User:Sir Langan/sandbox

I was writing this in my sandbox but I think I'll write it here because I'm not sure how those things work and I want some other editors in on this. History of Chinese in Australia Page

There needs to be a page about the broader history of Chinese in Australia. At the moment there is a very NSW bias for things that are currently on Wikipedia. The Chronology section on the Chinese Australian page is the main reason for this. This is funny because a hell of a lot happened with the Chinese in Victoria, Queensland, Tasmania...everywhere really. The bias for Sydney is understandable given that that was what the editors at the time knew and/or were interested in. I'm going to have a crack at rectifying this. But I think it all deserves it's own separate page.

I'd love to spitball this with someone else interested in this topic. ((Help me)) find people like this. My knowledge of Wikipedia isn't good enough to know where and how to look for users who might be interested. I won't copy, paste and then edit what's on the Chinese Australian because I always get muddled up when I do things like that. Instead I'll go through what I know from scratch that way I'll be less likely to miss things.

The following is off the top of my head. I'll put in some sources and do some necessary research at a later date. My sources for all this knowledge come from a bunch of books, research at the Golden Dragon Museum and from that great Harvest of Endurance scroll thingy at the National Museum of Australia, I really like that thing.

History of Chinese in Australia

A unique chapter in Australian history is that of Chinese peoples. See Chinese Australian for a definition of the subject. Some historians have theorized that Northern Indigenous Australians may even have had dealings with Chinese traders or come across Chinese goods long before Australia was officially discovered by Captain Cook. However the first has the distinction of providing the first official link between China and Australia with XXXSHIPXX AND XXSHIPXX (I'll need to look up which ships, don't remember off the top of my head) having their next stops in Canton. After this Chinese peoples are considered the oldest continuous immigrants to Australia outside of peoples from the British isles. The first recorded Chinese settler is Mak Sai Ying in 1818. Other contact between Chinese and Australia was sporadic and isolated up until the Australian gold rushes.

1788 - 1853
(This will be pretty much same as what's at the Chinese Australians page. Maybe a bit more detail about the conditions among the Chinese port cities after the Opium wars..)

Gold Rush
The 1850s and 1860s saw the largest pre-federation migration of Chinese to Australia, with numbers peaking around the 40,000 mark, these numbers were only reached again after the abolition of the White Australia policy in 1973. Gold was found at several places in Australia in 1851 but significant Chinese migration to join the diggers only began around 1853. There are various stories about how this came about, one being that a Chinese indentured labourer in Victoria described the gold rush to his family in Guangdong (can't think of the other reasons off the top of my head)

Most of the people who were lured to Australia by the gold rush were from the Guangdong province. This was much like the migration to America for the California gold rush. The conditions they were leaving included overpopulation, the declining power of the Qing Dynasty, the devastation of the Taiping Rebellion and the local Canton Hakka-Punti clan wars.

It was the Victorian gold rush that drew great numbers of Chinese to Australia. The voyage from Canton to Melbourne took about 3 months. It became a profitable exercise for the ship masters. The more Chinese passengers they could fit on board the more money they could make from the fare of passage. These fairs were often paid for through a system of debt to clan leaders and/or the shipmasters themselves. Some Chinese were able to pay there own way though. These were often the wealthier city born men who were coming to Australia to be merchants or work in an industry other than gold mining. The majority though were indentured peasant men. From 1853 to 1855 thousands of Chinese disembarked in Melbourne.

It is important to note that very, very few Chinese women came to Australia in this period. When the numbers of Chinese were at their height of around 40,000, there were only about 12 women. On the goldfields in Bendigo in 1861 there were 5346 Chinese men and only one woman.

The large influx of Chinese to the colony caused great alarm among the politicians and the miners. There was a lot of agitation amongst the miners at this time to begin with. The Red Ribbon Rebellion and the Eureka Stockade were in 1853 and 1854 respectively and the problems that ignited those events didn't disappear entirely they just relaxed a lot. Chinese men arrived to all this discontent and were seen as another problem. Some in parliament argued that it was a security risk to have so many Chinese in the colony who were '...fanatically loyal to a despotic foreign emperor who could order them to rise up at any moment..' This was a great example of the ignorance of the times as the origins of these men in Southern China were hotbeds of anti-Qing revolt and sentiment and judging by the work translating tombstones in Australian cemeteries by Dr Kok Hu Jin, some of the Chinese who came to Australia were followers of Hong Xiuquan and the Heavenly Kingdom. So that view and others were fallacious yet fuelled Victorian policy nonetheless.

In 1855 the Victorian parliament passed the Immigration Restriction Act. This forced Chinese arrivals in Victorian ports to pay a £10 head tax. It also mandated that there could only be a certain amount of Chinese travelers per tonnage of shipping. This put a dent in the shipmasters coffers. Cost of passage was already high. To avoid this Act, many ships travelled to South Australia. Between 1855 and 1857 thousands of Chinese landed in the Port of Adelaide and the port town of Robe, South Australia. In fact thanks to these migrants the town of Robe's population doubled overnight and it developed into the main port of call for Chinese arriving in Australia in this way. It was then a long overland route to the Victorian goldfields.

