Chinese-Australian history

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This book is the story of an association that began as a local club and became the regional headquarters of a transnational political party. It is based on extensive research and large collections of photographs and documents held in Australian KMT archives. Oral history interviews have supplemented this rich documentary record.

Different Sights provides an introduction to the rich and diverse history of immigrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds on the New England Tableland. It shares stories about the work which brought individuals and families to the region, where and how they settled, and the lives they created for themselves. It offers insights into how they were received and how they, in turn, perceived their new social, cultural and geographical environments. It identifies some of the themes and patterns which emerge from their histories, invites visits to the sites and places of their experiences, and presents objects and items that convey aspects of their stories. It is complemented by an online database where you can seek more detail on specific sites, places, objects and people, and where you can also offer to add your stories.

In the nineteenth century, Chinese gold prospectors built between 100 and 200 joss houses (temples) in Australia, from Darwin in the north to Weldborough, Tasmania, in the south. In 1988, nine were still standing, though some were in poor repair. In the nineteenth century, non-Christian places of worship were unpopular and missionaries sought to convert the `heathen Chinese'. In the twentieth century, the major threat to their survival was declining congregations (as non-White migrants were prohibited from entering Australia under the White Australia Policy). From the 1960s onwards, some surviving temples were restored. Yet they remain vulnerable to racism (Sze Yup Temple in Sydney was set on fire by an arsonist in 2008), neglect (in 2024 old electrical wiring caused a fire at the See Yup Temple in Melbourne), and modern development (in the 1960s the Castlemaine, Victoria temple was demolished). This article examines the material history of the Chinese in Australia, noting the White preference for a ‘heritage' presentation (as at the goldfields theme park Sovereign Hill near Ballarat, Victoria, where the joss house is a reproduction, or at Launceston Museum, where the dismantled Weldborough temple was erected as an exhibit) rather than actual knowledge of the history, archaeology, and lived religion of historic Chinese settlers in Australia.

GEOFFREY BLAINEY: If you read about this traffic and trade in such easily-found sources as Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica, and then turn to Paul Dillon’s latest book, you will sometimes wonder whether you are reading about the same episode in history.

Dillon often sets out long documents which give readers an opportunity to learn more and more, and even to make up their mind. Thus, he challenges the prevailing view that these islanders were usually shipped home like sheep without any worthwhile gain. And yet here, without much comment, is a brief aside on a return voyage from Queensland in the ship Spunkie. Scores of the islanders had crammed into the ship’s hold a small mountain of luggage “some of them having as many as three and four large boxes of clothes, besides loose articles of furniture and cooking utensils. The boxes, in addition to clothes and drapery of all descriptions, contained carpenters’ tools, such as adzes, tomahawks, chisels, gimblets, hand-saws, butchers' knives; rifles, double-barrelled guns, ammunition.”

Since 2018, as a fulltime researcher living on the Sunshine Coast, Dillon has written book after book. At present there is probably no researcher in an Australian university who can equal his knowledge on this vital set of topics. One reason for his success is that he has not only resurrected a collection of key witnesses – islanders themselves, sugar-cane growers, missionaries, sea captains, British naval officers, and politicians – but also cross-examined them with a barrister’s skill.

The Developments leading up to the erection of the Cairns Shire Council Chambers The Cairns Shire Council Chambers (Figure 1), commissioned by the Cairns Shire Council and completed in 1913, still stands at its original location on The Esplanade in Cairns. The Shire Chambers, now wedged between two multi-storey buildings, served as a centre of local government for eighty-two years, first for the Cairns Shire Council, and later for the Mulgrave Shire Council. After the amalgamation of the Mulgrave Shire and Cairns City Councils, the building served as a tourist information centre. The centre, however, was unable to compete with online tourism services and closed in 2018, leaving the former Council Office empty for the first time in over one hundred years. This paper describes the events leading to the erection of the Council Office. These events are closely related to the development and sale of the Cairns-Mulgrave Tramway, and, by extension, to the Cairns sugar industry.

The Queensland Native Police were renowned as keepers of the peace and good order on the Queensland colonial frontier. Trackers of the highest order graced the saddles of the Native Police. In the annals of Queensland policing, few units have displayed a devotion to duty and loyalty to the cause of justice to rival the Native Police.

The Australian Aboriginal lived in splendid isolation. On the entry of Australia into the world of commerce and trade, a great disparity arose between Aboriginals and settlers. Technology deprivation soon became apparent. From a semi-arid, unforgiving country - always was, always will be - appeared an abundance of beef and flour, and gibbers harder than rock. Bush tucker and stone implements soon gave way to cultivated food and metals. It was there for the taking and they helped themselves handsomely from the settlers’ flocks, gardens and huts.

