Tag: Melbourne Chinese Studies Group

Bringing the Chinese into Australian history: a 25-year collective endeavour – Melbourne Chinese Studies Group

Another Melbourne Chinese Studies Group talk that I wish I could attend!

Date: Friday, 3 December 2010
Time: 6pm
Admission: $2
Venue: Jenny Florence Room, 3rd Floor, Ross House, 247 Flinders Lane, Melbourne (between Swanston and Elizabeth Streets)

Topic: Bringing the Chinese into Australian history: a 25-year collective endeavour

Speaker: Paul Macgregor

The field of Chinese Australian historical research over the last 25 years has been remarkably fertile and diverse. In my 15-year role as curator of Melbourne’s Chinese Museum, and then convenor of the Melbourne Chinese Studies Group, I have been highly involved in this exciting work. After hesitant starts in the 1980s, an active research network sprang into being from the early 1990s, drawing in academics, independent researchers, Chinese community members, family historians, archaeologists, heritage professionals and others. The level of enthusiasm generated through this network has led to much highly fruitful cross-disciplinary achievement, with, for instance, a score of national and international conferences, several major research projects, dozens of PhD and masters theses, hundreds of hours of oral history recorded, a wide range of books and articles, as well as several Chinese museums and permanent exhibitions around the country. Yet, for all this exciting intellectual ferment, Chinese-Australian-ness remains in the margins of mainstream professional Australian historical discourse, and is still barely recognised in the general public’s historical consciousness. In reflecting on the research efforts of a quarter century, I will ask whether it is just a matter of time; do we need new research strategies; or are there fundamental blocks to a national recognition of the true Chinese-ness of Australia?

Paul Macgregor is an historian who is the convenor of the Melbourne Chinese Studies Group, and was the curator of Melbourne’s Museum of Chinese Australian History from 1990 to 2005. He is the editor of Histories of the Chinese in Australasia and the South Pacific (1995), and joint editor of both Chinese in Oceania (2002) and After the Rush: Regulation, Participation and Chinese Communities in Australia 1860-1940 (2004). He has organised three international conferences on the Chinese diaspora in Australasia, and has curated numerous exhibitions on the history and material heritage of Chinese Australians. He was also involved in the development of five major research projects: the Australia-China Oral History Project, the Thematic Survey of Sites of Chinese Australian History, the Chinese Heritage of Australian Federation project, the Chinese Historical Images in Australia project, and the (Chinese on the) Mt Alexander Diggings Project.

Talk followed by an informal, inexpensive meal in a nearby Chinatown restaurant.

Following seminar: This is the last Melbourne Chinese Studies Group seminar for 2010. The 2011 program will start on Friday, 4 March.

A transnational Chinese-Australian family and the ‘New China’ – Melbourne Chinese Studies Group

Date: Friday, 6 August 2010
Time: 6pm
Admission: $2
Venue: Jenny Florence Room, 3rd Floor, Ross House, 247 Flinders Lane, Melbourne (between Swanston and Elizabeth Streets)

Topic: A transnational Chinese-Australian family and the ‘New China’

Speaker: Pauline Rule

Chung Mow Fung arrived in Melbourne in 1857 as a single man and left nearly forty years later in 1895 to settle in Hong Kong together with his Chinese wife and a large family of eight surviving colonial-born children. Twenty-five years of constructing a family in country Victoria had seen Chung Mow Fung and his wife Huish Huish negotiate between Australian and Chinese culture and between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ values especially in the area of gender roles. Settlement in the complicated liminal space of Anglo-Chinese Hong Kong allowed the family to identify to varying degrees with the different parts of their cultural formation. Their Australian background was acknowledged and their life-style was largely westernized but some members of the family became involved in the Republican era in the struggle to change aspects of Chinese culture, especially the role of women. This paper will examine how the Australian childhood of the family members played some part in how they, especially the women, lived out their adult lives while also retaining a strong commitment to their Chinese heritage.

Pauline Rule undertook postgraduate research on the Bengali intelligentsia and then the social history of Calcutta during the period of the British Raj. She worked in both the curriculum and assessment areas of the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority and its prior manifestations. She has also researched and written extensively about the experiences of Irish women in nineteenth century Victoria. As part of this research she has examined marriages between Irish women and Chinese men in colonial Victoria and the outcomes for some of these families. This has lead to an interest in those Chinese women who came to Victoria in the colonial period.

Talk followed by an informal, inexpensive meal in a nearby Chinatown restaurant.

Temples, ghosts and Christians – Melbourne Chinese Studies group seminar

Date: Friday 2 July 2010
Time: 6pm
Admission: $2
Venue: Jenny Florence Room, 3rd Floor, Ross House, 247 Flinders Lane, Melbourne (between Swanston and Elizabeth Streets)

Topic: Temples, ghosts and Christians – A brief history of Chinese spiritual practice in Australia

Speaker: Paul Macgregor

Traditional spiritual beliefs and practices were fundamental to the lives of most Chinese in colonial Australia. Temples were built across the goldfields and in major cities. Cemeteries and burning towers to maintain relations with the spirits of the those who died here were also established around the country. Rituals and ceremonies were central to community events and the annual spiritual calendar was adhered to by many. On the other hand a small but growing number chose to adopt the Christian faith and formed congregations that, by the Federation era, also had key roles in community organisation, business affairs and political activity. New migrants from the Chinese diaspora to Australia from the 1950s onwards have also continually reinvigorated and diversified Chinese spirituality in Australia.

