Rewriting the History of Chinese Families in Nineteenth-Century Australia

Abstract

The nineteenth-century Chinese population in Australia was made up mostly of men, drawing many commentators to the conclusion these men faced an absence of family life, resulting in prostitution, gambling, opium use and other so-called vices. Recent research has, however, expanded and complicated our knowledge of Chinese families in New South Wales and Victoria, particularly concerning the extent to which Chinese men and white Australian women formed intimate relationships. This article traces the origins of the misconceptions about Chinese families in nineteenth-century Australia, and considers how new directions in scholarship over the past decade are providing methods for enlarging our knowledge. It argues that instead of being oddities or exceptions, Chinese-European families were integral to the story of Australia's early Chinese communities.

Notes

¹Reports of court cases involving Chinese living at the Bark Huts appear in the Sydney press from the mid-1850s. See, for example, Sydney Morning Herald (hereafter SMH), 8 February 1856, 11 November 1858, 21 April 1860 and 24 January 1863. Their presence was also noted in the parliamentary debate on the Chinese Immigration Bill in July 1858. See SMH, 29 July 1858.

² Courier (Brisbane), 7 June 1861.

³ SMH, 27 May 1861; Empire (Sydney), 30 May 1861; Sydney Mail, 1 June 1861; Goulburn Herald, 1 June 1861; Maitland Mercury, 4 June 1861; Courier (Brisbane), 7 June 1861.

⁴ SMH, 4 September 1867.

⁵ Empire (Sydney), 6 June 1861.

⁶ Empire (Sydney), 6 June 1861.

⁷References in this article to ‘white colonists’ and ‘white commentators’ should be taken to refer to men, unless otherwise stated. For discussion of gendered responses to the Chinese, see Kate Bagnall, ‘Across the Threshold: White Women and Chinese Hawkers in the White Colonial Imaginary’, Hecate 28, no. 2 (2002): 9–32.

⁸For further discussion of the arguments raised in this article see Kate Bagnall, ‘Golden Shadows on a White Land: An Exploration of the Lives of White Women Who Partnered Chinese Men and Their Children in Southern Australia, 1855–1915’ (PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 2006).

⁹Shirley Fitzgerald, Red Tape, Gold Scissors: The Story of Sydney's Chinese (Sydney: State Library of New South Wales Press, 1996), 17–22. On Chinese indentured labourers, see Maxine Darnell, ‘Master and Servant, Squatter and Shepherd: The Regulation of Indentured Chinese Labourers, New South Wales, 1847–1853’, in The Overseas Chinese in Australasia: History, Settlement and Interactions, ed. Henry Chan et al. (Taipei and Canberra: Interdisciplinary Group for Australian Studies, National Taiwan University and Centre for the Study of the Chinese Southern Diaspora, Australian National University, 2001).

¹⁰Charles H. Wickens, Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia, No. 18 – 1925 (Melbourne: Government Printer, 1925), 952–53.

¹¹On the overseas Chinese ‘bachelor society’ see Jennifer Ting, ‘Bachelor Society: Deviant Heterosexuality and Asian American Historiography’, in Privileging Positions: The Sites of Asian American Studies, eds. Gary Okihiro, Marilyn Alquizola, Dorothy Fujita Rony and K. Scott Wong (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1995) and Madeline Hsu, ‘Unwrapping Orientalist Constraints: Restoring Homosocial Narrativity to Chinese American History’, Amerasia Journal 29, no. 2 (2003): 229–53.

¹²See, for example, Bessie Ng Kumlin Ali, Chinese in Fiji (Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, 2002); Adam McKeown, ‘Transnational Chinese Families and Chinese Exclusion, 1875–1943’, Journal of American Ethnic History 18 (Winter 1999): 73–93; George Anthony Peffer, If They Don't Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration Before Exclusion (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Laura Hall, ‘The Arrival and Settlement of the Chinese in 19th Century British Guiana’, in The Chinese Diaspora: Selected Essays Volume II, eds. Wang Ling-chi and Wang Gungwu (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1998), 86–111; Manying Ip, Home Away From Home: Life Stories of Chinese Women in New Zealand (Auckland: New Women's Press, 1990); Clarence E. Glick, Sojourners and Settlers: Chinese Migrants in Hawaii (Honolulu: Hawaii Chinese History Center and University Press of Hawaii, 1980).

