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A Chinese Australian is an Australian of Chinese heritage. They are part of the ethnic Chinese diaspora (or Overseas Chinese). Chinese Australians are the fifth largest ethnic group in Australia, numbering 557,021 in 2001.

The early history of Chinese Australians had involved significant immigration from villages of the Pearl River Delta in Southern China. Less well known are the kind of society Chinese Australians came from, the families they left behind and what their intentions were in coming. Many Chinese were lured to Australia by the gold rush (since the mid-19th century, Australia was dubbed the New Gold Mountain after those in North America), sent money to their families in the villages, regularly visited their families and retired to the village after years working as a Sydney market gardener, Cairns shopkeeper or Melbourne cabinet maker. As with many overseas Chinese groups the world over, early Chinese immigrants to Australia established Chinatowns in several major cities, such as in Sydney (Chinatown, Sydney), Brisbane and in Melbourne.

The White Australia Policy of the early 20th Century severely curtailed the development of the Chinese communities in Australia. However, since the advent of Multiculturalism as a government policy in the 1970s, many Chinese from Hong Kong, Mainland China, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia (Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia and the Philippines) have immigrated to Australia.

Brief chronology

Earliest arrivals: 1788 to 1848

From the very beginning of the colony of New South Wales, links with China were established when several ships of the First Fleet, after dropping off their convict load, sailing for Canton to pick up goods for the return to England. The Bigge Report attributed the high level of tea drinking to 'the existence of an intercourse with China from the foundation of the Colony ...' That the ships carrying such cargo had Chinese crew members is likely and that some of the crew and possibly passengers embarked at the port of Sydney is probable. Certainly by 1818, Mak Sai Ying (also known as John Shying) had arrived and after a period of farming became, in 1829, the publican of The Lion in Parramatta. John Macarthur, a prominent pastoralist, employed three Chinese people on his properties in the 1820s. (Records may well have neglected others.)

Indentured labour: 1848 to 1853

After transportation of convicts ceased in the 1840s, the increasing demand for labour led to much larger numbers of Chinese men arriving as indentured labourers, to work as shepherds and irrigation experts for private landowners and the Australian Agricultural Company. These workers seemingly all came from Fujian via the port then known as Amoy (Xiamen) and some may have been brought involuntarily, as kidnapping (or the 'sale of pigs', as it was called), was common.

Between 1848 and 1853, over 3,000 Chinese workers on contracts arrived via the Port of Sydney for employment in the NSW countryside. Resistance to this cheap labour occurred as soon as it arrived, and, like such protests later in the century, was heavily mixed with racism. Little is known of the habits of such men or their relations with other NSW residents except for those that appear in the records of the courts and mental asylums. Some stayed for the term of their contracts and then left for home, but there is evidence that others spent the rest of their lives in NSW.

Gold rushes: 1853 to 1877

Attempts at importing contracted labour ended with the discovery of gold as those contracted at minimal wages could and did simply head for the diggings. Large numbers of Chinese men were working on the Victorian goldfields and on the smaller NSW fields in the mid 1850s. With major gold finds in NSW and the passing of more restrictive anti-Chinese legislation in Victoria, thousands of miners moved to NSW in 1859, and more miners continued to come from China. Fish curing, stores and dormitories in places such as The Rocks, soon developed to support the miners on the fields as well as those on their way to the diggings or back to China. The presence of numerous Chinese on the diggings led to anti-Chinese agitation, including violent clashes such as the Lambing Flat riots, the immediate result of which was the passing of an Act in 1861 designed to reduce the number of Chinese people entering the colony.

From miners to artisans: 1877 to 1901

The last gold rush in the eastern colonies of Australia occurred in 1873 in the far north of Queensland at the Palmer River, and by 1877 there were 20,000 Chinese there. After this gold rush ended people either returned to China or dispersed across the Australian colonies. This openness of the land borders and the rise in Chinese numbers after a period of decline again raised anti-Chinese fears in NSW, resulting in restrictive Acts in 1881 and 1888.