It is unknown exactly how many Chinese made it to the goldfields in this way but estimates range from the hundreds to the thousands (???). Some stories tell how the men would pay for local guides to take them to the goldfields. Sometimes, these guides would abandon the Chinese in the bush in order to return to Robe to get the money from another group and do the same thing. However it is known that as more and more Chinese undertook this journey it became easier and chances for these sort of hustles diminished. Along the way Chinese sojourners established wells and paths through the bush. Many such marks and developments can still be found along this route today.


 * that's all I feel like doing today. I'll punch in some more at a latter date.Sir Langan (talk) 13:33, 31 August 2013 (UTC)


 * time for some more. Where was I... Oh also. I've had a few articles on this subject published in a few magazines. Can I plagiarize myself for this? What are the rules on that? Those magazines probably wouldn't like it... help me help me ((help me)) I don't know how that works :/

Experience on the Goldfields
After finally arriving on the goldfields the hardships the Chinese faced continued. There was a lot of anti-Chinese sentiment amongst the European miners. In 1854 in Bendigo (look this up) there was a public meeting held amongst European miners to discuss the 'Chinese Problem'. This sentiment was widespread. In 1857 this caused the Buckland Riot and in 1860-1861 the Lambing Flat riots, which are both sad chapters of Australian history.

In answer to these problems the parliament of Victoria installed Chinese protectors (research this?). It was the task of these officers to organize the Chinese and liaise between them and local authorities. The Chinese didn't appreciate this because to fund it government charged all Chinese in Victoria £1 per annum. Called the Chinese Residents Tax, this fee was on top of their miner's licenses and other costs.

Around most of the goldfields the Chinese were organized into camps. Whether it was due to this protection program or the decisions of the Chinese themselves is unknown (at least by me off the top of my head). These camps were the forerunners to later Chinatowns in many places. In Bendigo there were at least seven different camps for the Chinese in the area. The organization of these camps was often done around clan, or dialect differences where this was applicable. While most of the men were from the Canton region, several different dialects of the Chinese language were present on the goldfields. (This section on camps isn't great. Maybe I shouldn't be trying to write while so tired.)

These camps were often their own little communities. There is evidence that the Chinese even used their own currency in these places. To the Europeans these were notorious and exotic places (Upload that great old engraving of the European impression of a Chinese camp). At the same time in China, opium addiction was rampant, some of the men brought this addiction with them to the goldfields. Two of the most common finds by modern fossickers in the area of Chinese camps are Chinese coins and Opium pipes.

When it came to searching for gold many of the Chinese. XXXXX detail and develop the experience of Chinese as miners, including the mining techniques used, the extra fee on puddling (or was it sluicing) etc XXXX

Amongst the defining moments on the goldfields, the Red Ribbon Rebellion, the Eureka Stockade, the Chinese in Bendigo had what could be described as a defining moment for the Chinese in Australia. In 1857 over 3,000 Chinese men met on the site of what is now Bendigo's Rosalind Park. This meeting was to contest and denounce the many discriminatory laws the Victorian government had enacted. A petition was sent to Melbourne with around 5,000 names on it. It has later been found that some of those names are actually fake names or joke names (it'd be nice to include the example of this).

(This section is getting pretty long and it's not really close to as comprehensive as it should be, might have to break it up more.)

Chinese Burials in Australia
As soon as the Chinese started arriving in Australia, they started dying here. Many wanted their remains to be sent back to China for spiritual and traditional reasons. Many families went to great lengths to see this achieved. Others however, were buried in Australia. Cemeteries around the country contain Chinese graves. To accommodate the Chinese funeral rituals that involve burning. Cemeteries around Australia allowed the construction of chimneys. These chimneys can still be found in cemeteries around the country today. Often the people in charge of the cemeteries were devout Christians, people who had an aversion to what they saw as pagan rituals. This meant that no such chimneys were built until the 1860s after several grass fires had burnt through Australian cemeteries. (Find the evidence of this)

The Chinese section of the White Hills cemetery in Bendigo is possibly the most important example remaining in Australia of Chinese graves in their original state. Many other cemeteries have been redeveloped and the heritage and cultural diversity of their Chinese sections has been lost.

White Australia Policy
One of the most defining factors in the history of Chinese in Australia is that of the White Australia Policy. At the lead up to federation, a unified immigration policy was one of the biggest selling points for pro-federation campaigners. This stemmed from the difficulties Victoria and NSW had had in passing and enforcing their immigration restrictions in regard to Chinese during the gold rush. A lot of the cartoons in newspapers of this era depict caricatured Chinese in a position of invading Australia if federation isn't reached (find and upload those appropriate images, a lot of this is in the Immigration Museum, Melbourne).

Legislation that began the rollout of this policy was the first act passed by the federal parliament. Australia's first prime minister had this to say in regards to Chinese, 'insert exact quote'.


 * That'll do for tonight, a lot more to come Sir Langan (talk) 12:38, 1 September 2013 (UTC)