History of Chinese Australians

Though some have theorised that northern Aboriginal Australians had dealings with ethnic Chinese traders, the vast majority state that they interacted indirectly via trepanging.

Three ships of the First Fleet, Scarborough, Charlotte and Lady Penrhyn, after depositing their convicts in the colony, sailed for Canton with the intent to purchase tea and other Chinese goods to sell on their return to Britain.

These ships carried some ethnic Chinese sailors, and some historians have raised the possibility that they chose to disembark in the port of Sydney to start a new life in the colony.

In 1818, John Shying who was born in Guangzhou (Canton) in 1798 had arrived and after a period of working as a farmer, in 1829, he became the publican of The Lion in Parramatta.

[3] The ethnic Chinese such as Macarthur's employees were part of the varied mix of people that inhabited early Sydney Town.

[5] Between 1848 and 1853, over 3,000 Chinese workers on labour contracts arrived via the port of Sydney for employment in the New South Wales (then including Victoria and Queensland) countryside.

Resistance to this cheap labour occurred as soon as it arrived, and, like such protests later in the century, was heavily spurred on by racist opposition towards the ethnicity of the Chinese emigrants.

Some stayed for the term of their contracts and then left for home, but there is evidence that others spent the rest of their lives in New South Wales, marrying and founding families that are only now rediscovering their Chinese heritage.

A Gulgong resident who died at age 105 in 1911 had been in New South Wales since 1841 while in 1871 the Keeper of Lunacy still required the Amoy dialect from his interpreters.

So as to avoid antagonising the ruling Qing dynasty, the British government often overruled the Australian colonies when they attempted to exclude Chinese immigration.

Gold was found at several places in Australia in 1851 but significant Chinese migration to join the diggers only began late in 1853.

These issues impacted many parts of China, but immigrants to California and the Australian colonies came mainly from the counties most proximate to the port of Hong Kong.

It was a profitable exercise for the ship masters, and the more Chinese passengers they could fit on board the more money they could make from the passage fares.

After arrival in South Australia, the large number probably in the thousands of Chinese miners then walked the long overland route to the Victorian goldfields.

However, the Chinese miners resented the extra £1 per annum residency tax this system required and strong resistance meant it had lapsed by 1861.

However, the records of local health groups and hospitals show only low numbers of Chinese were ever treated for their opium addictions.

This could be seen as a cause for the Lambing Flats Riots and then later the same problems were found on the Palmer River Goldfields in the late 1870s where Chinese miners vastly outnumbered Europeans.

One of the most compelling arguments for federation amongst the public and politicians of the time was that a united immigration policy would secure the borders of all the Australian colonies.

One prominent Chinese Australian at this time was gold seeker Wong Ah Sat and Mei Quong Tart who ran a popular tea house in the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney.

The government of Victoria but not New South Wales passed a Factories and Shops Act that targeted Chinese working in that industry.

They were also part of an international community involved in political events in China such as sending delegates to a Peking Parliament or making donations at times of natural disaster.

Numbers increased rapidly again when refugees consisting of ethnic Chinese toddlers began to enter Australia as the result of WW2.

The Northern Territory's administrator Aubrey Abbott had written to Joseph Carrodus, secretary of the Department of the Interior, in 1943 to propose "the elimination of undesirable elements which Darwin has suffered from far too much in the past" and stated that compulsory acquisition and conversion to leasehold should "entirely prevent the Chinese quarter forming again".

The territory's civilian population had mostly been evacuated during the war and the former Chinatown residents returned to find their homes and businesses reduced to rubble.

At the same time cafes began to replace market gardens as the major source of employment and avenue for bringing in new migrants, both legal and illegal.

These changes, combined with the increased number of Australian-born Chinese, the final return of the last of the domiciles who still wished to do so and the arrival of Chinese background students under the Colombo Plan from various parts of Asia, brought about the end of the dominance of south China in the link between China and Australia that had existed for nearly 100 years.

The final end of the White Australia Policy saw new arrivals from the Chinese diaspora and for the first time significant numbers from non-Cantonese speaking parts of China.

The first wave of arrivals were ethnic Chinese refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia during the 1970s; this was followed by economic migrants from Hong Kong in the 1980s and 1990s, whose families often settled in Sydney while the breadwinner returned to Hong Kong to continue earning an income – a significant reversal of the traditional migration pattern.

After the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, the then Australian Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, allowed students from mainland China then resident to settle in Australia permanently.

The equality of citizenship laws and family reunion immigration after 1972 meant that an imbalance of the sexes, once a dominant feature of the Chinese communities in Australia, was not an issue in these later migrations.