Sojourning and Settling: Locating Chinese Australian History

Abstract

During the past thirty years, our understanding of the history of Chinese Australians has been remade. Today, as a growing community of researchers delves into the archives, new insights into the political, economic and cultural dimensions of Chinese Australian experiences are emerging. The tired, one-dimensional depictions of the sojourning celestial digger have, at last, given way to a more complex view. Historians of the Chinese in Australia have been both instigators and beneficiaries of a move towards a more inclusive, multicultural approach to Australian history within the academy and beyond. They have played an important role in challenging the often peripheral status of specialised ethnic and multicultural studies, or ‘ethno-histories’, within Australian historiography. At the same time, their efforts to better understand the history of the Chinese in Australia have provided a ‘valuable counterpart’ to ongoing research into Australia's relations with Asia.1

¹Hsu-Ming Teo, ‘Multiculturalism and the Problem of Multicultural Histories: An Overview of Ethnic Historiography’, in Cultural History in Australia, eds., Richard White and Hsu-Ming Teo (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2003), 146; For the peripheral status of ethno-history in Australia into the 1990s see Barry York, Ethno-Historical Studies in a Multicultural Australia (Canberra: Centre for Immigration & Multicultural Studies, 1996), 27.

Acknowledgements

Research for this article was supported under Australian Research Council's Linkage Projects funding scheme (project number LP0667552) and the Monash Fellowship Scheme. We thank Tseen Khoo, the organizers of Dragon Tails 2009, Richard Broome and Diane Kirkby—the journal editors and also the two anonymous referees for their constructive and incisive comments. Reeves would like to acknowledge the contribution of the students who took his 131-548 Heritage Workshop Chinese in Australia honours seminar at the University of Melbourne

Notes

¹Hsu-Ming Teo, ‘Multiculturalism and the Problem of Multicultural Histories: An Overview of Ethnic Historiography’, in Cultural History in Australia, eds., Richard White and Hsu-Ming Teo (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2003), 146; For the peripheral status of ethno-history in Australia into the 1990s see Barry York, Ethno-Historical Studies in a Multicultural Australia (Canberra: Centre for Immigration & Multicultural Studies, 1996), 27.

²Adam McKeown, ‘Introduction: The Continuing Reformulation of Chinese Australians’, Otherland 9 (2004), 9.

³Figures taken from I. McCalman, A. Cook and A. Reeves, ‘Introduction’, in Gold: Forgotten Histories and Lost Objects of Australia, eds., I. McCalman, A. Cook and A. Reeves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 19.

⁴C. M. H. Clark, A History of Australia, Vol. 4 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1968), 1–4; Tom Griffiths, Forests of Ash: An Environmental History (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1–15.

⁵Geoffrey Blainey, The Rush That Never Ended (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1963), 33.

⁶McCalman, Cook and Reeves, 19.

⁷Morag Loh, Sojourners and Settlers Chinese in Victoria 1848–1985 (Melbourne: Victorian Government China Advisory Committee, 1985), 5.

⁸G. B. Endacott, A Biographical Sketch-Book of Early Hong Kong, Echoes: Classics of Hong Kong Culture and History (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005). See also ‘The Hong Kong Story’, Hong Kong Museum of History.

⁹Philip A. Kuhn, Chinese Among Others: Emigration in Modern Times (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2008), 107.

¹⁰Kuhn, 107–112.

¹¹Philip A. Kuhn, ‘The Taiping Rebellion’, in The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 10, Part 1, ed. John K. Fairbank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 264–217; J. Spence, The Search for Modern China, 2^nd ed. (New York, 1999), 167–191.

¹²‘China. Correspondence Respecting Emigration from Canton’, Command Papers: Accounts and Papers [2714], (London 1860), 122–124.

¹⁷ The Argus, 9 March 1868. Clarke's article was reprinted as Marcus Clarke, ‘The Chinese Quarter’, in A Colonial City, High and Low Life: Selected Journalism of Marcus Clarke, ed. L. T. Hergenhan (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1972), 113–25. For a British perspective see The Graphic: An Illustrated Weekly Newspaper, 13 November 1880.