Down came the squatter a-riding his thoroughbred;
Down came policemen — one, two, and three.
"Whose is the jumbuck you've got in the tucker-bag?
You'll come a-waltzing Matilda with we."

Now Wokes would require dispersing rather than waltzing. Be that as it may, the world had long moved away from collectives to private ownership for profit. Taking instead of buying in the settler world meant only one thing: the troopers. The government employed Aboriginals to police Aboriginals. With the eventual recognition that the Aboriginals were seeking a better standard of living but lacking the skills to achieve those ends, the government of the day resorted to welfare economics and instituted a food dole for Aboriginals on the northern frontier. It then attempted social engineering with the introduction of The Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act.

During the Anti-extradition Movement in Hong Kong, a wave of new unions surfaced-18 newly registered unions in 2019 and 491 in the first half of 2020. This article examines and analyzes the factors behind this upsurge in new union activism and asks how protesters acquired trade union consciousness. Previously, in the throes of an earlier protest movement in 2014 led by young people who valued individualism, self-activism, spontaneity, and postmaterialism, hierarchically structured institutions were distrusted and scorned, including trade unions. Yet half a decade later, during the 2019-20 protest movement, many thousands of participants joined forces to form the new unions. These took the shape of a new type of union known in labor studies as "social movement unionism." Despite having little experience, the new unions were able to sustain themselves, and some began to engage not only with political activism but also with management-labor issues and worker rights. This article draws on extensive interviewing during 2020-22 with labor activists and trade union organizers from old and new unions.

In recent years, fiction by Asian Australian[!) women writers has emerged into prominence and has been read within various frames as a defined body of work within Australian Literature. This diverse group of authors includes, in the past couple of decades,

The paper contrasts the dU/racIeristies (~r bankrupt proprietors with those of debtors using Parr X of rhe Bankruptcy Act. The findings, which are based partly on Cl survey (l (?fficial files on bankrupts and Part X debtors. reveal class-related difll'reIlCl's between the two groups, with !Jankrupls coming/,.ol1/ relatively underprivilexed /)ackgrounds. This finding is moderated by faciOrs such as ethnicity, parrnership arrangements and time in business. The data are interpreted sociological!.v, with special reference to ethnomethodological concepts like deviance and stigma which emphasise the denouncement and .\ymbolic expulsion of debtors; and structuralist explanations which associate differential use of the Bankruptcy Act with social inequality. V ery little is known about the social characteristics of proprietors in Australia who become bankrupt or enter into Part X agreements. With notable exceptions (Rock 1973; Sullivan, Warren and Westbrook 1989), the sociological contribution to understanding debt collection processes and the characteristics of bankrupts has been minimal. This paper moves beyond a purely economic analysis of business failure to explore the sociological characteristics of bankrupt proprietors and Part X debtors. Bankruptcy and Part X agreements are legal processes offering individuals a way out of their financial problems. They are an intrinsic part of our capitalist, consumer oriented and highly indebted society.

Abstract: The field of Conservation of Contemporary Art is constantly faced with a number of hitherto unprecedented ethical challenges. These challenges present a particular complexity when the artists are alive, since their input can happen to be at odds with established practices for the conservation of their artworks. The artist’s interview is a useful tool which is, however, often loaded with ethical conundrums and pitfalls. In order to overcome the obstacles they are presented with, conservators have a duty to maintain an open-minded attitude while constantly aiming to enrich, develop, and reflect upon their methods and practices.

In 2014 the conservative Australian Institute of Public Affairs called for the abolition of the minimum wage—at the time AU$16.87, the highest in the industrial world and twice that of the United States. The Australian minimum, enacted in Victoria in 1896, was the first in the world. Other nations copied it, and the International Labor Organization inscribed it as an international convention in 1928. Responding to calls for its abolition, University of Melbourne historian Marilyn Lake reminded Australians that the minimum wage was a “symbol of Australian values.” Envisioned as a “living wage, sufficient to meet the variety of needs of a person living in a civilized community … [it] recognized workers as human beings and equal citizens,” she wrote.

