Caribbean and West Indian Australians are people of

Caribbean The Caribbean ( , ; ; ; ) is a region in the middle of the Americas centered around the Caribbean Sea in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, mostly overlapping with the West Indies. Bordered by North America to the north, Central America ...

ancestry who are

citizens Citizenship is a membership and allegiance to a sovereign state. Though citizenship is often conflated with nationality in today's English-speaking world, international law does not usually use the term ''citizenship'' to refer to nationality; ...

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising mainland Australia, the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and list of islands of Australia, numerous smaller isl ...

Demographics

According to the 2006 Australian census, 4,852 Australians were born in the Caribbean Total count of persons: 19,855,288. while 4,242 claimed the Caribbean ancestry, either alone or with another ancestry. Total responses: 25,451,383 for total count of persons: 19,855,288.

History

Connections between the

West Indies The West Indies is an island subregion of the Americas, surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, which comprises 13 independent island country, island countries and 19 dependent territory, dependencies in thr ...

and Australia began in the early days of European settlement. Australia’s first newspaper publisher, and founder of the

Sydney Sydney is the capital city of the States and territories of Australia, state of New South Wales and the List of cities in Australia by population, most populous city in Australia. Located on Australia's east coast, the metropolis surrounds Syd ...

Gazette in 1803 was George Howe, a white convict from

St Kitts Saint Kitts, officially Saint Christopher, is an island in the West Indies. The west side of the island borders the Caribbean Sea, and the eastern coast faces the Atlantic Ocean. Saint Kitts and the neighbouring island of Nevis constitute one ...

.J. V. Byrnes,
Howe, George (1769–1821)
,

Australian Dictionary of Biography The ''Australian Dictionary of Biography'' (ADB or AuDB) is a national co-operative enterprise founded and maintained by the Australian National University (ANU) to produce authoritative biographical articles on eminent people in Australia's ...

, Volume 1, MUP, 1966, pp 557–559. Retrieved 13 March 2025 Eighteen convicts from the West Indies arrived on the convict ship ''the Moffatt'' in 1836 including William Buchanan and Richard Holt. Buchanan and James Smith, also from Jamaica, were two of 34 convicts from the West Indies known to have stayed at the Hyde Park Barracks.

Billy Blue William Blue (c. 1767 – 7 May 1834) was an Australian convict who, after completing his sentence, became a boatman providing one of the first services to take people across Sydney Harbour. He was also made a water bailiff and watched boat ...

who had served in served in the

British Army The British Army is the principal Army, land warfare force of the United Kingdom. the British Army comprises 73,847 regular full-time personnel, 4,127 Brigade of Gurkhas, Gurkhas, 25,742 Army Reserve (United Kingdom), volunteer reserve perso ...

before being convicted of stealing sugar and transported to Australia was also thought to be a Jamaican. At the height of the

British Empire The British Empire comprised the dominions, Crown colony, colonies, protectorates, League of Nations mandate, mandates, and other Dependent territory, territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom and its predecessor states. It bega ...

, officers and administrators moved freely between far-flung colonies. Many came to Australia from the West Indies, while others, like

Edward Eyre Edward John Eyre (5 August 181530 November 1901) was an English land explorer of the Australian continent, colonial administrator, Lieutenant-Governor of New Zealand's New Munster Province, New Munster province, and Governor of Jamaica. Early ...

,Geoffrey Dutton (1966),
Eyre, Edward John (1815–1901)
, ''

'', Volume 1 (Australian National University), accessed 13 March 2025. left Australia to take up appointments there. Another emigrant was barrister Robert Burnside. He was born and raised in the Bahamas, the son of the country's Solicitor-General. After qualifying in England, he set up practice in Perth, eventually becoming a Supreme Court judge. Black convicts, servants and sailors from the West Indies also arrived in Australia and many of them later integrated into Aboriginal communities. These relationships, and links forged through the sport of boxing, contributed to later alliances between the

Black Consciousness Movement The Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) was a grassroots anti-apartheid activist movement that emerged in South Africa in the mid-1960s out of the political vacuum created by the jailing and banning of the African National Congress and Pan Af ...

s in Australia, the USA and the West Indies, including a branch of

Marcus Garvey Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr. (17 August 188710 June 1940) was a Jamaican political activist. He was the founder and first President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL) (commonly known a ...

’s UNIA-ACL in Sydney in the 1920s. Caribbean people were also among the many nationalities flocking to the Victorian goldfields after 1851. One of the thirteen miners killed at the

Eureka Stockade The Eureka Rebellion was a series of events involving gold miners who revolted against the British administration of the colony of Victoria, Australia, during the Victorian gold rush. It culminated in the Battle of the Eureka Stockade, wh ...

was a

Jamaica Jamaica is an island country in the Caribbean Sea and the West Indies. At , it is the third-largest island—after Cuba and Hispaniola—of the Greater Antilles and the Caribbean. Jamaica lies about south of Cuba, west of Hispaniola (the is ...

n, James Campbell. Arthur Windsor, editor of the Age newspaper from 1872 to 1900 was born in

Barbados Barbados, officially the Republic of Barbados, is an island country in the Atlantic Ocean. It is part of the Lesser Antilles of the West Indies and the easternmost island of the Caribbean region. It lies on the boundary of the South American ...

.''Caribbean, Select Births and Baptisms, 1590-1928'' Especially since the abandonment of the White Australia policy, West Indians have arrived from many countries of the Commonwealth. From honky-tonk pianist Winifred Atwell to environmental engineer Ken Potter and writer Ralph de Boissière, they have brought wide-ranging skills, experience and cultural richness to Australia.

External links

Further Listening

* ABC Radio National. �
Caribbean Convicts in Australia
” *The History Listen*, 30 November 2021.

Demographics

History

External links

Further reading

Further Listening

References

See also