¹³Paul Jones and the National Archives of Australia, Chinese-Australian Journeys: Records on Travel, Migration and Settlement, 1860–1975 (Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 2005), 14.

¹⁴C. Y. Choi, Chinese Migration and Settlement in Australia (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1975), 18–21; Madeline Y. Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882–1943 (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2000), 19–20.

¹⁵G. A. Oddie, ‘The Chinese in Victoria 1870–1890’ (MA thesis, University of Melbourne, 1959), 184.

¹⁶In 1881, there were 1,057 Chinese in Melbourne and 1,321 in Sydney. A decade later, the Chinese population in both cities had doubled, to 2,143 persons in Melbourne and 3499 in Sydney. ‘When the Commonwealth of Australia came into being in 1901, Chinese communities in New South Wales and Victoria, with the undisputed centres in Sydney and Melbourne, were already well entrenched in a larger Australian community.’ See here C. F. Yong, The New Gold Mountain. The Chinese in Australia 1901–1921 (Adelaide: Raphael Arts, 1977), 4.

¹⁸William Westgarth, Half a Century of Australian Progress: A Personal Retrospect (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1889), 284–85.

¹⁹This interpretation underpins the studies of economics, immigration and population in the Australian volume of The Cambridge History of the British Empire. See for instance E.O.G. Shann, ‘Chapter XI: Economic and Political Development, 1860–1885’, in The Cambridge History of the British Empire. Vol. VII. Part I, eds., J. Holland Rose, A. P. Newton and E. A. Benians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 297–324.

²⁰I. Turner, ‘My Long March’, in Room for Manoeuvre: Writings on History, Politics, Ideas and Play (Melbourne: Drummond, 1982).

²¹Myra Willard, History of the White Australia Policy to 1920, 2^nd ed. (London: Frank Cass & Co Ltd, 1967), 18.

²²Brian Fitzpatrick, The British Empire in Australia: An Economic History, 1834–1939. (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1941), 271–72.

²³The classic works here are H. McQueen, A New Britannia: An Argument Concerning the Social Origins of Australian Radicalism and Nationalism (Melbourne: Penguin, 1970); C. Price, The Great White Walls Are Built: Restrictive Immigration to North America and Australasia (Canberra: Australian Institute of International Affairs in association with Australian National University Press, 1974); A. Markus, Fear & Hatred. Purifying Australia and California, 1850–1901 (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1979). The key collection of 1970s racial studies is A. Curthoys and A. Markus, eds., Who Are Our Enemies? Racism and the Working Class in Australia (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1978) and K. Cronin, Colonial Casualties: Chinese in Early Victoria (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1982).

²⁴Recent examples include L. Boucher, J. Carey and K. Ellinghaus, eds., Re-orienting Whiteness: Transnational Perspectives on the History of an Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmilllan, 2009); Jane Carey and Claire McClisky, eds., Creating White Australia (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009); Penelope Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities (Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2010).

²⁵The debate often focuses on the work of Keith Windschuttle. See here John Fitzgerald, Big White Lie (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2007), Chapter 1; David Walker, ‘Strange Reading: Keith Windschuttle on Race, Asia and White Australia’, Australian Historical Studies 37, no. 128 (2006), 108–22; Keith Windschuttle, The White Australia Policy (Paddington: Macleay Press, 2004).

²⁶B. Mountford and K. Reeves, ‘Reworking the Tailings: New Gold Histories and the Cultural Landscape’, in Creating White Australia, eds., Jane Carey and Claire McClisky (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009), 27.

²⁷E. H. Carr, What Is History? 2^nd ed. (London: Penguin, 1987), 30.

²⁸Ann Curthoys, ‘“Men of All Nations, Except Chinamen”: Europeans and Chinese on the Goldfields of New South Wales’, in McCalman, Cook and Reeves, 103–4.

²⁹P. Just, Australia, or Notes taken during a Residence in the Colonies from the Gold Diggings in 1851 till 1857. (Dundee: Durham and Thomson, 1859), 47. Just, a selection agent in Scotland for the Colonial Land and Selection Office, became a merchant in Melbourne.

³⁰ Sydney Morning Herald, 2 October 1852.

