Kava: brewing up a storm

There’s a storm brewing over the Pacific as the region’s kava industry watches a gradually unfolding situation in the North Queensland city of Bundaberg.

Known more for its sugar cane and famous rum, the city has found itself at the centre of a storm which may be more than a tempest in a kava bowl.

Bundaberg’s Mayor, Jack Dempsey, recently apologised to the descendants of 62,000 South Sea Islanders taken from Vanuatu and other Pacific islands to provide labour for cane farms in the 1800s. Slave traders, known as ‘Blackbirders’, would . . .

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