This article introduces and evaluates heritage tourism interpretation strategies for depicting the Chinese-Australian gold seeking experience across an urban tourism landscape in central Victoria, Australia. The city of Bendigo has its origins in the nineteenth century goldrushes and contains a variety of heritage sites, most notably those connected with the Chinese migration to the region in search of gold. These sites, including a temple, museum, cemetery, and kiln site, form arguably one of the most complete collections of Chinese goldrush heritage assets still in existence across the globe and have the potential to be marketed to visitors as a Chinese heritage precinct. They provide a direct familial and cultural nexus between southern China and Australia, yet also highlight a complex historical encounter that requires development of visitor interpretation to bring the stories to life and provide meaning and tourist appeal. This article, using a cultural landscape model, will evaluate the way in which key historical assets can be understood as heritage tourism attractions in the present day and the role of interpretation in that process, particularly focusing on the use of podcasts and promotional media films as interpretive tools. It will also consider how thematic interpretation, based on and acknowledging contested narratives, may add to the authenticity of the precinct for visitors and complement the built heritage. The findings suggest that while some of the Chinese heritage sites in Bendigo are successful tourism ventures or have strong tourist potential, overall the tourist experience is fragmented and would benefit from more integrated interpretation strategies that link the various sites across the precinct and the region.

During the Anti-extradition Movement in Hong Kong, a wave of new unions surfaced-18 newly registered unions in 2019 and 491 in the first half of 2020. This article examines and analyzes the factors behind this upsurge in new union activism and asks how protesters acquired trade union consciousness. Previously, in the throes of an earlier protest movement in 2014 led by young people who valued individualism, self-activism, spontaneity, and postmaterialism, hierarchically structured institutions were distrusted and scorned, including trade unions. Yet half a decade later, during the 2019-20 protest movement, many thousands of participants joined forces to form the new unions. These took the shape of a new type of union known in labor studies as "social movement unionism." Despite having little experience, the new unions were able to sustain themselves, and some began to engage not only with political activism but also with management-labor issues and worker rights. This article draws on extensive interviewing during 2020-22 with labor activists and trade union organizers from old and new unions.

This paper focuses on the meanings of Confucian heritage for the Chinese ethnic community at the time Australia became a Federation. It will argue that public narratives about Confucian heritage provided a new agency for mobilizing urban Chinese Australian communities. These narratives politicized culture, helped to shape Chinese ethnic identity and diasporic nationalism over time. The appearance of narratives on Confucian heritage in the late 19th century reflected the Chinese community’s attempt to differentiate and redefine itself in an increasingly inimical racist environment. The fact that Chinese intellectuals interpreted Confucian heritage as symbolic of their distinctiveness does not necessarily mean that the Chinese community as a whole aligned themselves with the Confucianism revival movement. By interpreting Confucian heritage as a national symbol, Chinese Australian public narratives reflected a national history in which the Chinese community blended Confucian heritage i...

In the second half of the nineteenth century, thousands of young Chinese men migrated to colonial Australia, mostly in search of gold, but with many staying on to become settlers. Their story has conventionally been told as one of survival in the face of racial prejudice. However, research in recent decades has highlighted their diverse experiences and the development of a Chinese Australian identity out of often inauspicious beginnings. This article traces some features of their experience of the criminal law, drawing on new evidence from the Prosecution Project. It outlines the scope and patterns of archival data drawn from court and prison records, before considering some of the legal and procedural responses that were provoked by their presence as alien, usually non-Christian subjects and non-English speakers. Important questions arising from their story are whether there was an erosion over time of a flexibility in legal encounters with cultural difference and whether colonial law was more accommodating of a Chinese presence than was colonial politics.

DECLARATION I confirm that the material contained in this these is my own original work, and that, to the best of my knowledge, it contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference is made in the text.

Currently, heritage practice brings a nation-centric lens to the heritage of migration, privileging narratives of arrival and settlement over narratives of return, circulatory transnational flows, and cross-border connectivity. Drawing on the case of Chinese migration to Australia in the period from the 1840s to the 1940s, the 'heritage corridor' concept is proposed here as an aid in conceptualising a heritage that escapes the nation-state frame of reference. The aspirational modernity of Chinese migrants in this period led them to construct new houses, schools, and infrastructure in their home villages in China using money earned in Australia, even though in Australia at this time Chinese migrants were characterised as premodern misfits by a white majority that saw itself as modern and progressive. In relegating Chinese migrants to the past, white Australia conferred on them a state of non-belonging that I argue is perpetuated in the country's heritage system by a form of structural racism which, embedded in site listing processes, minimises the visibility of Chinese Australians in the heritage record.

