Chinese in Australian Fiction, 1888–1988 By Ouyang Yu

The discovery of gold in Australia in 1851 attracted an enormous number of people from all over the world, particularly from England and Ireland, whence 290,000 migrated to Victoria in the years from 1852 to 1860.¹⁶ The Chinese made up the largest group of non-European migrants who came seeking gold. Their numbers in Victoria, for example, soared from 2,341 in 1854 to 17,000 by mid-1855. Almost all of them male,¹⁷ only three Chinese women had arrived in Victoria by 1857.¹⁸ This followed the traditional Chinese practice in migration, with only Chinese men allowed to go overseas; their women stayed home to maintain the family shrine and continue posterity.¹⁹ Another factor, the custom of foot binding, made it difficult for Chinese women to move around.

With the increasing number of Chinese in the Australian goldfields, tension developed between European and Chinese diggers. This led to a series of anti-Chinese riots, among them the ‘Buckland Massacre’ (1857),²⁰ the Lambing Flat Riots (1861), and the Clunes Riot (1873), resulting in much loss of Chinese life. Historians have suggested various reasons to explain these incidents. Some put the violence down to economic competition and cultural and religious differences,²¹ while others ascribe it to a racial fear of possible contamination of the British character of the community.²² Whatever the reasons, it remains clear that, as they grew in number, the Chinese in Australia were resented, feared, and eventually excluded.²³

With regard to the exclusion policies, the first restriction act passed in 1855 in Victoria as An Act to Make Provision for Certain Immigrants. This act limited the number of incoming Chinese passengers to one for every ten tons of registered tonnage and imposed a ten-pound capitation fee.²⁴ Further legislative restrictions followed in South Australia (1857) and New South Wales (1861), all identical and all suspended or dropped by 1867 because of their success in reducing the number of Chinese in those three colonies.²⁵

Ten years later, a second anti-Chinese wave swept throughout Australia when a large stream of Chinese migrants arrived in northeast Queensland. This time, Queensland took the initiative and in 1877 introduced a Chinese Immigration Restriction Act, effectively cutting the number of Chinese from 25,000 to 11,200 in 1881.²⁶