The ghosts of White Australia: Excavating the past(s) of Rusty's Market in tropical Cairns

Abstract

This paper tracks the history of Rusty's Market in Cairns, Queensland, a site once home to Chinatown from the late nineteenth century and now an important tourist site owned and managed by Gilligan's Backpacker Hotel and Resort. I depict the site as a palimpsest that has simultaneously borne witness to, but also helped to shape, the more general development of cosmopolitan Cairns. My intention in rendering Rusty's in this way is twofold. First, I show how the contemporary experience of cosmopolitan food shopping/eating is always and already layered over faded cosmopolitan pasts. The site has been home to Chinese, Japanese, and Southeast Asian vendors for well over a century; their presence in the current market is continuity as much as change. Second, I recover the older meanings of Chinatown that lay buried underneath the market floor. Retrieving these overwritten meanings reveals a culture of ‘forgetting’ in Cairns, of the role the Chinese played in early economic and cultural life but also of the White Australia policies that helped bring about Chinatown's ultimate demise. This paper intervenes in the forgetting by narrating/performing a layered interpretation of the site, offering a more contested sense of cosmopolitan belonging.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Jean Duruz and Peter Bishop for including me in the symposium, and to Susan Luckman for patiently shepherding my paper through the process. Thanks also to Steve Pile for alerting me to the presence of ghosts in the city, and to two anonymous reviewers for providing insightful commentary on this article.