I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve been awarded the National Archives of Australia’s Ian Maclean Award for 2012. My project is called Paper Trails: Travels with Anglo-Chinese Australians, 1900–1939. I’m looking to start the project towards the end of…
This morning I went to the ANU Archives to look at records created by Charles A. Price, the demographer who I know as the author of The Great White Walls are Built: Restrictive Immigration to North America and Australasia, 1836–1888….
I have been wanting to write something for Women’s History Month. The Australian theme for 2013 is Finding Founding Mothers—looking at women involved in shaping the new nation in the fields of political, social, medical and educational reform. The women…
All in all we know very little about Australia’s very earliest Chinese residents. Best known is Mak Sai Ying, or John Shying, who arrived in Sydney as a free settler in 1818, working first as a carpenter with John Blaxland…
On 10 May, I will be speaking at the Lilith Conference: ‘Women without men: Spinsters, widows and deserted wives in the nineteenth century and beyond’, at the ANU. It sounds like such a great conference, and I’m excited to be…
Names can be one of the trickiest parts of researching Chinese Australian history. They consistently seem to puzzle and confuse people – there’s the way that given names became surnames, the way that spellings changed over time and in different…
From the Hobart Town Police Report of Monday, 15 January 1838: Caroline Sye complained of her husband, a Chinaman, for ill-usage, which she failed to prove; and as she insisted she would not live with him, she was allowed to…
Here’s a story about a remarkable old white woman and her friendship with a Chinese man. In June 1901, a reporter from Melbourne’s Argus newspaper accompanied Castlemaine’s most senior policeman, Sergeant CW Armstrong, and the reverend from the local Christ…
Yesterday I spoke at Visible Immigrants Seven, a small conference organised by Flinders University and the Migration Museum in Adelaide. The conference aimed to explore the idea of migrant mobility before and after the major act of migration. Most of…
A known but little-discussed part of the history of Chinese Australians is the entry of people on false papers or using assumed identities. Both those within the community and those of us researching the history know examples of families where…