This paper draws upon qualitative interview data to present a historical geography of 'homemaking' and economic activity among Chinese Australian women during the White Australia Policy era. An analysis of interview material indicates that some women dedicated their lives to unpaid work in the home, while other women worked in family businesses in subordinate positions. In some instances, Chinese Australian women took on more responsibility in these businesses in ways that challenged the 'front'/'back' gender divide. This economic participation reflected the need for Chinese Australian women to contribute to the survival of their families and experience roles and subjectivities that challenged the patriarchal division of gendered labour and space. This complex historical geography of Chinese Australian family economies in the White Australia era therefore challenges traditional feminist assertions that 'the home' is a universal site of female oppression and Orientalist assumptions that Confucian family systems were practised uniformly by all overseas Chinese.

Chinese Australian women are largely absent from scholarly accounts of Chinese Australian migration and settlement in the White Australia Policy period. This invisibility in research has been perpetuated by studies that emphasise the sex imbalance of the Chinese Australian population at the time, focus on male spheres of influence and activity, and utilise "traditional" historical sources that generally overlook the lives of women. Despite their relatively low numbers compared to their male counterparts, Chinese Australian women were present in the Australian nation throughout the White Australia Policy period and their lives, experiences and contributions are worthy of investigation. Despite limitations of official documentation, sources are available that bring to light the presence and lived realities of Chinese Australian women in this historical and geographical context. By combining information obtained from historical census records and in-depth interviews with Chinese Australian women themselves, the presence and migration experiences of this previously "invisible" group are brought to the fore.

My title, I have to confess at the outset, does not signal the discovery of a long-lost feminist literary manifesto. You will probably have recognised it as an appropriation of Joseph Furphy's famous claim for his novel of 1903, Such is Life, that its temper is democratic, its bias offensively Australian. I have changed its terms for two reasons. The first is to draw attention to the pejorative characterization of women's writing which emerged in the 1890s-in particular, of the fiction produced by the socalled Lady Novelists who were well-known at the time: Ada Cambridge, Rosa Praed, and 'Tasma'. All three (though only Cambridge still lived in Australia by then) continued to publish popular romantic novels, variously drawing on the domestic romance, the Gothic and the novel of manners, during a period when the masculine forms of romance (stories of convicts, bushrangers and station life) were fading in popularity-were, indeed, coming under concerted attack. So romantic fiction came to be associated exclusively with women writers, and to be defined by its traditionally feminine forms. This shift in the meaning of literary romance was particularly disadvantageous for two younger women writers who began to publish at the turn of the century, Barbara Baynton and Miles Franklin. Despite their association with the newlydominant literary institution of the Bulletin's Red Page, features of their work were attacked in the same terms as that of the 'lady novelists' I have already referred to. They too were deemed to be limited by their 'romantic' temper and 'offensively feminine' bias.

This article explores the methodological and ethical issues arising from the reuse of migrant oral history collections in Australia. It provides an overview of the literature on reuse, or the secondary analysis of qualitative data, and highlights approaches that consider the reuse of multiple collections. Two collections from the researcher’s own secondary analysis are presented as case studies: Morag Loh’s FILEF interviews from Melbourne in the late 1970s, and the Ethnic Affairs Commission of NSW Oral History Project interviews managed by Janis Wilton in Sydney in the early 1980s. Through comparing and connecting a small-scale community-engaged project, and an early government-initiated migrant oral history collection, the article posits that it is possible to listen not only ‘with’, but ‘across collections’. Listening across collections is a particularly valuable approach to histories of migration and health, both areas in which migrant and/or patient voices are rarely captured in ‘traditional’ historical records.

