‘Still Children of the Dragon’? A review of three Chinese Australian heritage museums in Victoria

Abstract

The Museum of Chinese Australian History reopened on 29th August 2010 with newly refurbished exhibitions displaying Chinese Australian history and contemporary Chinese Australian identities. This article reviews the new exhibitions in comparison with the Gum San Heritage Centre at Ararat and the Golden Dragon Museum at Bendigo and specifically examines the way each museum represents being Chinese and being Australian. This will be shown by interrogating the historical representations, text and methods of display.

Notes

¹Elaine Heumann Gurian, Civilizing the Museum The Collected Writings of Elaine Heumann Gurian (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 52.

²Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p.30.

³John Fitzgerald, Big White Lie Chinese Australians in White Australia (Sydney: University of NSW Press, 2007), 216.

⁴Fitzgerald 2007, 218.

⁵Han Alan, ‘The Gum San Museum: Inclusion by Virtue of Otherness’ The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum, 2:3 (2009), 7–19.

⁶John Fitzgerald, ‘Another Country: John Fitzgerald Examines Our Chinese Heritage Museums’, Meanjin 60:4 (2001), 62.

⁷Bhikuh Parekh, The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain. The Parekh Report (London: Profile Books, 2000), 163.

⁸James Clifford, Routes Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 258.

⁹(Han Alan 2009), 11.