Historians and archaeologists have undertaken significant documentation of many of the temples and cemeteries. Others have enquired into the organisational history, and the political and social influence, of traditional Chinese spiritual organistions such as the Hung League as well as key Chinese Christian congregations. This seminar however will focus on exploring the actual spiritual beliefs and practices – both traditional and Christian – of Chinese Australians, how these were transformed in Australia, and how they have underlain individual lives as well as community history.

Paul Macgregor is an historian who is the convenor of the Melbourne Chinese Studies Group, and was the curator of Melbourne’s Museum of Chinese Australian History from 1990 to 2005. He is the editor of Histories of the Chinese in Australasia and the South Pacific (1995), and joint editor of both Chinese in Oceania (2002) and After the Rush: Regulation, Participation and Chinese Communities in Australia 1860-1940 (2004). He has organised three international conferences on the Chinese diaspora in Australasia, and has curated numerous exhibitions on the history and material heritage of Chinese Australians.

Talk followed by an informal, inexpensive meal in a nearby Chinatown restaurant.

Following seminar:
Friday 6 August – Pauline Rule: A transnational Chinese-Australian family and the ‘New China’

Telling the stories of Chinese–Australian families: Melbourne Chinese Studies Group, April 2010

Announcing the next Melbourne Chinese Studies Group seminar…

Topic: Three approaches to telling the stories of Chinese–Australian families – a panel of papers from Chinese Australian Family Historians of Victoria Inc (CAFHOV)
Speakers: Sophie Couchman, Robyn Ansell, Barbara Nichol
Date: Friday, 9 April 2010, 6pm
Admission: $2. All welcome
Venue: Jenny Florence Room, 3rd Floor, Ross House, 247 Flinders Lane, Melbourne (between Swanston and Elizabeth Streets)

The Chinese Australian Family Historians of Victoria (CAFHOV) is a group of people who gather on the first Saturday of very month to discuss issues related to their research into Chinese–Australian family history. These were the papers presented by members of the group at the Dragon Tails conference held last year in Ballarat.

Sophie Couchman – ‘Remembering Chinatown’: The history behind a self-guided audio tour of Melbourne’s Little Bourke Street
Since the early work of labour historians in the 1970s our knowledge of the history of Chinese in Australia has expanded enormously. The challenge is to bring these understandings to the broader Australian public. This paper explores the difficulties and joys of practically applying current perspectives in Chinese–Australian history to a commercial product aimed at the general public.

Robyn Ansell – The wives of Hin Yung and Ah Whay
The Irish-Chinese connection is illustrated by this transition across one generation – from shame to sobriety, from goldfield survivor to pillar of the community. Creswick and Maryborough are the setting of the story.

Barbara Nichol – Chinese restaurant children: negotiating Australian lives
We love stories of those valiant pioneers who tamed the bush, but what about the people who pioneered the urban landscape? The early post-federation stories of Melbourne’s Chinese restaurant families will be the focus of this paper. ‘Restaurant children’ recognised the importance of fulfilling the obligations of their Chinese heritage, yet at the same time were negotiating their futures as Australians. They tend not to be described as ‘pioneers’, yet in many ways their struggles were just as valiant and the obstacles they negotiated were no less daunting.

Talk followed by an informal, inexpensive meal in a nearby Chinatown restaurant.

[Wish I could be there, but I’ll be a bit occupied elsewhere.]

Lowe Kong Meng: China’s first global citizen?

Paul Macgregor will be addressing the Melbourne Chinese Studies Group on the life of Lowe Kong Meng (1831–88):

Date: Friday 5 December 2008, 6pm
Admission: $2, all welcome
Venue: Jenny Florence Room, 3rd Floor, Ross House, 247 Flinders Lane, Melbourne (between Swanston and Elizabeth Sts)
Topic: Lowe Kong Meng 1831-1888: China’s first global citizen?
Speaker: Paul Macgregor

Born in Malaya, with a Cantonese father and possibly a Nonya mother; educated in English, French and Italian; trading in: tea and opium from China to Melbourne, beche de mer from Queensland to Hong Kong, sugar from Mauritius, rice from Calcutta to Victoria – Lowe Kong Meng was head of a firm that had branches in Melbourne, Townsville, Mauritius, Hong Kong and London. Awarded the honour of Chinese imperial rank of the blue button (the equivalent of a British knighthood), Lowe Kong Meng was the unofficial consul of the Chinese government in Victoria, but also claimed to be a British subject because of his birth in Penang, a British dependency. His colleagues included those in the highest political and business circles of Melbourne, as well as New York traders and members of the Shanghai American community. All this before 1870. Lowe Kong Meng has a modest place in Australian historiography, yet the scope of his achievements warrants much more. In this paper Paul Macgregor will argue that Lowe took opportunities open to him through the expansion of the British Empire in the Far East and Australasia to become a unique bridge between European & Asian cultures in the 19th century.

Paul Macgregor is an historian who is the convenor of the Melbourne Chinese Studies Group, and was the curator of Melbourne’s Museum of Chinese Australian History from 1990 to 2005. He is the editor of Histories of the Chinese in Australasia and the South Pacific (1995), and joint editor of both Chinese in Oceania (2002) and After the Rush: Regulation, Participation and Chinese Communities in Australia 1860-1940 (2004). He has organised three international conferences on the Chinese diaspora in Australasia, and has curated numerous exhibitions on the history and material heritage of Chinese Australians.

The talk will be followed by an informal, inexpensive meal in a nearby Chinatown restaurant.