This interdisciplinary study addresses a problem of intellectual concern at the intersection of the scholarly fields of heritage studies and migration history: How to recognise and manage the heritage of a shared past beyond the boundaries of the nation-state? Existing research and conservation practice on sites of migrant heritage in Australia conventionally considers events and places related to the immigrant experience after they arrive in Australia, but not their continuing links to migrant places of origin overseas. An exception to this is the China–Australia Heritage Corridor project—an Australian Research Council-funded Discovery Project initiated by researchers at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University to document the diasporic dimension of Chinese migrant heritage to Australia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Under the umbrella of the China–Australia Heritage Corridor project, this doctoral thesis specifically explores the social and architectural dimension of the Chinese diaspora’s educational philanthropy in the period from the early twentieth century until the present. It helps reveal how Chinese migration to Australia ultimately resulted in the socio-material transformation of the native home of migrants in the Pearl River Delta of China’s Guangdong Province, specifically in relation to the construction and operation of modern schools there. This thesis presents a dual—qiaoxiang and diaspora—perspective that disrupts the conventional understanding of migrant heritage as defined by the nation-state. The study is the first of its kind to examine how the Chinese diaspora relates to the material heritage of the diaspora-funded school setting in China. Diaspora-funded schools were unique socio-material assemblages that first emerged in southern China in the early twentieth century. This thesis reveals how the modern school shaped a new way of life and future for the qiaoxiang. The socio-material legacies of the diaspora-funded school buildings are a testimony to the generosity of the donors, but the schools may also become a burden for donors and their descendants, requiring maintenance and continuous improvement. Since the 1980s, Chinese migrants in Australia (and their descendants) continued the tradition of erecting new schools and renovating old ones as a way to contribute to the qiaoxiang’s future. But this second wave of construction only lasted until the turn of the twentieth-first century, after which China no longer depended on the diaspora as a funding source for schools. The thesis concludes that Chinese-Australian migrant heritage in China remains relevant to both China and Australia. It testifies to the history of their mutual entanglement and place-based attachment, as well as improving intergenerational relationships. It also has potential to strengthen the transnational ties established by the history of diaspora philanthropy.

A new wave of Chinese migrants arrived in Australia in the 1980s. These newcomers, having arrived in a post-assimilationist multicultural Australia, were more culturally aware than their nineteenth-century predecessors. The book under review considers an earlier period of Australian history. Chronicling the time that preceded Australia's multiculturalism, South Flows the Pearl is a collection of single-person narratives with twelve then-elderly' Chinese Australians who lived through the era of 'White Australia'. Only one of the interlocutors was alive at the time of publication. Author Mavis Gock Yen went through the Cultural Revolution (1967-76) in China. Her experience during that period prompted her to undertake an oral history project in Australia, recording interviews with Chinese Australians between 1987 and 1995 with the aim of recording their various life experiences. Stepping away from the type of history penned by European 'outsiders', this self-initiated project was conceived by an 'insider' who understood the complexities of her subjects' lives. Not only had Mavis lived through the latter part of the same historical period as her subjects, but she also spoke the same languages. Like the narrators, Mavis was considered a foreigner in 'her country', whether she was in China or Australia. She too experienced discrimination, a family divided by geopolitics, and felt excluded from the national history in both Australia and China. During the assimilation period, the Chinese in Australia were ridiculed for not being 'white' (or 'Australian') enough. The same people would again be alienated with the advent of multiculturalism, and particularly the arrival of the new Chinese-this time, for not being 'Chinese' enough. Various themes run through the volume, one of them being discrimination. Many narrators recall all kinds of insults and nicknames: not just stereotypical 'Ching Chong Chinaman', but also a gamut of southern Chinese appellations used by fellow Chinese, for example, gum shan haak (金山客, gold mountain guests), choy gee lo (財主佬, rich fellow), tai jee jay (太子仔, crown prince), loi lek bat ming (來歷不明, of unknown provenance) (p. 10). While some learnt to defend themselves by fighting back, others got used to it and ignored it over time. These accounts, of both the discrimination and responses to it, and accounts of it coming from within the Chinese community, enrich our understanding of the diversity of the Chinese-Australian experiences. Despite experiences of discrimination, Australia remained a desirable destination for Chinese people, due mainly to the perception of opportunity. During the gold rush era, there was a belief that gold could be 'picked up off the ground' (p. 99), and that wealth was easily acquired. This theme persisted well into the twentieth century: as late as 1977 returnees to China and Hong Kong were viewed as 'millionaires' by relatives (p. 310). But for those who ventured abroad, their realities in the 'Gold Mountain' were often far from that: instead, wealth was gained through labour, Reviews: Cheng Studies in Oral History 2022 200 often confined to vegetable and market gardens or in Chinatown. Evelyn Yin Lo, for example, remembers how, in the postwar period, her poor mother 'never stopped working, not even for one day' (p. 241). Another theme that emerges is work ethic. An interesting theme the book picks up on is the impact of peoples' return to China. For example, up to the early twentieth century, emigrants returned to their ancestral home in China's Pearl River Delta to build brick houses (pp. 68, 98, 136, 346) and invest in rice paddies or businesses (pp. 69, 143). All these transformed the fate of the villagers living in south China, bringing with them a perceived prosperity. But behind the benefits of emigration, lurked the curse of sudden wealth, where the spendthrift sons or grandson (tai jee jay) 'bludged on the labours of their [fore]fathers' (p. 98). In still-poor rural China, rising affluence of emigrant families depending on Australian remittances, left such families in China living in constant fear of robbery, kidnapping, and even murder (pp. 139, 155). With interviews held far away from ancestral villages, a strength of the book is the author's skilful navigation between two worlds and two languages. Two interviews were recorded in Cantonese, while the rest (n=10) were in vernacular Australian-English. Words like larrikin (p. 128), dump (p. 346), mate (p.157) and outback (p. 90) pepper the text. Interestingly, those who spoke Cantonese generally tend not to consider themselves Australians; this was not because of exclusionary policies, but due to linguistic and cultural reasons that underpinned a tendency to self-identify as Chinese rather than Australian. The book also describes the emergence of a Chinese-Australian identity: those who looked Chinese, but their minds were Australian (p. 257). An example is Elizabeth Lee, who vowed to never ask her children for money (p. 351). Western notions of equity and independence prevailed here, even if her ancestors depended on their children. In this way, the narratives offer a repertoire of instances of being 'fair dinkum Aussies', thus enriching Australian identity and history. In thought, language and experience, the book certainly documents an Australian way of life, albeit through Chinese bodies.

