Making the ‘last Chinaman’: Photography and Chinese as a ‘vanishing’ people in Australia's rural local histories

Abstract

From the 1900s residents of declining former gold-rush towns in south-eastern Australia took snapshot photographs of frail, elderly Chinese men. A small but distinct group of these photographs were subsequently termed the ‘last Chinaman’. This article argues that photographs of the ‘last Chinaman’ have been mobilised in local histories, to describe Chinese involvement in the gold rushes as part of the history of rural towns, contributing to the construction of Chinese Australians in national history as a ‘vanishing’ people. The implications of this are that Chinese who were ‘everyday’ Australians have been overlooked in our histories and the public circulation of photographs which illustrate Chinese as Australians have also been constrained and overshadowed by those of the ‘last Chinaman’.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Amanda Rasmussen, Richard Broome and the two anonymous referees for their comments.

Notes

¹ Ovens and Murray Advertiser, 24 May 1924, 2.

²‘Chinese file’, Burke Museum, Beechworth.

³Thanks to Kate Bagnall and Leonard Hill for information about this family.

⁴Rebe Taylor, Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island (Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2002), 140. Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880–1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997), 49.

⁵Ann Curthoys, ‘“Men of All National, except Chinamen”: Europeans and Chinese on the Goldfields of New South Wales’, in Gold: Forgotten Histories and Lost Objects of Australia, ed. Iain McCalman, Alexander Cook, and Andrew Reeves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 103.

⁶Keir Reeves, ‘A Hidden History: The Chinese on the Mount Alexander Diggings, Central Victoria, 1851–1901’ (PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 2006), 192.

⁷This focus on absence has also been observed by Amanda Rasmussen, ‘Chinese in Nation and Community Bendigo 1870s–1920s’ (PhD, La Trobe University, 2009), 5.

⁸Fitzgerald, Big White Lie, 4.

⁹See for example: Cathie May, Topsawyers: The Chinese in Cairns 1870 to 1920, vol. 6, Studies in Northern Queensland History (Townsville: Department of History, James Cook University, 1984), 1. Kathryn Cronin, Colonial Casualties: Chinese in Early Victoria (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1982), 1. Janis Wilton, ‘Revealing the Chinese Past of Northern New South Wales’, in Histories of the Chinese in Australasia and the South Pacific: Proceedings of an International Public Conference Held at the Museum of Chinese Australian History, 8–10 October 1993, ed. Paul Macgregor (Melbourne: Museum of Chinese Australian History, 1993), 249.

¹⁰See for example: Jan Ryan, Ancestors: Chinese in Colonial Western Australia (Fremantle, Western Australia: Freemantle Arts Press, 1995), 11. Shirley Fitzgerald, Red Tape, Gold Scissors: The Story of Sydney's Chinese (Sydney: State Library of New South Wales Press, 1996), 6. Shirley Fitzgerald, ‘The Chinese in Sydney with Particular Focus on the 1930s’, in The Overseas Chinese in Australasia: History, Settlement and Interactions: Proceedings from the Symposium Held in Taipei, 6–7 Jan 2001, ed. H. Chan, A. Curthoys, and N. Chiang, Monograph 3 (Taipei: IGAS, National Taiwan University & CSCSD, Australian National University, 2001), 140.

¹²Janis Wilton, ‘The Chinese History of Heritage of Regional New South Wales’, in The Overseas Chinese in Australasia: History, Settlement and Interactions: Proceedings from the Symposium Held in Taipei, 6–7 January 2001, ed. Henry Chan, Ann Curthoys, and Nora Chiang (Taipei: IGAS, National Taiwan University and CSCSD, Australian National University, 2001), 97.

¹¹Janis Wilton, ‘The Chinese History of Heritage of Regional New South Wales’, in The Overseas Chinese in Australasia: History, Settlement and Interactions: Proceedings from the Symposium Held in Taipei, 6–7 January 2001, ed. Henry Chan, Ann Curthoys, and Nora Chiang (Taipei: IGAS, National Taiwan University and CSCSD, Australian National University, 2001), 95.

