ABSTRACT
Florida, Utah, Montana, Louisiana, Gladstone, Victoria, Eve, Plato, Jacob. Names of esoteric places and famous people, you might say. That they are. But they are also the names of the first Indian children born in Fiji. They were born not in Rewa or Rakiraki or Raralevu, later to become important centres of IndoFijian settlement on Fiji’s main island of Viti Levu, but on the remote, tiny, island of Rabi, on planter John Hill’s estate, the largest employer of the first batch of Indian indentured labourers to arrive in Fiji. The new migrants were sent there because other European planters who were expected to recruit them were angry with the government for prohibiting the employment of Fijian labour and so they sullenly refused to have anything to do with the new comers. Sir Arthur Gordon, Fiji’s first governor and the chief architect of the indenture scheme – he had seen its operation in Mauritius and Trinidad where he had been governor before coming to Fiji – was disappointed, but not despairing. By the early 1880s, the prospects brightened considerably with the expansion of the sugar industry under the – recently arrived – Australian-owned Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR), which would go on to dominate not only the industry but also Fiji’s economy for nearly a century until its departure in 1973.