This book is about marine incidents that occurred on or near Queensland waters and seaways from 1859 to Federation, regarding Queensland's participation in the exploration, conversion, exploitation, possession, and governance of a group of people described as Papuan within the territory formerly known as British New Guinea.

In 1982, following a meeting in Venice with Bernard Hickey of blessed memory, I wrote a bemused article for the Age Monthly Review about the spread of OzLit in Europe. Brian Kiernan, then president of ASAL, replied by telegram: Last month (May 9-15 1982), the Association for the Study of Australian Literature held its annual conference in Adelaide. Over a hundred teachers and researchers of Australian Literature in universities and colleges throughout Australia attended …. At the general meeting disappointment and not a little irritation were expressed at the fatuous way in which serious interest in Australian literature abroad had been presented in the press. As current president of the Association, I was instructed to write to the Age Monthly Review in the hope of correcting the impression that there is something vaguely questionable, even a little ludicrous, in the notion that Australian literature could excite informed interest abroad, especially in cultured and sophisticated Europe. (2) ASAL was then at a high tide of missionary enthusiasm, though not without the sense of parody that has always been its forte. As a callow twenty-something who had been to Italy, I was treading on toes, going where angels know better. I replied: We needn't be prevented from recognizing in this amiable extension of Australian [literary] studies a cultural phenomenon in its own right, which, if it deserves encouragement, also arouses curiosity and invites speculation. … It may even be that bemusement is as useful as piety when it comes to learning something from the ways in which we can be misconstrued, and the ways in which we sometimes cooperate in those misconstructions. (2) Thus have I found myself an Australianist by accident, out of sheer love of the material, and because it came with the territory when I was overseas.

Post-indenture has largely been neglected in historical examinations of Chinese indentured labour in colonial contexts. We know little about what happened to workers after their contracts expired. Through the life of one Chinese man, Chi, and his small farming community in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Illawarra, New South Wales, Australia, I consider this issue. Drawing chiefly on church and other records usually used for research into local and family history, sources in which Chi’s voice is often audible, this paper highlights a continuity between indenture and post-indenture. Indeed, Chi’s ‘freedom’ after indenture was qualified. This indicates, I argue, that further attention to post-indenture could enable us to better understand indenture itself, as a system that may have endured well beyond the expiration of the labour contract. Concentrating on the individual and small community, I also contend, holds value in this respect, as a way of further exploring the continuity between the two states, and as a means of incrementally forming a fuller picture of post-indenture in its own right.

If Australia were invaded, should it be defended? This is the question at the heart of a short essay by Guy Rundle published in Arena in July 2020. Responding to the release of the Morrison government's last defence strategy paper, the essay began by rehashing some common left-wing critiques of Australian foreign policy. Australia, Rundle argued, is wrong to see China as aiming for world dominance, wrong that other Asian nations view China in this way, and arrogant in thinking the rest of Asia does not notice Australia's failure to create genuine links with the region. Such arguments are familiar enough, but for Rundle they only invited larger questions.

This article canvasses recent scholarship on migrants and refugees in Australian history. It covers broadly three main fields of enquiry: White Australia, postwar immigration and refugees since the Vietnam War. We argue there is a new dynamism to the field while simultaneously making the case that migrant and refugee history has hitherto been largely quarantined from mainstream Australian historiography.