³¹ Sydney Morning Herald, 2 October 1852.

³²William Howitt, A Boy's Adventures in the Wilds of Australia (London, 1855), 237–9.

³³William Howitt, Land, Labour, and Gold, Vol. I, 2^nd ed. (London, 1858), 199–200.

³⁴See Markus, Fear & Hatred, 240–1.

³⁵Paul C. P. Siu, ‘The Sojourner’, The American Journal of Sociology 58, no. 1 (1952), 34.

³⁶ The Bendigo Advertiser, 10 October 1861.

³⁷See for example ‘Disgraceful Scene at a Chinese Funeral’, Ballarat Times, 14 August 1857.

³⁸‘John Chinaman in Australia’, Household Words, 17 April 1854.

³⁹Joseph Anderson Panton, Resident Commissioner at Sandhurst on 3 January 1855 in The Chinese in Victoria: Official Reports and Documents, ed. Ian McLaren (Melbourne: Red rooster Press, 1985), 11.

⁴⁰‘Minutes of Evidence: Commission Appointed to Enquire into the Conditions of the Goldfields of Victoria, 1855’, in Joseph Anderson Panton, Resident Commissioner at Sandhurst on 3 January 1855 in The Chinese in Victoria: Official Reports and Documents, ed. Ian McLaren (Melbourne: Red rooster Press, 1985), 12.

⁴¹‘Minutes of Evidence: Commission Appointed to Enquire into the Conditions of the Goldfields of Victoria, 1855’, in Joseph Anderson Panton, Resident Commissioner at Sandhurst on 3 January 1855 in The Chinese in Victoria: Official Reports and Documents, ed. Ian McLaren (Melbourne: Red rooster Press, 1985), 12, 12–14.

⁴²Richard Broome, Arriving (Melbourne: Fairfax Syme & Weldon Associates, 1984), 94.

⁴³For British Columbia and the United States, Vancouver and San Francisco provide interesting parallel overseas examples, see for example Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900–1936 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 4–11.

⁴⁴Tseen Khoo, and Jacqueline Lo, ‘Asia@Home: New Trajectories in Asian Australian Studies’, Journal of Australian Studies 32, no. 4 (2008), 425–432.

⁴⁵G. Karskens, Inside the Rocks: The Archaeology of a Neighbourhood (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1999); Alan Mayne, Hill End: An Historic Australian Goldfields Landscape (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003).

⁴⁶Barry McGowan, ‘The Chinese on the Braidwood Goldfields: Historical and Archaeological Opportunities’, Journal of Australian Colonial History 6 (2004), 35–58; Kevin Rains, ‘Intersections: The Historical Archaeology of the Overseas Chinese Social Landscape of Cooktown, 1873–1935’ (PhD thesis, University of Queensland, 2004).

⁴⁷Jane Lydon, ‘Many Inventions’: The Chinese in the Rocks, Sydney 1890–1930 (Clayton: Monash University, 1999).

⁴⁸Jane Lydon, ‘Many Inventions’: The Chinese in the Rocks, Sydney 1890–1930 (Clayton: Monash University, 1999)., 8.

⁴⁹Jane Lydon, ‘Many Inventions’: The Chinese in the Rocks, Sydney 1890–1930 (Clayton: Monash University, 1999)., 67–102.

⁵⁰Chris McConville, ‘Chinatown’, in The Outcasts of Melbourne: Essays in Social History, eds., Graeme Davison, David Dunstan and Chris McConville (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985), 58–68.

⁵¹Sophie Couchman, ‘Tong Yun Gai (Street of the Chinese). Investigating Patterns of Work and Social Life in Melbourne's Chinatown 1900–1920’, (MA thesis, Monash University, 2000); Sophie Couchman, ‘The Banana Trade: Its Importance to Melbourne's Chinese in Little Bourke Street, 1880s–1930s’ in Histories of the Chinese in Australasia and the South Pacific, Proceedings of an International Public Conference, ed. Peter MacGregor (Melbourne: Museum of Chinese Australian History, 1995), 75–87; Sophie Couchman, ‘Oh I would like to see Maggie Moore again: Selected women of Melbourne's Chinatown’, Otherland 9 (2004), 171–90.