¹³For further discussion of this see Sophie Couchman, ‘In and out of Focus: Chinese and Photography in Australia, 1870s–1940s’ (PhD, La Trobe University, 2009).

¹⁴On the use of photographs as illustrations in photographic histories see: Anne-Marie Willis, Picturing Australia: A History of Photography (Sydney: Angus and Robertson Publishers, 1988), 260–3.

¹⁵On the reluctance of historians to understand visual material in more sophisticated ways see: Damousi, Joy. “In This Issue.” Australian Historical Studies 123 (2004): iv–v. On the problematic nature of photographic meaning and its theoretical underpinnings see: John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin, 1972). Susan Sontag, On Photography (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1979; reprint, 1984). Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1979). J. Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (London: MacMillan Education, 1988). Allan Sekula, Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973–1983 (Nova Scotia: The Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984). Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1991). Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums (Oxford: Berg, 2001).

¹⁶Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, ‘Introduction’, in Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, ed. Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart (London: Routledge, 2004).

¹⁷Tagg, The Burden of Representation, 2–5.

¹⁸Berger, Ways of Seeing, 8. Barthes, Image, Music, Text, 15, 27–8, 271–3.

¹⁹Sekula, Photography against the Grain, 10.

²⁰Sekula, Photography against the Grain, 3.

²¹Pierre Bourdieu and Luc Boltanski, Photography: A Middle Brow Art (Cambridge: Polity Press, c1990), 5. Edwards, Raw Histories, 21. Helen Ennis, ‘Mirror with a Memory’, in Mirror with a Memory: Photographic Portraiture in Australia (Canberra: National Portrait Gallery, 2000), 12–3, 17. Jane Lydon, ‘Regarding Coranderrk: Photography at Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, Victoria’ (PhD thesis, Australian National University, 2000), 8.

²²Sontag, On Photography, 132.

²³Analysis of ‘Last Chinaman’ images is based on the following sources: Mitchell Library, Small Pictures Collection, ML Pic 4470. State Library of Victoria, A.C. Dreier postcard collection, H23576, H23577. Harrietville Historical Society, ‘Ah Lok’. Burke Museum (Beechworth), ‘The last Chinese survivors of the Chinese mining community Beechworth’, viewed May 2006. Banfield, Lorna L., ‘Chinese and the gold digging days in old Ararat’, Ararat Advertiser, 17 February 1938, 5. Sun News Pictorial, 21 October 1922, 13. Linton and District Historical Society, A Pictorial History of Linton 1839–1989 (Linton: Linton and District Historical Society, 1989), 8. Owen F. Tomlin, Gold for the Finding: A Pictorial History of Gippsland's Jordan Goldfield (Melbourne: Hill of Content, 1979), 100. J. G. Rogers, Jericho on the Jordan: A Gippsland Goldfield History (Moe: J. G. Rogers, 1997), 114. Lionel Arthur Gilbert, New England from Old Photographs (Sydney: John Ferguson, 1980), 24. Ian Handley, The Land of the McCrossins: A History of Uralla ([Uralla]: I Handley, [197–?]), 7. Malcolm Drinkwater, Hill End Gold ([S. I]: M. Drinkwater, [c1982]), 14. Harry Hodge, The Hill End Story: A History of the Hill End-Tambaroora Goldfield Book 1 ([Newcastle?]: H. Hodge, 1964), 189.

²⁴Graeme Davison, The Use and Abuse of Australian History (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2003), 201. Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 211. Stuart Macintyre, A History for a Nation: Ernest Scott and the Making of Australian History (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994), 1–4.

²⁵Davison, The Use and Abuse of Australian History, 202.

²⁶Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, 1–3.

²⁷Davison, The Use and Abuse of Australian History, 203.

²⁸Davison, The Use and Abuse of Australian History, 203.