In 2003, Australia's National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in Canberra commissioned a rising Australian contemporary artist, Ah Xian, to create a portrait of Dr John Yu, one of the country's most celebrated paediatricians. Both the artist and the subject have contributed greatly to Australian society and culture, yet it was to a certain extent their Chinese heritage that brought them together. The resulting portrait-Dr John Yu (2004, Figure 1)-communicates this 'Chineseness' in three interconnected aspects: above all, it is a deeply personal portrayal of a Chinese-Australian by a contemporary Chinese-Australian artist; at the same time, its medium, as well as the manner and location in which it was created, evoke an association with the history of Chinese porcelain; finally, Ah Xian's use of an iconic Chinese motif and the link that this creates with his other works suggests an added layer of cultural meaning. It is this third, cultural element that attains most significance, uniting with the personal and historical dimensions of meaning to communicate Ah Xian's and Yu's shared experiences as migrant citizens, shaped by their individual negotiations of 'Chinese-Australian' identity.

Although multicultural, Australia has not adequately documented the traditions of its immigrant communities, such as culturally specific dance styles. This article calls for an immigrant dance archive to be established. Perusal of existing archives reveals an Australian preference for Western theatrical dance. Oral histories are recommended as a data collection method and are an ideal means for relating somatic experiences and performance contexts. Accounts of migration, resettlement and resumption of dance practices in a novel environment can also be documented. Various issues relating to the proposed collection, including the fluidity of ‘community’ and the construction of subjective meaning through oral accounts, are addressed. Innovative strategies for presentations include combinations of oral, visual and performative data to formulate multi-modal narratives. Overall, the article advocates for collaborative collection building and describes potential benefits of the proposed archive for participants and the public.

Migration has been a vital element of human histories, cultures, and civilizations. Although it poses a long-standing issue, migration studies have made significant progress only in recent decades. The combination of the progress in interdisciplinary pursuits and the popularization of postmodern thought proved to be enough to establish it as a discipline in the late 1990s (Greenwood and Hunt 2003). Since then, scholars have used different approaches and scopes of analysis to tackle the phenomenon, ranging from 'geographies of migration' to 'diasporas and transnationalism' (Pisarevskaya et al. 2020). As Alejandro Portes (1997) predicted, the newly emerged pluralism contributed to the shift of focus from issues of governance to themes of families and gender in the twenty-first century. Academia and policymakers began to give more attention to the complexity of migration, thus leading to the increase of work on identity narratives, such as migrants and their descendants' dual identities (De Fina 2003; Jens and Carbaugh 2001). However, this change did not last long. Due to the increase of such events as the rise of neo-nationalist right-wing populism, terrorism, and the global increase of migration waves in recent years, the public discourse has returned to the preexisting practice of a collective equation. The narrative has shifted from asking the question of 'how?' and 'why?' to 'how can we stop it?' and 'where they are from?'. As a result, the migrants have become numbers and their stories irrelevant, the act of compassion has given way to depersonalization, and the popularity of the focus on the individual dimension has decreased. Amid this turn of events, scholars of migration studies have continued to further the field's progress through the formulation of more innovative and ambitious research. Among these, the publication, Remembering Migration: Oral Histories and Heritage in Australia, edited by Kate Darian-Smith and Paula Hamilton, has stood out. The book constitutes one of the most comprehensive studies of diverse migrant memories in Australia since the 1950s, when Jean Martin compiled the life and integration stories of displaced

Migrants all over the world have left multiple traces in different countries, and this cultural heritage is of growing interest to researchers and to the migrant communities themselves. Cultural heritage institutions, however, have dwindling funds and resources to meet the demand for the heritage of immigrant communities to be protected. In this article we propose that the key to bridging this gap is to be found in new possibilities that are opened up if resources are linked to enable digital exploration of archival records and collections. In particular, we focus on the value of building a composite and distributed resource around migrants' life courses. If this approach is used and dispersed collections held by heritage institutions can be linked, migrant communities can have access to detailed information about their families and researchers to a wealth of data-serial and qualitative-for sophisticated and innovative research. Not only does the scattered data become more usable and manageable, it becomes more visible and coherent; patterns can be discovered that were not apparent before. We use the Dutch-Australian collaborative project "Migrant: Mobilities and Connection" as an example and case study of this life course-centered methodology and propose that this may develop into a migration heritage template for migrants worldwide. Global migration is one of the defining characteristics of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As Alexander Betts noted in 2015, "There is greater human mobility than ever before. In 1970, there were 70 million international migrants; today there are well over 200 million" (Betts 2015). With globalization, the opportunity and