¹³‘Report from the Select Committee of the Legislative Council on the Chinese Immigration Bill, 1858’, Journal of the New South Wales Legislative Council, vol. III (1858).

¹⁴Rev. J. W. Young, ‘Report on the Condition of the Chinese Population in Victoria (1868)’ in The Chinese in Victoria: Official Reports and Documents, ed. Ian F. McLaren (Ascot Vale, Victoria: Red Rooster Press, 1985), 31–57.

¹⁵Census of New South Wales 1891 and 1901. The national census returns after Federation gave the numbers of married Chinese men with their wives either in China or Australia. In 1911, 36.4 per cent of Chinese-born men in New South Wales, and 49.8 per cent in Victoria, were married, about the same proportion as earlier estimates. See C. F. Yong, The New Gold Mountain: The Chinese in Australia 1901–1921 (Adelaide: Raphael Arts Pty Ltd, 1977), 264.

¹⁶The term ‘married bachelor’ was used by Paul C. P. Siu in his classic study of Chinese laundry workers in Chicago in the 1930s. See Paul C. P. Siu, The Chinese Laundryman: A Study of Social Isolation, ed. John Kuo Wei Tchen (New York: New York University Press, 1987).

¹⁸Those men who described themselves as married but whose wives were not resident in the colony were placed in the ‘never married’ category. The figure for ‘never married’ men in 1901 includes 73 who did not state whether they were married or not.

¹⁷On early colonial attitudes regarding Chinese morality see, for example, Ann Curthoys, ‘Race and Ethnicity: A Study of the Response of British Colonists to Aborigines, Chinese and Non-British Europeans in New South Wales, 1856–1881’ (PhD thesis, Macquarie University, 1973); Alan Dwight, ‘The Chinese in New South Wales Lawcourts 1848–1854’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 73, no. 2 (October 1987): 75–93; J. M. Graham, ‘“A Danger That No Language Could Magnify”: The Newcastle Morning Herald and the Chinese Question’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 69, no. 4 (March 1984): 239–50.

¹⁹On the ideology of domesticity during the gold rush period, see David Goodman, Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994), 149–88.

²⁰See Russel Ward, The Australian Legend (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1958), 88–90 and Clive Moore, ‘Colonial Manhood and Masculinities’, Journal of Australian Studies 56 (March 1998): 35–50.

²¹See, for example, Robert Chao Romero, ‘“El Destierro de los Chinos”: Popular Perspectives of Chinese-Mexican Interracial Marriage in the Early Twentieth Century’, Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies 32, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 113–144; Margaret E. Burns, ‘Of Tongues and Temporalities: Notes Towards an Understanding of the Recent Chinese Past in French Polynesia’, The Journal of Pacific History 35, no. 2 (September 2000): 181–93; James Ng, Windows on a Chinese Past: How the Cantonese Goldseekers and Their Heirs Settled in New Zealand, four volumes (Dunedin: Otago Heritage Books, 1993–1999); Ben Featuna'i Liua'ana, ‘Dragons in Little Paradise: Chinese (Mis)fortunes in Samoa, 1900–1950’, The Journal of Pacific History 32, no. 1 (June 1997): 29–48; Verena Martinez-Alier, Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989); Romanzo Adams, Interracial Marriage in Hawaii: A Study of the Mutually Conditioned Processes of Acculturation and Amalgamation (Montclair: Patterson Smith, 1969); and Ta Chen, Emigrant Communities in South China, English version ed. Bruno Laskar (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1940).

²² SMH, 3 April 1852.

²³ SMH, 3 April 1852.