²⁹ Sun News Pictorial, 21 October 1922, 13.

³⁰In the context of Aboriginal history see: Bain Attwood, The Making of the Aborigines (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989), 117.

³¹Smith, Bernard. “Lindsay, Norman Alfred Williams (1879 – 1969)’, in Australian Dictionary of Biography, 106–15. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1986

³²Francis Robert Moulds, ‘Semmens, Edwin James (1886–1980)’, in Australian Dictionary of Biography (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002), 211–2. Catalogue entry for E.J. Semmens collection, University of Melbourne, http://db.lib.unimelb.edu.au/cgi-bin/library?form=Accessions-new-3.all&accessio_1=76&accessio_2=33 (accessed 5 June 2006). Personal communication, Wendy Ohlsen, Creswick and District Historical Society, 18 May 2004.

³³University of Melbourne Archives, E. J. Semmens collection, uncatalogued photographic prints.

³⁴State Library of New South Wales, Lindsay, Peter – Photographs mainly of the Lindsay family, 1870–1970, ML MSS 647/3.

³⁵Davison, The Use and Abuse of Australian History, 204.

³⁶David Goodman, Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994), ix, xxix.

³⁷Davison, The Use and Abuse of Australian History, 204.

³⁸Graeme Davison, The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1978), 241–57. Peter Quartermaine, ‘Johannes Lindt: Photographer of Australia and New Guinea’, in Representing Others: White Views of Indigenous People, ed. Mike Gidley (Exeter: University of Exeter Press for AmACAS, 1992), 94.

³⁹ The Ararat Advertiser, 17 February 1938, 5. Hodge, The Hill End Story, 188. On local history: Davison, Graeme. The Use and Abuse of Australian History. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2003, 203–206.

⁴⁰Hodge, The Hill End Story, 189.

⁴¹NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, Attorney General's Department of NSW, http://www.bdm.nsw.gov.au/familyHistory/searchHistoricalRecords.htm (accessed 18 May 2006).

⁴³Hodge, The Hill End Story, 192.

⁴²Hodge, The Hill End Story, 188, 191.

⁴⁴Tom Griffiths, Beechworth: An Australian Country Town and Its Past (Richmond: Greenhouse Publications, 1987), 36–8.

⁴⁵Tom Griffiths, Beechworth: An Australian Country Town and Its Past (Richmond: Greenhouse Publications, 1987), 36–38.

⁴⁶Rogers, Jericho on the Jordan, 114–5.

⁴⁷On the global dimensions of racial competition see Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the Question of Racial Equality (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008).

⁴⁸I adopt the term ‘vanishing’ people from John Fitzgerald, Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales, 2007), 212. Attwood, The Making of the Aborigines, 105, 00, 18. McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880–1939. Richard Broome, Aboriginal Victorians: A History since 1800 (Melbourne: Allen & Unwin, 2005), 101–10.

⁴⁹Broome, Aboriginal Victorians, 101.

⁵⁰C.Y. Choi, Chinese Migration and Settlement in Australia (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1975), 20.

⁵¹Australian Bureau of Statistics, 3105.0.65.001 Australian Historical Population Statistics, 2008, http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/[email protected]/DetailsPage/3105.0.65.0012008?OpenDocument (accessed 7 December 2009).

⁵²Choi, Chinese Migration and Settlement in Australia, 28.

⁵³On the marginalisation of urban history see: John Fitzgerald, ‘Another Country’, Meanjin 60, no. 4 (2001): 70–1.

⁵⁴On ‘firsts’ in local history see: Davison, The Use and Abuse of Australian History, 200.

⁵⁵Richard Anthony John Neville, Faces of Australia: Image, Reality and the Portrait (Sydney: State Library of New South Wales Press, 1992), 50–1. Russel Ward, The Australian Legend (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1977 (first published 1958)), 180–206. Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1980, ed. Heather Radi, The Australian Experience (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1981), chapter 6.