Well fancy that! The nice folk at the National Library of Australia have decided that this little blog is worth preserving for posterity in Pandora.
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Over at discontents, Tim Sherratt has recently posted about a new project he and I are embarking on. Called ‘Invisible Australians: Living under the White Australia Policy’, the project aims to reveal something of the lives of the thousands of men, women and children who were affected by the racially-based immigration policy of early 20th-century Australia. (You might like to read Tim’s post.)
The Immigration Restriction Act, introduced in December 1901, was designed to limited the migration of ‘coloured’ people to Australia, but it (and other elements of the White Australia Policy) also had an affect on the lives of non-white, non-Indigenous Australians – people of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Lebanese, Syrian, Afghan descent who were either born here, or who had already built lives here after migrating.
To administer the Immigration Restriction Act, government officials implemented an increasingly complex and structured system of tracking and documenting the movements of non-white people* as they travelled in and out of the country. This surveillance left an extraordinary body of records containing information about people who, according to the national myth of a ‘White Australia’, were not Australian at all.
Tim and I hope that, starting with the documentary legacy of the Immigration Restriction Act, we can link together disparate fragments of information about non-white Australians to make their presence in early 20th-century Australia more visible. Many writings comment on how the White Australia Policy resulted in a reduction in Australia’s non-white population over the early decades of the century, particularly in the Chinese community – forgetting, it seems, that there were still thousands who just kept on living here, living their lives under the White Australia Policy.
Our first steps in the project are small ones. Tim is beginning work on a transcription tool that will enable the extraction of information from records already digitised by the National Archives of Australia. And I am going back and thinking about the records themselves, in part to provide Tim with details he needs to develop the transcription tool. I am also putting together a guide to researching individuals in the Immigration Restriction Act records from New South Wales (c.1902–1948) that are held in the National Archives’ Sydney office.
The lives revealed in the Immigration Restriction Act records are, for the most part, not big ones. They are those of market gardeners, labourers, hawkers, farmers, shopkeepers, cabinetmakers – as well as a wives and mothers and children. In many cases they are lives that are documented nowhere else. The documents I’ve included to illustrate this post are examples of two of the types of forms that we will be working with: Form 22, which was used to apply for an exemption from the dictation test, and Form 21, the Certificates of Domicile (CoD) and then Certificates Exempting from Dictation Test (CEDT) issued to those whose applications were successful. I’ll be posting more about these documents soon.
I have written elsewhere of the value of the records, and I marvel at the possibilities they offer for creating connections – between different groups of records, between the people documented in the records (parents, children, siblings, cousins, clansmen, neighbours) and between those ‘invisible Australians’ and their descendants today. Some days I’m a little overwhelmed by all the possibilities, but, for today at least, I’m happy that we’re making a start.
* In this post, and in our discussions of the project more generally, we use ‘non-white’ to refer to the people who crop up in the White Australia records because bureaucrats at the time considered them as something other than ‘white’. It’s not a perfect term, but it’s hard to come up with something that adequately covers all bases, particularly considering the instability of racial categorisation. Among those classified as ‘non-white’ were, for example, people of mixed race who had one white parent (usually their mother). Our use of ‘non-white’ does not include Indigenous Australians as they did not generally come under the restrictions of the White Australia Policy.
Shirley Fitzgerald has written an article on the Chinese in the newly released online Dictionary of Sydney.
(Such a brief post, after quite a lull, but I don’t know I have more to say on the matter!)
The Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas, has a great collection of online maps of China, both current and historical.
One of the real treasures is the China – Topographic Maps [Scale 1:250,000] (China Series) U.S. Army Map Service, Series L500, dating from 1954. Using a map of the whole of China as a guide, you can click to bring up very detailed maps of particular regions. Place names are given in modified Wade-Giles with some Chinese characters (and it’s kinda fun spotting familiar places – a detail map of Macau, for instance, points past the Portas do Cerco to ‘Chi-Ta 5 km’, which would be Jida, now a bustling and ever-growing part of Zhuhai city).
The Chung Shan map (NF-49/8 on the big plan, and warning, it’s a big file: 6.4mb), shows the western part of the Pearl River Delta, from Kaiping in the west to the border with Hong Kong in the east, from Panyu in the north to Macau in the south. You can see the level of detail provided on the map below.
