Fully Indentured Labour – the Kanaka series

Queensland Centre for Photography, Brisbane, 2011

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Pat Hoffie’s The Kanaka Series is part of the series titled Fully Exploited Labour, one that has been ongoing for the past three decades, that examines changing ideas and values associated with our understanding of ‘work’. Kanakas were workers from various Pacific Islands employed in British colonies, in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The word Kanaka, which was once widely used in Australia, is now regarded in Australian English as an offensive term for a Pacific Islander. The manipulation to create the digital images poetically evokes the struggling workers, drawing on subtle details of the time that are shared by the plantations of the US’ ‘deep South’; overseers on horseback, work gangs, women with their young babies working in the furrows. Through collating images sourced from the archives of the John Oxley Library, Hoffie imbues the struggles of workers through creating a new objective history out of the archival documentary images.