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Chinese settlers and sojourners

Ray Evans.

Historian Ray Evans describes the arrivals of Chinese in Queensland in the nineteenth century and the restrictions and racism they faced.

Created:

2005

Date Added:

16 February 2006

Source:

Ray Evans interviewed by Andrew Jakubowicz for MMA

Format:

mov (Quicktime);

File size:

12.6 MB

Length:

4 min 18 s

Transcript

Chinese settlers and sojourners in Queensland

Chinese and so on that come here would have found it a very different place from their home country as well. It's a very vast piece of territory, it's one of the biggest single colonies of the British Empire. It's about twelve times the size of Great Britain, Queensland is…

It has a big British core. It also has quite interesting other sectors of non-British people, whether they happen to be European, or non-European peoples…

From the end of the 1840s they start bringing in Chinese bonded labourers in quite significant numbers considering the size of the settlement. It's only a small minority compared to what you're going to see with the gold rushes, where you get quite large numbers coming in. But this little group of Chinese create quite a stir in the society because they are so remarkably different-looking, and their behaviour is different…

You've got probably about 50,000 Chinese coming to the Queensland colony over the nineteenth century. Now to put those numbers into some context, the European population – or let's say the white population – by the 1890s, is 300,000…

Then you've got a whole series of gold rushes, in the 1860s and 1870s, which are sometimes said to be the saving grace of the colony…

They come as credit ticket holders, in that they're working for a syndicate, for a Chinese syndicate or a Chinese businessman. They have to more or less win a certain amount of gold for that entrepreneur before they begin themselves to be making any money. And they often work in gangs, watched over by headmen and so on, and they're a fairly tight knit community. They have their own systems of law that they bring with them, and they have their own quite powerful social organisations and community groups…

Race rioting against Chinese actually begins before the gold rushes. 1851: near here, Longpocket, near Ipswich, the first anti-Chinese riot in Australia. That's against those Chinese indentured labourers…

The Palmer River Rush 1877

The uniqueness of this rush is that there are more Chinese there than there are Europeans. The Chinese are enormously outnumbering the Europeans. There are a few thousand Europeans there, and there are possibly anywhere between 15 and 20,000 Chinese…

It was a difficult field to get to and Europeans were initially not so keen on going there. It was also a very, very rough and violent frontier. And there's a lot of Aboriginal activism in that area in terms of trying to resist the invader, the incomer. And so Chinese are being speared, whites are being speared and so on. So really, it's one of those gold fields where you've got a triangular racial conflict situation going on…

With the 1880s of course you've got increasing restriction on Chinese migration. And they do this by restricting the number of Chinese to the tonnage of the ship…

From 1877 Queensland starts to bring in quite restrictive migration legislation. And as far as the Colonial Office is concerned, they say it's the most restrictive. And of course the tonnage is going up all the time – it starts out one Chinese to every ten tons of ship tonnage. And by 1888 it's one to every 500 tons…

You've got the rise of the labour press, which is absolutely unrestrained in its attack on non-white workers. Now this is partly because of economic competition, but it's not just economic competition. There's a strong aspect involved here of wanting to have a racially pure society.