⁵²The Museum of Chinese Australian History conducts a number of interpretive walking tours through Melbourne's Chinatown and has recently produced an audio-guide tour. ‘Chinatown Laneways: The Diseases of Malignant Air’ forms part of the ‘Melbourne Podtours Series,’ a co-production between the ABC and the Cultural Heritage Unit at the University of Melbourne.

⁵³See for example Valerie Lovejoy, ‘The Fortune Seekers of Dai Gum San: First Generation Chinese on the Bendigo Goldfield, 1854–1882’ (PhD thesis, La Trobe University, 2009); Kate Bagn all, ‘Golden Shadows on a White Land (PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 2006).

⁵⁴Heather Holst, ‘Equal Before the Law? The Chinese in Nineteenth Century Castlemaine Police Courts’, Journal of Australian Colonial History 6 (2004); Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2008), 32–44; Anna Kyi, ‘The Most Determined, Sustained Diggers Campaign’, Provenance 9 (2009).

⁵⁵R. Noonan, ‘Wild Cathay Boys, Chinese Bushrangers in Australian History and Literature’, Journal of Australian Studies 24 (2000), 128–45; Jan Ryan, Ancestors: Chinese in Colonial Australia. (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1995); Tseen Khoo, Banana Bending: Asian-Australian and Asian-Canadian Literatures. (Hong Kong and Montreal: Hong Kong and McGill-Queens University Presses, 2003).

⁵⁶W. Frost, ‘Migrants and Technological Transfer: Chinese Farming in Australia, 1850–1920’,Australian Economic History Review, 42 (2002), 113–31; Barry McGowan, ‘The Economics and Organisation of Chinese Mining in Colonial Australia’, Australian Economic History Review 45, no. 2, (2005), 119–38.

⁵⁷Fitzgerald, Big White Lie; Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line.

⁵⁸Fitzgerald, Big White Lie, 52.

⁵⁹For an excellent recent biographical study see Ian Welch, ‘Alien Son: The Life and Times of Cheok Hong Cheong, (Zhang Zhuoxiong) 1851–1928’, (PhD thesis, Australian National University, 2003). See also Shen Yuanfang Dragon Seed in the Antipodes: Chinese Australian Autobiographies (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001).

⁶⁰A more comprehensive biographical outline of Lee Heng Jacjung's life can be found in K. Reeves, “Echoes on a Cultural Landscape: Glimpses of Chinese Community Life in Castlemaine’, in Gold Tailings: Forgotten Histories of Family and Community on the Central Victorian Goldfields, eds., A. Mayne and C. Fahey (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010).

⁶¹G. T. Mansfield, ‘Lee Jacqung Notes Correspondence’, in Vaughan folder Castlemaine Library (Castlemaine: 1972). Lee Heng Jacjung is the most common spelling of his name and is used in the text accordingly.

⁶²Stephen Legge, ‘A Farm in the Life of. The Department of Crown Lands and Survey Selection Files’, Gippsland's Heritage Journal 3, no. 2 (1988), 28–31; Stephen Legge, ‘Lee Hing Jacjung’, Department of Crown Lands and Survey, Gippsland's Heritage Journal 3, no. 5 (1988), 32–5.

⁶³Fitzgerald, Big White Lie, 24.

⁶⁴Amanda Rasmussen's work promises much in this direction, see Amanda Rasmussen, ‘Networks and negotiations: Bendigo's Chinese and the Easter fair’, Journal of Australian Colonial History, 6 (2004), 79–92.

⁶⁵Cai Shoaqing, ‘From Mutual Aid to Public Interest: Chinese Secret Societies in Australia’, Otherland 9 (2004), 134–51.

⁶⁶Hu Jin Kok, Hung Men Handbook (Golden Dragon Museum: Bendigo, 2002); Cai Shoaqing, ‘From Mutual Aid to Public Interest’, Otherland 9 (2004), 134–7.

⁶⁷Annette Shun Wah, Banquet Ten Courses to Harmony (Sydney: Doubleday, 1999); William Yang and National Portrait Gallery. Australian Chinese (Canberra: National Portrait Gallery, 2001).