Australia

Basque emigration to Australia is the story of a trade: cutting sugar cane in the north of Queensland. It was begun around 1910 by some sailors who left their ship in Sydney on learning that cutters were wanted in the north. It was fed by the families who stood surety for hundreds of their fellow Basques, and it reached its peak between 1958 and 1960, with organised recruitment in the north of Spain. Whoever arrived under contract paid for the passage with two or three years of work wherever the Australian Government decided, and many ended up far from the cane, on the country’s great public works. By the mid-sixties the colony numbered around two thousand people. The mechanisation of the harvest and the Basque economic recovery closed the cycle, and out of that emigration came the three clubs that Australia would come to have.

Before that there was almost nothing. William A. Douglass finds little record of Basques in the Australia of the nineteenth century: the census of the time barely registers a handful of Spaniards and Frenchmen with Basque surnames, and there is no record of any settled colony.⁴

The way was opened by the sugar industry. In 1907 the attempts to replace the Pacific Islander workers, known as “kanakas”, with Italians stalled, and the recruiters widened their search to southern Europe. They hired 104 Catalans to cut cane in the Ingham and Innisfail districts, and with them the Spanish presence in North Queensland began.⁴ Some Basque Australians believe that the first Basques in the country were sailors from Lekeitio who, around 1910, heard in Sydney (perhaps from the Catalans) that cutters were needed in the north, left the ship and headed up there.⁴³

Between 1910 and 1930 some cutters saved enough to buy cane land of their own. The Badiola and Mendiolea families, of Ingham, stood surety for several hundred Basques, who paid back the bond once they were settled in Australia. Most of them, however, went back to Europe with their savings.⁴ Then came fifteen years of standstill: the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War all but cut off Basque emigration to Australia.⁴³

The great wave came between 1958 and 1960, with the recruitment in the north of Spain for the cane fields of Queensland (see the cane cutters).⁴ Whoever arrived under contract had exchanged the assisted passage for two or three years of work wherever the Australian Government decided. His first bed was usually in a migrant hostel, and the largest was Bonegilla, in north-east Victoria, opened in 1947 and in use until 1971, which Totoricagüena compares with Ellis Island in the United States.²

Many ended up far from the cane, on the great public works: the Snowy Mountains hydroelectric scheme, in New South Wales, begun in 1949; the mines and the construction of Mount Isa; the steelworks of Wollongong and Port Kembla. To work on them you had to join the union.²

By the mid-sixties the Basque colony in Australia numbered around 2,000 people, spread across North Queensland, the Atherton Tableland (where several grew tobacco), the rural districts of New South Wales and Victoria, and the cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth.⁴³ That was when the cycle closed. The mechanisation of the harvest left the cutting gangs without work, and at the same time the Basque economy was recovering: those coming back now outnumbered those leaving.⁴