This history will have a number of themes but central is the idea that China and people who identify as Chinese have always had a role in and impact on “Australia”, even before its invasion by British/Europeans. Moreover, this role was not merely one of outsiders impacting on a perceived “European” or “white” Australia – though this is often how the history is written – but was and is integral to an understanding of Australia’s history. This is an understanding that is rapidly evolving, producing changes in historical perception that raises another major theme that will recur here and why this history is sub-title a “reflective history”.
At base “reflective history” is the perhaps the obvious – that history is often used and abused to meet the needs of the present. Here specifically it meant that both the return of China as a global power and the reoccurrence in significant numbers of Australians identifying as “Chinese Australian” is bringing about a major reinterpretation of Chinese Australian history and therefore of Australian history. Where and how this is happening will be identified and discussed throughout this chronological narrative.
In general, the approach to history taken is that: “The truth may be out there but the lies are inside your head”.[1] In other words, it is all about perception with stereotypes and assumptions, misinterpretations and outright lies all playing a supporting role. A demonstration of this approach being how China’s weakness has influenced perceptions in the past just as China’s strength now is influencing perceptions today. Overlaying this foundation are the so-called “hidden histories” and “new” discoveries – often a publisher’s sales pitch or media click bait. These are founded on popular history where despite things being well known in academic and/or Chinese-Australian community circles, popular history operates in another dimension and is resistant to certain facts until it is good and ready.
Entitled “Chinese Australian” history above all this is “Australian” history. But it is Australian history told through the perspective of a community of Australians that have not always been accepted as Australians and this too is very much part of the Australian story. As are the regional and global connections that a telling of Chinese Australian history necessitates. For while all Australian history – including its Indigenous origins stretching back 60,000 years – has global connections, it is through its Chinese elements that this interconnection can be most clearly seen. Stretching back before the beginning of the European invasion of 1788 and continuing through to contemporary times, this is an interconnection with the world that Australia has and still struggles with. In promoting awareness of this interconnection Chinese Australian history has much to offer.
With the exception of John Fitzgerald’s, Big White Lie, most histories of the Chinese in Australia are exactly that, histories in Australia. Yet even without the contemporary heightening of tensions between Australia and China and its consequences for Chinese Australian’s it is obvious that histories that do not include China are only be telling part of the story. This work is a history of Chinese in Australia therefore that includes China, China weak and China strong, China cultural and political, China reality and China perceptions.
Chinese Australian history is often told in terms of anti-Chinese agitations – the Buckland and Lambing Flat riots – and discriminatory legislation enacted – Poll Taxes and Dictation Tests. While undeniable, this history also includes Opera, merchants, a fishing industry, temple building, medicine, and repeals of discriminatory legislation, as well as intermarriage, businesses, Christianity, sending bones home, and the founding of intergenerational chain migration links that continue to this day. This reflective history will seek not only to revive memories of this history but also to discover why they were forgotten and why they are being remember (or not) today.
All the features mentioned above were of course well known to Australian’s – of Chinese and European heritage – in the 19th century. The fact that much was forgotten and did not make it into the general histories written in the 20th century can be laid at the feet of the White Australia policy. Not the specifics of the discriminatory legislation that reduced the actual size of the Chinese Australian population. Rather it was the psychology of “whiteness” that made it increasingly difficult to even see non-white people – indigenous, Chinese or other – in the history. As a result, many could (can) only see Chinese Australians in the history as stereotypes – gold miners, victims or exotic players on the margins of history.[2]
Sporadic efforts to reverse such stereotypes have done little or nothing to challenge them. This is because the efforts of popular history have been motivated by “white guilt”, resulting in a continued focus on racism and victimisation of Chinese in Australia. While these are often well-intentioned efforts to acknowledge past wrongs, not only is much left out but European Australian’s – “whites” – are continually left in central place in such histories. At the same time academics and historians of the community who have done much to recover the history and go beyond the stereotypes have been limited to “Chinese Australian history” in parallel to “real” Australian history.
This last point is essential as Chinese people and China itself have been intimately involved in Australia’s history, and in increasingly large numbers throughout the 19th century on all levels – personal and family – business and economics – political and international. Negativity and hostility there undoubtedly was, along with so much more that is gradually being re-discovered and re-integrated into the history. Thus Wrongly but Highly Civilised is not a history of Chinese Australia in the sense of a separate history of a minority people that only touches incidentally on the broader Australian history. Rather it is an Australian history told from a specific perspective in the same way as a political or military history is also Australian history.
Yet the first step in discussing Chinese Australian history is the need to unpack the very idea of “Chinese”. Thus it is fundamental to understanding Chinese Australia that in the period from the beginning of the gold rush of the 1850s until the mid-20th century nearly all the people involved originated from a handful of counties – 8 to 10 – in the Pearl River Delta of the single province of Guangdong. The implications of this for the history are multiple. Primarily is that while usually referred to as “Cantonese” for most of this period this is almost as misleading a term as “Chinese”. Many spoke non-Cantonese languages such as Taishanese and more importantly identified themselves on the basis of their dialects and villages rather than as members of a nation that did not yet exist.
Such considerations are important for understanding how people organised themselves and their purposes in coming to the Australian colonies at all, either to search for gold or subsequently. The people from the Pearl River Delta counties were overwhelmingly men of working age – from 15 to 30 predominantly – and their intentions revolved around providing income to families – parents and later wives and children – in their villages of origin. This leads directly to three issues that help explain both the history and the interpretation of that history, namely, New Gold Mountains, Taiping Rebellions and Sojourners vs. Settlers. All three will be discussed as they arise but here it is sufficient to say that failure to appreciate motives and the perspectives of those involved had led to multiple misinterpretations being embedded in the history.
[1] Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
[2] Perhaps the most extreme example of this whitewashing is an encyclopedia of Australia published in the 1920s in which under Chinese is the simple entry – See Immigration Restriction.