Poison, polygamy and postcolonial politics: The first Chinese Australian novel

Abstract

This article examines the first novel written by a Chinese diaspora writer in Australia, The Poison of Polygamy (多妻毒), published in instalments in the Chinese-language newspaper Chinese Times (Melbourne) from 1909 to 1910. Set during the Gold Rush of the 1850s, the novel is nevertheless of its own time, reflecting the pressing concerns of a community in turmoil as the political upheavals of China in the final years of the Qing dynasty competed for attention with the disastrous effects of the White Australia policy. Taking the form of a picaresque and cautionary tale warning against traditional practices such as polygamy, opium smoking and foot-binding, the novel seeks to educate members of the lower classes of the Chinese community while embracing the republican cause against the Manchu rulers. The article argues that the progressive political agenda of the text (democratic, feminist) stands in sharp contrast to the view of the Chinese which prevailed in the white Australian community at the time.

Keywords:

• Chinese Australian fiction
• Chinese republican movement
• cautionary tale
• opium smoking
• polygamy
• White Australia policy

Notes

1. The most comprehensive source of information about Australian literature, including Asian Australian literature, is AustLit (www.austlit.edu.au). AustLit is a subscription database which includes bibliographical and biographical information about texts and authors, as well as on scholarly work on Australian literature. For information on how to gain access to information contained in the database, contact [email protected].

2. The authors of this article are participants in the project “New Transnationalisms: Australia’s Multilingual Literary Heritage”, funded by the Australian Research Council to investigate Australian writing in Spanish, Arabic, Vietnamese and Chinese languages.

3. The very first Chinese-language paper was in fact The Chinese Advertiser, published in Ballarat from 1856 to 1858. See Bagnall (2015) and Rolls (1996, 434). As it did not carry any literary content it is not considered here.

4. The Chinese title of this newspaper changed several times, while the English title remained the same throughout its years of publication.

5. For a more detailed analysis of the literary content of the Tung Wah Times, see Huang and Ommundsen (2015). We have summarized some of the historical overview and the content of the Tung Wah Times from this article as this is the background against which the literary content of the Chinese News must be read.

6. All translations are by Huang Zhong.