Chinese Australian History by Chidestudy Press

The Poison of Polygamy - the last Qing novel or the first novel of the Chinese Australian experience - is undoubtedly a fascinating read. This podcast will delve into the equally fascinating historical background to this story, highlighting what is true and what is just a good story.  It will also explain the political intentions of this novel written at the end of Qing China and the beginning of...

The Scattered Legacy project is a digital archive that brings together the scattered treasures and history of Chinese Australians. Drawing on material from private collections, regional museums, archives, and families, it creates a national database linking objects, people, places, and historical themes. Rather than being just a catalogue, it shows how individual artefacts connect to larger storie...

How did a colourful scene of Sydney harbour from around 1820 find itself depicted on a large punchbowl - the so-called Canton Punchbowl - that was manufactured in the Chinese port city of Canton (Guangzhou 廣州)? This gilded punchbowl was one of many China-made products produced specifically for export to Europe and represents the growing establishment of European-China trade centred on Canton but...

It is impossible to understand Chinese Australian history without also understand the qiaoxiang - the home districts. The various small countries or districts in the Pearl River Delta with which people identifies and via which many people organised and associated themselves when far from home. Here we only touch upon this fascinating topic. See: Returning Home with Glory: Chinese villagers around...

Too much like Englishmen uncovers a forgotten migration that reshaped colonial Australia long before the gold rushes made Chinese migration visible. Between 1848 and 1853, more than 3,000 men from Amoy—modern Xiamen in China’s Fujian province—were recruited under five-year labour contracts and sent to New South Wales. Their recruitment was often opaque and coercive, their voyages arduous, and thei...

The rise of China and the rise of multiculturalism in Australia has greatly influenced how we perceive Chinese Australian history. Here we discuss how modern influences have impacted on the production of history in recent times. The question is posed: Is history about making us feel good about ourselves or is it about learning about ourselves? For a Youtube lecture on Mirroring the Past see: https...

The Tung Wah News was one of a number of Chinese language newspapers published in Sydney and Melbourne from the late 19th century well into the 20th century. This is an in-depth look at just one of these newspapers over a brief period around 1900 that gives us an insight into the concerns of the Chinese Australian community at this time. See: M Williams, Wading 10,000 li to seek their fortune: Tun...

In the history of links between people from the Pearl River Delta with the countries of South-East Asia and the Pacific, the role played by Hong Kong cannot be ignored. An examination of the role and contribution of Hong Kong to these Pearl River Delta links over the period 1842 to 1942 allows the impact of Pearl River Delta links on Hong Kong to be investigated. This perspective enables aspects o...

Too often Chinese Australian history is viewed as a history parallel to "real" Australian history that only touches this history at points like racism or the gold rushes. In reality people from China have been an integral and significant part of Australian history from its European beginings, and even to some extent before that. Here is an overview of that history that originated in an interview w...

Chinese–Australian history is a vital part of the national story—one that has long fascinated, yet often perplexed, many (white) Australians. As Australia’s Chinese communities continue to grow and evolve, this history is attracting increasing attention. That interest spans both academic inquiry and popular curiosity, though, as in most fields, scholarly insights do not always travel easily into t...

The first of a great many myths and misconceptions relating to Chinese Australian history. This is one of a mystery beehive shaped and stone capped well is associated with the famous walk from Robe in South Australia as Chinese gold seekers evaded the Victoria Poll tax in the 1850s. This is an episode you can find in Every Requisite for a Campaign upon the Goldfields, a Chidestudy Press book - Cli...

Thomas Cook, Esq. J.P. was one of many immigrants of middling income and status who early in their life threw in their lot with the young Colony of NSW. A good image of Thomas Cook as a magistrate can be built up from the chance survival of the Magistrates Letterbooks of the Dungog Court in which is preserved much of his official outward correspondence, particularity from 1837 throughout the 1840s...

