Pacific Islander labourers outside slab-hut dwellings, late 1800s

Description

This is a black-and-white photograph showing indentured Pacific Islanders and their families posing by their slab-hut homes, probably on a coastal Queensland sugar plantation. They are wearing Western-style clothes, with the women in long skirts and the men wearing jackets and trousers. The huts appear to have been constructed with care and pride, displaying items such as a formal stone-edged flower garden and a sapling fence along one wall. The huts front onto a dirt road edged with banana trees, while dense bush encroaches at the back of the clearing.

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