Chinese in Australia

The Chinese presence in colonial Australia is one of the most significant and least adequately documented subjects in the history of Australian immigration. Drawn initially by the gold rushes of the 1850s — which brought tens of thousands of men from Guangdong province to the diggings of Victoria and New South Wales — the Chinese community established itself across the full range of colonial economic life, from market gardening and cabinet-making to the merchant trades of the major cities. The antique prints that document this presence are complex historical objects: produced almost entirely by non-Chinese illustrators for non-Chinese audiences, they reflect the assumptions and anxieties of colonial society as much as the realities of Chinese Australian life, and they must be read with that awareness.

The goldfields images are the most numerous and historically significant body of colonial illustration relating to Chinese Australians. Artists working on the Victorian and New South Wales diggings depicted the Chinese camps, the Chinese methods of working alluvial ground and the social interactions — sometimes pacific, sometimes violently hostile — between Chinese and European miners with a variety of intentions and degrees of sympathy. The Buckland River riot of 1857, the Lambing Flat riots of 1860–1861 and the periodic episodes of anti-Chinese violence that punctuated colonial history appear in illustrated press coverage that documents both the events themselves and the attitudes that enabled them.

S.T. Gill, the most perceptive and prolific illustrator of goldfields life, depicted Chinese miners and their communities with a complexity that goes beyond the simple caricature that characterised much colonial imagery of Chinese subjects. His images show the daily reality of Chinese life on the diggings — the joss houses, the cooking fires, the communal working arrangements, the distinctive dress — with an observational accuracy that gives them documentary value that more obviously hostile or sympathetic images lack. These images are among the most important visual documents of Chinese Australian life in the gold rush era.

Urban Chinese communities — centred on the Chinatowns of Melbourne, Sydney and other colonial cities — attracted illustrative attention as subjects of exotic fascination for a non-Chinese readership. The illustrated press published images of Chinese shops, festivals, religious observances and community life that combined documentary observation with the orientalist conventions of Victorian popular illustration. These images are of considerable social historical interest, documenting both the character of Chinese urban communities and the visual conventions through which colonial society chose to represent them.

The political history of Chinese exclusion — the successive colonial and then federal legislation that restricted Chinese immigration and eventually, after Federation, formed a central plank of the White Australia Policy — generated its own body of political illustration. The caricatures and editorial cartoons of the colonial press reflect the racial anxieties that drove exclusion with a directness that is historically significant even as it is morally uncomfortable. These images are primary documents of the politics of race in colonial Australia.

For collectors of Australian history, the history of immigration and multiculturalism, or the visual culture of colonial society, antique prints relating to Chinese Australians offer material of unusual historical depth and social complexity. They document a community whose contribution to Australian history has been systematically undervalued, and they preserve evidence of the conditions — welcoming and hostile, documented and suppressed — in which that contribution was made.