Robert Towns was born at Longhorsley in Northumberland, England, on 10 November 1794, and went to sea as a boy. By 1832 he was sailing into Sydney as the master of his own ship, and in 1843 he settled there for good, founding the trading house of Robert Towns & Co. He had a gift for spotting profit at the edges of empire. His vessels gathered sandalwood from the islands of the New Hebrides, carried tea out of China during the Opium War, and chased whales across the western Pacific long after the industry's peak had passed. By 1857 his firm had cleared profits of nearly a quarter of a million pounds, and he sat on the board - later as president - of the Bank of New South Wales. From the outside, he was a pillar of the colony. The question of who did the work that built his fortune is where his story darkens.

Towns, like many colonial employers, struggled to find workers willing to labour for what he was prepared to pay. He tried importing labourers from India and China; one ship, the Orwell, arrived in 1846 carrying men and women recruited in Calcutta who had been forced to work the pumps of the leaking vessel day and night, underfed and underclothed - one died soon after landing. When British officials blocked further recruitment in Asia, Towns turned to the islands of Melanesia. He had noticed that the South Sea Islanders who crewed his sandalwood ships worked hard and could be paid little. It was a short, cold step from observing their usefulness to deciding to bring them to Australia in numbers.

The American Civil War had choked off the world's cotton supply, and Queensland wanted to grow its own. In 1863 Towns bought land on the Logan River south of Brisbane, named it Townsvale, and set out to plant cotton. To work it, he sent the ship Don Juan to the islands under recruiter Henry Ross Lewin - a man whose name became a byword for the brutality of the trade. The Don Juan returned to Brisbane in August 1863 with 73 South Sea Islanders aboard; one of them died on arrival, worn out by the voyage. Towns wanted adolescent boys, and though he denied it, kidnapping was reported in the gathering of them. Over the next two years he brought around 400 more Melanesians to Townsvale. This was the beginning of "blackbirding" in Queensland - the coercion, deception, and outright abduction of Pacific Islanders for colonial labour.

Between 1863 and 1904, roughly 63,000 Islander men, women, and children were brought to work Queensland's plantations and ships. Behind that figure are individual lives: people taken from Vanuatu, the Solomons, and the Loyalty Islands, often lured aboard with trinkets or seized by force, set to cut cane and pick cotton far from home. Many were paid in goods rather than coin - one of Towns' agents claimed they were "savages who did not know the use of money," a justification for cheating them even after the law required cash wages. Some never returned. Their descendants, the Australian South Sea Islander community, still carry this history, and it was on their behalf that Towns' statue was marked in red. Towns himself died in Sydney in 1873 after a series of strokes. His grave-marker was later moved to Castle Hill, looking down over the city that bears his name - and over the people whose story it can no longer be told without.