²⁴See SMH, 31 March 1854; Argus (Melbourne), 26 January 1859; Empire (Sydney), 23 July 1861; ‘Chinese Immigration Act (Despatch)’, Journal of the New South Wales Legislative Council, vol. IX, part I (1862): 2.

²⁵Young, ‘Report on the Condition of the Chinese Population in Victoria’, 50; Rev. John F. Horsley, ‘The Chinese in Victoria’, The Melbourne Review 4 (January to October 1879): 422.

²⁶Edmund Fosbery, ‘Information Respecting Chinese Resident in the Colony’, New South Wales Legislative Assembly Votes & Proceedings, 1878; see also SMH, 20 November 1878. A later report similarly found about even numbers of married and non-married Chinese-European couples in New South Wales. See Martin Brennan and Quong Tart, ‘Reports Upon Chinese Camps’, New South Wales Legislative Assembly Votes & Proceedings, 1883–84.

²⁷See Bagnall, ‘Golden Shadows’, Section 2 and Appendix 1; Pauline Rule, ‘The Chinese Camps in Colonial Victoria: Their Role as Contact Zones’, in After the Rush: Regulation, Participation, and Chinese Communities in Australia 1860–1940, eds. Sophie Couchman, John Fitzgerald and Paul Macgregor (Kingsbury, Victoria: Otherland Literary Journal, 2004).

²⁸On U.S. anti-miscegenation legislation relating to Chinese see Henry Yu, ‘Mixing Bodies and Cultures: The Meaning of America's Fascination with Sex Between “Orientals” and “Whites”’, in Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History, ed. Martha Hodes (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 444–45; Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

²⁹Andrew Markus, Fear and Hatred: Purifying Australia and California 1850–1901 (Sydney: Hale & Ironmonger, 1979), 258–59.

³⁰For a discussion of this legislation, the Act to Prevent the Employment of Female Labour in Certain Capacities, enacted in Saskatchewan in 1912, see Constance Backhouse, ‘The White Women's Labor Law: Anti-Chinese Racism in Early Twentieth-Century Canada’, Law and History Review 14, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 315–68.

³¹See, for example, Empire (Sydney), 26 May 1858; Bell's Life in Sydney, 29 May and 28 August 1858; Border Post (Albury), 9 April 1859.

³²On the writings of William Lane, the Bulletin and other similar publications see, for example, Markus, Fear and Hatred; David Walker, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850–1939 (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1999); Neville Meaney, ‘“The Yellow Peril”, Invasion Scare Novels and Australian Political Culture’, in The 1890s: Australian Literature and Literary Culture, ed. Ken Stewart (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1996); Ouyang Yu, ‘The Chinese in the Bulletin Eyes’, Southerly 55, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 131–43.

³³On the personal backgrounds and motivations of Chinese-European couples, see Bagnall, ‘Golden Shadows’, Section 2.

³⁴ Empire (Sydney), 30 May 1861.

³⁵Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, 12.

³⁶On marriage, the family and colonialism see Penny Russell, For Richer, For Poorer: Early Colonial Marriages (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994), 2.

³⁷Kathryn Cronin, Colonial Casualties: Chinese in Early Victoria (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1982), 128.

³⁸C. F. Yong, The New Gold Mountain: The Chinese in Australia 1901–1921 (Richmond: Raphael Arts Pty Ltd, 1977), 171; Cronin, Colonial Casualties, 126; Vivien Suit-Cheng Burrage, ‘The Chinese Community, Sydney, 1870–1901’ (Masters thesis, Macquarie University, 1974), 26; Weston Bate, Lucky City: The First Generation at Ballarat, 1851–1901 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1978), 150.

³⁹See McKeown, ‘Transnational Chinese Families’ and Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago and Hawaii 1900–1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

⁴⁰See, for example, Bon-wai Chou, ‘The Sojourning Attitude and the Economic Decline of Chinese Society in Victoria, 1860s–1930s’, in Histories of the Chinese in Australasia and the South Pacific, ed. Paul Macgregor (Melbourne: Museum of Chinese Australian History, 1995), 60–4. Chou argued that those Chinese men who took white wives were remarkably broadminded, a trait they owed to their ‘exceptional cosmopolitan backgrounds’.