As gold rushing was always a risky endeavour, Chinese people began trying other ways of earning a living. People opened stores and became merchants and hawkers, while a fishing and fish curing industry operating north and south of Sydney supplied dried fish in the 1860s and 1870s to Chinese people throughout NSW and Victoria. By the 1890s Chinese people were represented in a wide variety of occupations including scrub cutters, interpreters, cooks, tobacco farmers, market gardeners, cabinet-makers, storekeepers and drapers, though by this time the fishing industry seemed to have disappeared. At the same time, Sydney’s proportion of the Chinese residents of NSW had steadily increased; one prominent Chinese Australian was Mei Quong Tart, who ran a popular tea house in the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney.

The era of White Australia policy: 1901 to 1936

By the Australian Federation, Chinese people in NSW were a significant group, running numerous stores, an import trade, societies and several Chinese language newspapers. They were also part of an international community involved in political events in China, and also made donations at times of natural disaster. The immigration restrictions of 1888 had not had a great impact on total numbers and a continued inflow of Chinese from Queensland mitigated even this. The passing of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, however, froze the Chinese communities of the late 19th century into a slow decline.

Continued discrimination, both legal and social, reduced the occupational range of Chinese people until market gardening, always a major occupation, became far and away the representative role of 'John Chinaman'. These men often had to go back to their villages in China in order to find wives, then relied on the minority of merchants to assist them to negotiate with the immigration bureaucracy. Only the rise of a new generation of Australian-born Chinese people, combined with new migrants that the merchants and others sponsored, both legally and illegally, prevented the Chinese population of NSW disappearing entirely.

War and refugees: 1936 to 1949

By the war period numbers had nevertheless fallen greatly and Australian-born people of Chinese background began to predominate over Chinese-born people for the first time. Numbers increased rapidly again when refugees began to enter Australia as the result of Japan’s war in China and the Pacific. Some were Chinese crew members who refused to return to Japanese-held areas and others were residents of the many Pacific islands evacuated in the face of the Japanese advance. Still others included those with Australian birth who were able to leave Hong Kong and the villages on the approach of the Japanese. At the same time the anti-Japanese War helped inspire the development of organisations focusing on China as a whole, rather than the region of a migrant's ancestry. A few of these organizations, such as the Chinese Youth League, survive to this day.

The era of assimilation: 1949 to 1973

In the post-war period, assimilation became the dominant policy and this led to some relaxation to migration and citizenship laws. At the same time "cafes" (as Chinese restaurants were known in Australia during the 1950s) began to replace market gardens as the major source of employment and avenue for bringing in new migrants, both legal and illegal. In addition, some students of Chinese background arrived under the Colombo Plan from various parts of Asia.

The era of multiculturalism: 1973 to the present

Soon after the effective end of the White Australia Policy in 1973, immigrants of Chinese ancestry began to increase significantly. The first wave of arrivals were ethnic Chinese refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia during the 1970s; this was followed by economic migrants from Hong Kong in the 1980s and 1990s, whose families often settle in Sydney while the breadwinner returned to Hong Kong to continue earning an income - a significant reversal of the traditional migration pattern. Likewise, immigrants from Taiwan often arrived via New Zealand, with the breadwinner returning to Taiwan or Mainland China to work.

After the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, the Australian Prime Minister of the day, Bob Hawke, allowed students from mainland China to settle in Australia permanently. Since then, immigrants from mainland China and Taiwan have arrived in increasing numbers.

New institutions were established for these arrivals and old ones such as the Chinese Chamber of Commerce revived; Chinese language newspapers were once again published. The equality of citizenship laws and family reunion immigration after 1972 meant that an imbalance of the sexes, once a dominant feature of the Chinese communities in Australia, was not an issue in these later migrations.

