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A fictionalised autobiography depicting the years Walter Gill spent as a manager for the Colonial Sugar Refining Company in Fiji. This is one of very few first-hand accounts of the system of indentured labour.
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This extract describes the difficulties associated with managing the labour-force of a sugar plantation and mill. The hiring of sidars (Indian overseers), an attempted strike and a serious dispute over wages are all related, with Gill achieving a small victory over his workforce in each case. However, he is also misled into poisoning a worker and at the end of the extract he reveals his young age: "In the September of that year I was twenty-two".