⁴¹Yong, The New Gold Mountain, 174; Jan Ryan, Ancestors: Chinese in Colonial Australia (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1995), 36.

⁴²Jean Gittins, The Diggers from China: The Story of Chinese on the Goldfields (Melbourne: Quartet Books, 1981), 118.

⁴³See, for example, Curthoys, ‘Race and Ethnicity’; Cronin, Colonial Casualties; Markus, Fear and Hatred.

⁴⁴Eric Rolls, Citizens: Flowers and the Wide Sea: Continuing the Epic Story of China's Centuries-old Relationship with Australia (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1996), 185. See also Eric Rolls, Sojourners: The Epic Story of China's Centuries-old Relationship with Australia: Flowers and the Wide Sea (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1992).

⁴⁵H. D. Min-hsi Chan, ‘A Decade of Achievement and Future Directions in Research on the History of the Chinese in Australia’, in Histories of the Chinese in Australasia and the South Pacific, ed. Paul Macgregor (Melbourne: Museum of Chinese Australian History, 1995), 422.

⁴⁶H. D. Min-hsi Chan, ‘Becoming Australasian But Remaining Chinese: The Future of the Down Under Chinese Past’, in The Overseas Chinese in Australasia: History, Settlement and Interactions, ed. Henry Chan et al. (Taipei and Canberra: Interdisciplinary Group for Australian Studies, National Taiwan University and Centre for the Study of the Chinese Southern Diaspora, Australian National University, 2001), 9.

⁴⁷See H. D. Min-hsi Chan, ‘Qiaoxiang and the Diversity of Chinese Settlement in Australia and New Zealand’, in Chinese Transnational Networks, ed. Chee-Beng Tan (New York: Routledge, 2006).

⁴⁸Australia has not seen the publication of Chinese family histories and memoirs in the same way the United States has. For example, however, see Barbara Moore, Eurasian Roots: A Story of the Life and Times of George Ah Kin and Mary Higgins and their Descendents (Canberra: self-published, 2007); Dawn Wong, ‘Four Generations of Wong Sat Women’, in From Great Grandmothers to Great Granddaughters: The Stories of Six Chinese Australian Women, ed. Nikki Loong (Katoomba: Echo Point Press, 2006); Sophie Couchman, ed., Secrets, Silences and Sources: Five Chinese-Australian Family Histories (Melbourne: Asian Studies Program of the La Trobe University, 2005); and the work of Monica Tankey, including ‘English on the outside and Chinese on the inside’, Australia-China Review 11 (February 1983).

⁴⁹Few publications have yet to result but see, for example, Sophie Couchman, ‘Oh I Would Like To See Maggie Moore Again: Selected Women of Melbourne's Chinatown’ in After the Rush: Regulation, Participation, and Chinese Communities in Australia 1860–1940, eds. Sophie Couchman, John Fitzgerald and Paul Macgregor (Kingsbury, Victoria: Otherland Literary Journal, 2004).

⁵⁰Grace Karskens, ‘Family matters’, Phanfare: Magazine of the Professional Historians Association of NSW Inc. 150 (November 1998): 3.