They call me the angry Chinese How can I not be When I couldn' t be what I had wanted to be A totally different man From my original society When I realized for the ftrst time in my life That the west was a lie from Songs of the Last Chinese Poet 111 Ouyang Yu, the Chinese Australian poet who penned the lines above, is indeed regarded by many people as an angry Chinese. His sometimes in-your-face declarations can dislodge those who celebrate the successes of multiculturalism in 34

Australia has a tradition of imaginative engagement with Asia which is both tentative and complex. Perhaps the complexity can be seen to resolve itself in terms of a magnetic alternation between attraction and repulsion, depending on the kind of fantasy currently swaying the collective mind. In the words of Alison Broinowski, "it has been characteristic of Australian responses to Asia since the last century to oscillate between wide extremes", a pattern made possible "fundamentally by ignorance". 1 Arguably this sort of ignorance derives in part from Australia's centripetal impetus, at a time when it is still attempting to consolidate its own sense of national identity. Indeed, Alan Lawson has pointed out that "social, literary and political commentators in Australia and Canada have, perhaps, shown an even greater obsession with the problem of national identity than those of other emergent colonial or post-colonial nations". 2 If, in the case of Australia, one agrees to see this as a side-effect of a problematic "tyranny of distance" from a European "home", then the mixed response to Asia can be clarified in the light of the struggle for national self-definition. 3 Clearly, as an epitome of the inscrutable which pulls at the tide of national consciousness, "Asia" in its haunting proximity only enhances Australians' sense of disconnection from familiar (European) points of cultural reference. Conversely, though, if approached as a more attractive matrix of identity, "Asia" can also be found to provide ready-made configurations of sensibility, easily recuperable for the purpose of post-colonial emancipation from Europe. However, the point is that this duality is only apparent, as it can be shown that in any case the concern with Asia is part and parcel of a self-centred exploration of the distinctive nature of Australian experience. In literature, the two extremes of perception are equally illustrated. The first pattern in Australian thinking about Asia, in which the place is depicted as mostly hostile, is memorably represented by C.J. Koch's The Year of Living Dangerously (1978), which typically takes as a setting Jakarta in 1965 when Indonesia was going to descend into the spiral of political unrest and violence that would precipitate the fall of Sukarno. In this pattern, the Australian interloper is usually quite unable to apprehend all the political and cultural forces underlying the violence, in a way which makes him/her not only irredeemably alien, but also dangerously vulnerable. This is again the case in Robert Drewe's A Cry in the Jungle Bar (1979), in which the protagonist is an apolitical Australian touring the continent on a scientific mission. Although he desperately tries to maintain his disinterested stance throughout the experience (which proves to be harrowing), his non-commitment is eventually exposed as a form of innocence which is both untenable and fatal-while the myth of Asia's inscrutability is reinforced in the process. As Drewe himself commented, "the discomfited, innocent white man in Asia is hardly a new idea", 4 but it takes on renewed significance in post-colonial times when the foreign scene, far from being susceptible of inclusion within the colonial order, instead emerges as an intractable

Based on broad research investigating British immigrants in post-Second World War Australia, this article examines various impacts of the passing of imperialism on this group, tracing how they have been "passengers" both of national memory in Australia and more recently of their own narratives. Arguing also that British migrants have been subject on occasion to postimperial forgetting, it is emphasised here that British migrants display heterogenous constructions and negotiations of identity that may reflect new departures.

The paper expresses deep concern for the paucity of critical accounting scholarship in the contemporary period that can only be deemed hyper-racial (Alim and Reyes, 2011). By reflecting on how the concept of race has been mobilized in the critical accounting literature, we identify the contours of extant accounting research on race and we discuss the pitfalls and the challenges of pursuing scholarship in this area. In addition, we develop a framework for future research on race and accounting aimed at rendering our efforts more impactful and more subversive in challenging contemporary systems and practices of inequality based on race. 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. There is a myth in this country, a fable some people cherish because it makes them feel good and demands no moral or intellectual heavy lifting. That myth holds that we are done with race and have been for a very long time, that we overcame, learned our lesson, reached the Promised Land and built luxury condos there (Leonard Pitts Jr., 2015).

I analyze historical changes in American immigration law and the subsequent responses of Chinese immigrants during the Chinese Exclusion Era. Using the political process model's concept of “political opportunity structure,” I examine how the indeterminate nature of the Chinese Exclusion laws provided key opportunities for mobilization. I present an interactive framework that considers not only how the broader political environment