The maps that are likely to be useful for those interested in Chinese Australian history are the following:
- NF 49-4 KUANG-CHOU (6.2 MB) [Guangzhou]
- NF 49-4 KUANG-CHOU (CANTON) AND VICINITY [verso] (3.1 MB) [detail map of Guangzhou city]
- NF 49-8 CHUNG-SHAN (6.4 MB) [western Pearl River Delta]
- NF 49-8 MACAU AND VICINITY [verso] (3.9 MB) [detail map of Macau city]
- NF 49-12 CH’IH-CH’I (4.8 MB) [most southerly bits of Guangdong and lots of sea]
- NF 50-1 HO-YUAN (6.7 MB) [east of GZ and north of HK]
- NF 50-5 HONG KONG (5.1 MB) [Hong Kong region]
- NF 50-5 VICTORIA AND KOWLOON AND VICINITY [verso] (3.5 MB) [detail map of Hong Kong city]
![NF 49-4 KUANG-CHOU (CANTON) AND VICINITY [verso]](http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/ams/china/txu-oclc-10552568-nf49-4-back.jpg){kind=link}
![NF 49-8 MACAU AND VICINITY [verso]](http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/ams/china/txu-oclc-10552568-nf49-8-back.jpg){kind=link}
![NF 50-5 VICTORIA AND KOWLOON AND VICINITY [verso]](http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/ams/china/txu-oclc-10552568-nf50-5-back.jpg){kind=link}
The other very cool thing about these maps is that they correspond to the map references in the Chinese Villages Database. So, for instance, the villages database gives the map reference ‘GQ 4394′ for Shek Kay Chun in Chung Shan (Shiqi in Zhongshan). This means you have to look for the area marked as GQ, find line no. 4 and go in 3/10 of the way to line no. 5, then find line 9 and go 4/10 of the way to line no. 0. A somewhat daggy illustration of how to do this is below (click on the image to get the full-size version). There you can see, circled in blue is Shekki.
The Dragon Tails conference now has a website up and running, and registrations are open. There’s no program online yet, but there is a list of speakers and their abstracts:
Archives New Zealand has just put online a small collection of photographs of early Chinese settlers, men who lived in Otago in the late 19th/early 20th century. The online exhibition is called Chinese Portraits.
The photographs were attached to the men’s certificates of registration, the New Zealand equivalent of Australia’s CEDTs (and their colonial predecessors). The original records are held by Archives New Zealand’s Dunedin office.
You can also read about the project in the Otago Daily Times.
Historian Melissa Bellanta references Sophie Couchman’s work, and the wonderful Chinese–Australian Historical Images in Australia (CHIA) website, in this short blog post on turn-of-the-century theatre and Melbourne’s Chinatown.
The State Library of New South Wales’ Eureka! The rush for gold web feature includes some interesting material about the Chinese in the section titled Minority miners.
There are links to digitised photographs, paintings and sketches, and images of a most intriguing gold medal from the State Library’s collection. The medal was presented to a goldfields warden in Braidwood in 1881 as a ‘mark of esteem’ by Chinese miners.
The text that goes with these images gives a brief and fairly typical account of the Chinese on the southern Australian goldfields – telling a story of anti-Chinese sentiments, violence, poll taxes, Lambing Flat, anti-Chinese legislation, as well as introducing the exception to all the stereotypes, Quong Tart (there are links to Tart family papers also held by the Library.)
It’s nice to see some of the State Library’s Chinese stuff being highlighted, but it’s a pity that people can’t seem to get past the idea that there isn’t anything more to the story of the goldfields Chinese than rivalry, misunderstanding, prejudice and discrimination. The gold medal, just by itself, suggests that the story is much more complex than that.
Hong Kong University Theses Online does just what it says – provides online access to theses completed at the University of Hong Kong. You can browse by degree or department and, unlike many other similar online thesis sites, this one provides full-text searching.
There’s much of interest here – including a number of theses I’ve wanted to read for a while – and it’s all available free of charge. Hooray.
Here are some that took my eye:
Michael Williams – Destination qiaoxiang (a must-read thesis! The first real exploration of Australia’s Chinese communities from a transnational perspective)
Geoffrey Emerson – Stanley Internment Camp, Hong Kong, 1942-1945: A study of civilian internment during the Second World War
Stacilee Ford Hosford, Gendered exceptionalisms: American women in Hong Kong and Macao, 1830-2000
CHIU Yiu-tat, Franklin – Lineage and rural industry in South China: The case of Taishan
KO Yeung, Katherine – From ‘slavery’ to ‘girlhood’? Age, gender and race in Chinese and western representations of the mui tsai phenomenon, 1879-1941
Tiziana Salvi, The last fifty years of legal opium in Hong Kong, 1893-1943
WONG Chun-leung, Empire and identity: British elite representations of ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’ in Hong Kong, 1880-1941
YU Yang, Remaking Xiamen: Overseas Chinese and regional transformation in architecture and urbanism in the early 20th century