⁵¹See, for example, Barry McGowan, ‘From Fraternities to Families: The Evolution of Chinese Life in the Braidwood District of New South Wales, 1850s–1890s’, Chinese Southern Diaspora Studies 2 (2008): 4–33; Gary Osmond and Marie-Louise McDermott, ‘Mixing Race: The Kong Sing Brothers and Australian Sport’, Australian Historical Studies 39, no. 3 (2008): 338–55; Ken Oldis, The Chinawoman (Melbourne: Arcadia, 2008); Paul Jones, ‘Bureaucratised Identities: Family Reunion in the First Years of the White Australia Policy’, in Historicising Whiteness: Transnational Perspectives on the Construction of an Identity, eds. Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey and Katherine Ellinghaus (Melbourne: RMIT Publishing in association with the School of Historical Studies, University of Melbourne, 2007), 98–105; Charlotte Jordan Greene, “‘Fantastic Dreams’: William Liu, and the Origins and Influence of Protest Against the White Australia Policy in the 20^th Century” (PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 2005); Dinah Hales, ‘Lost Histories: Chinese-European Families of Central Western New South Wales, 1850–80’, Journal of Australian Colonial History 6 (2004): 93–112; Heather Holst, ‘Equal Before the Law? The Chinese in the Nineteenth-century Castlemaine Police Courts’, Journal of Australian Colonial History 6 (2004): 113–36; Pauline Rule, ‘Challenging Conventions: Irish-Chinese Marriages in Colonial Victoria’, Irish-Australian Studies: Papers Delivered at the Ninth Irish-Australian Conference, Galway, April 1997 (Sydney: Crossing Press, 2000); Jane Lydon, Many Inventions: The Chinese in the Rocks 1890–1930 (Melbourne: Monash Publications in History, 1999).

⁵²See, for example, Penny Edwards and Shen Yuanfang, eds., Lost in the Whitewash: Aboriginal-Asian Encounters in Australia, 1901–2001 (Canberra: Humanities Research Centre, 2003); Guy Ramsay, ‘Cherbourg's Chinatown: Creating an Identity of Place on an Australian Aboriginal Settlement’, Journal of Historical Geography 29, no. 1 (2003), 109–22; Christine Choo, ‘Chinese-Indigenous Australian Connections in Regional Western Australia’, in A Changing People: Diverse Contributions to the State of Western Australia, eds. Raelene Wilding and Farida Tilbury (Perth: Office of Multicultural Interests, 2004); Regina Ganter, Mixed Relations: Narratives of Asian/Aboriginal Contact in North Australia (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2005).

⁵³Henry Reynolds, North of Capricorn: The Untold Story of Australia's North (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2003), vii.

⁵⁴On the overseas Chinese family see, for example, McKeown, ‘Transnational Chinese families’; Michael Szonyi, ‘Mothers, Sons and Lovers: Fidelity and Frugality in the Overseas Chinese Divided Family before 1949’, Journal of Chinese Overseas 1, no. 1 (May 2005): 43–64; Chan Kwok Bun, ‘A Family Affair: Migration, Dispersal, and the Emergent Identity of the Chinese Cosmopolitan’, Diaspora 6, no. 2 (1997): 195–213.

⁵⁵For studies with a transnational approach see, for example, Madeline Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882–1943 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change; John Fitzgerald, ‘Transnational Networks and National Identities in the Australian Commonwealth: The Chinese-Australasian Kuomintang 1923–1937’, Australian Historical Studies 37, no. 127 (April 2006), 95–116; Keir Reeves, ‘Tracking the Dragon Down Under: Chinese Cultural Connections in Gold Rush Australia and Aotearoa, New Zealand’, Graduate Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies 3, no. 1 (2005), 49–66.

⁵⁶See Bagnall, ‘Golden Shadows’, Section 5; Michael Williams, ‘Destination Qiaoxiang: Pearl River Delta Villages and Pacific Ports, 1849–1949’ (PhD thesis, University of Hong Kong, 2002), 166–69.

⁵⁷See NSW birth registrations for Edward (3703/1862), Frederick (3987/1864), John (4122/1866), William (4327/1868), Mary (4881/1869) and Thomas (3177/1872) Davis; and NSW death registrations for Frederick (2399/1864), Edward (2075/1865), William (2925/1875) and Eliza (2232/1877) Davis.

⁵⁸ SMH, 24 January 1863.

⁵⁹The birth registration for Eliza Davis’ son Thomas in 1871 lists two other sons and two daughters living, as well as three deceased sons. NSW birth certificate for Thomas Davis (1872/003177).

⁶⁰ Queanbeyan Age, 28 April 1875.

⁶¹NSW death certificate for Eliza Davis (1877/002232).