Chinese Australian communities today

Today there are significant Chinese communities in all major Australian cities, the largest concentration being in Sydney, followed closely by Melbourne. While Chinatowns continue to serve as the focal points of these communities, Chinese Australians have long settled in suburbs across the metropolitan areas, with their own shops, restaurants, churches, and Chinese language schools. A few areas have developed into satellite "Chinatowns"; for example, Sydney's "Little Shanghai" is in Ashfield, "Little Hong Kongs" in Chatswood and Hurstville, and "Little Saigon" in Cabramatta. In Melbourne suburbs with a large Chinese concentration are Doncaster, Box Hill, Murrumbeena, Springvale and Glen Waverley. These all contribute to the cosmopolitan character of modern urban Australia.

Apart from shops selling imported Chinese language books, magazines, CDs and DVDs, there are also several Chinese language newspapers, three shortwave radio channels in Cantonese and Mandarin, as well as a number of Chinese language satellite television stations from around the world - all helping to bring the communities up-to-date with the events and cultures of their ancestral homes. Australian public broadcaster SBS also provides television and radio programming in both Cantonese and Mandarin.

Like Chinese people across the world, Chinese Australians have a tradition of academic excellence; Chinese Australians are prominent among the top performers of the annual Higher School Certificate (NSW), Victorian Certificate of Education, and their counterparts in other states and territories. Perhaps surprisingly, few second-generation Chinese Australians learn the Chinese language at normal weekday schools, but many do attend privately-run Chinese language classes on Saturdays.

People of Chinese descent are now well-represented across all professions in Australia; quite a few receive the prestigious Order of Australia award every year. In part fuelled by anti-migrant policies of Pauline Hanson in the 1990s, Chinese involvement in Australian politics is quite strong, with several representatives in Federal and State parliaments over the years. (See also Unity Party (Australia).)

Like many Chinese communities overseas, Cantonese has historically been the lingua franca of the Australian Chinese communities. However, recent arrivals (see below) from other parts of China and Taiwan mean that Mandarin and other dialects are increasingly commonly spoken as well. Both Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese scripts can be seen, although local Chinese language newspapers tend to prefer the former. As Australia is an English speaking country, most Chinese Australians also have some knowledge about the English language, although the level of proficiency varies among recent immigrants. In the past, those who came from Hong Kong have tended to know English better than those from Mainland China and Taiwan. Australian Bureau of Statistics data records that the Chinese language with the greatest number of speakers in Australia is Cantonese with 225,300 (thereby spoken by around 40.4 per cent of Chinese Australians), followed by Mandarin with 139,300 (25.0 per cent). Other Chinese languages, and English, are undoubtedly the home languages of the remainder.

Chinese migrants to Australia are drawn from throughout the Chinese diaspora. According to the 2001 Census, the main source countries and regions for overseas-born ethnic Chinese are:

Prominent Chinese Australians

Prominent Chinese Austalians include:

References

  • Brawley, Sean, The White Peril - Foreign Relations and Asian Immigration to Australasia and North America 1919-1978, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1995.
  • Cushman, J.W., "A 'Colonial Casualty': The Chinese community in Australian Historiography", Asian Studies Association of Australia, vol.7, no 3, April, 1984.
  • Fitzgerald, Shirley, Red Tape, Gold Scissors, State Library of NSW Press, Sydney, 1997.
  • Macgregor, Paul (ed.), Histories of the Chinese in Australasia and the South Pacific, Museum of Chinese Australian History, Melbourne,1995.
  • May, Cathie, Topsawyers: the Chinese in Cairns 1870 to 1920, James Cook University, Townsville, 1984.
  • Williams, Michael, Chinese Settlement in NSW - A thematic history (Sydney: Heritage Office of NSW, 1999) http://www.heritage.nsw.gov.au

See also

Chinese Australians | Australian immigration | Ethnic groups in Australasia | Overseas Chinese groups

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Chinese Australian".

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