasifika peoples - identity is linked to Church. But Cairns based pastor Eterei Vaele, who has a Samoan and Niuean background, says she's noticed a drift in church attendance. "All you can really do is sort of pursue the presence of God in your own way and love the different diversities of the cultures here and their own perspectives of what religion should look like," she said.
Faith, heritage, and culture are all proving to be enduring identity markers for the evolving Pasifika communities of Far North Queensland.