When people talk about the Chinese diaspora before the mid-20th century, it’s usually described as a story of men heading overseas. But those men stayed closely tied to the women who remained in their villages back in south China—often just as many, if not more, than the men who left. The role these women played has been seriously under-researched. Because of that, the focus in most writing has be...

The Dictation Test is often seen as the defining symbol of the White Australia policy. For more than 50 years after 1901, it was the main tool used to keep so-called “undesirables” out of the country. This podcast looks at the story behind it—the mix of history, politics and ideology that produced a fake test you were never meant to pass. A key moment came at the 1897 Imperial Conference, where th...

The story of Chinese settlement in New South Wales is unique. From the start, Chinese communities worked hard to keep close ties with their home villages in south China. Most of the early arrivals were men, not women, and they often had to deal with open prejudice and harsh anti-Chinese laws. All of this shaped a settlement history that stood apart from other migrant groups. Those constant connect...

Most research into migration and diaspora tends to focus on one group or country at a time — often treating them in isolation. This is especially true for studies of Chinese and Italian migration to places like the U.S. and Australia. Here we discuss what we can learn by putting those stories side by side. The focus is on how people from China and Italy moved to the U.S. and Australia in the late...

Controlling entry to an island continent proved more complex than the Immigration Restriction Act, 1901 framers imagined. Chinese people had been coming to Australia in numbers since the 1850s and by 1901 had substantial community, family, and economic links with their Pearl River Delta villages, around the colonies and with Hong Kong and Shanghai. Resistance was fought out on the boats themselves...

Dundas Crawford was sent to the Australian colonies at a time when the Colony of Queensland was concerned as thousands of Chinese goldseekers were arriving at Cooktown and walking inland to the Palmer River goldfields. This was in 1877 and the report of his observations of Chinese activity in Queensland, NSW and Victoria was duly sent to the Foreign Office. The report makes fascinating reading. It...

The one hundred years between the mid nineteenth-century Cali­fornian and Australian gold rushes and the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 saw the establishment and maintenance of extensive trans-Pacific links. These links developed between the native places or qiaoxiang of tens of thousands of people originating in the Pearl River Delta of south China who travelled to various des...

Chinese Opera was a prominent feature of colonial Australia, initially in the Victorian goldfields, but later in New South Wales, Queensland, and north-eastern Tasmania. Tracing its performance history and key locations, this discussion describes how it was staged and received, the efforts to attract a non-Chinese audience, and the practise of charitable benefit performances. The discussion also d...

Anglo-Saxonizing Machines: Exclusion America, White Australia by Michael Williams, contrasts the restrictive immigration policies targeting Chinese people in Australia and the United States from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries. It examines the political and social contexts that shaped these laws and their enforcement, highlighting that while both countries aimed to limit Chinese entry, the...

Of the many episodes that make up the oftentimes exotic impression of Chinese Australian history the 1850s walk from the small port of Robe in South Australia to the goldfields of Victoria has repeatedly taken on epic proportions. Its ‘long march’ like length, tales of hardship and death, not to mention present-day outrage at the discriminatory tax the walk was designed to avoid, all combine to ma...

If people know anything about Chinese Australian history, they likely associate it with the 19th-century gold rushes, market gardening, the Lambing Flat Riots, and the infamous fake Dictation Test from the early years of Australia's 20th-century Immigration Restriction Act. But this common understanding focuses almost entirely on people from the Pearl River Delta, a region of the province of Guang...

The stereotype of the Chinese market gardener is a prominent one in Australia. That it is a stereotype does not mean that it is wrong but that it is simply not as true as it claims to be. Today the discussion however is more about giving examples of how a denial of individuality helped to create such stereotypes. Stereotypes that remain embedded in Australian history today.  This podcast is based...

It is all well and good to focus on interesting aspects of a history but it is also necessary to have a grasp of its entirety. Here I strive to give the briefest of overviews to help provide the much needed context for previous as well as future podcasts. Enjoy! As usual you should always check out the publications at - https://chidestudypresscom.wordpress.com/the-bookstore/   You can ask question...