Journal of Chinese Overseas 9 (2013) 99-106 brill.com/jco

Introduction Chinese Australians: Politics, Engagement and Activism

Sophie Couchman and Kate Bagnall* Guest Editors

This special issue of the Journal of Chinese Overseas draws on papers and ideas from the Dragon Tails Chinese-Australian history and heritage conference held at the Chinese Museum in Melbourne, Australia, in November 2011. Papers at the conference addressed issues related to sources, language and approaches used in telling the history of Chinese in Australia. “Politics”, in the broadest sense of the word, as a force that influences people on a civic and individual level, emerged as a strong theme throughout the conference and forms the theme of this special issue. The conference brought together aca- demics of many disciplines, community and family historians, government policy makers, educators and the interested public. This collegial spirit is an exciting part of the research community working in Chinese-Australian his- tory and heritage, and this special issue follows in a long tradition of confer- ences and their resulting publications.1 The field of Chinese Australian history is comparatively young. It emerged in the 1960s and 1970s out of a desire by scholars to understand Australia’s White Australia Policy — its implementation over the final decades of the nineteenth century and its subsequent gradual deconstruction from the mid- dle of the twentieth century. The White Australia Policy is a broad term used to

* Dr Sophie Couchman is Curator at the Chinese Museum in Melbourne and an Honorary Research Fellow at La Trobe University. Her email address is [email protected]. Dr Kate Bagnall is a public historian based in Canberra, Australia. Her email address is [email protected]. They were joint convenors of Dragon Tails 2011: Sources, Language, Approaches, an Australasian conference on overseas Chinese history and heritage held at the Chinese Museum, Melbourne, from 11 to 14 November 2011. 1 For further information about previous Chinese‑Australian history and heritage conferences and their related publications see http://www.dragontails.com.au/past-conferences (accessed 25 July 2013). For a second special issue from the 2011 Dragon Tails conference see: Kate Bagnall and Sophie Couchman, eds. 2013. “Sources, language and approaches in Chinese Australian history”, special issue of Chinese Southern Diaspora Studies, 6.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/17932548-12341255 100 Sophie Couchman, Kate Bagnall / Journal of Chinese Overseas 9 (2013) 99-106 cover a range of legislation and administrative practices that severely restricted non-white immigration, particularly Chinese or “Asiatic”, to Australia and, more broadly, the rights of these individuals and their descendants once they settled in Australia. It followed in the wake of earlier colonial anti-Chinese leg- islation. Labour historians of the 1960s and 1970s were particularly keen to explore the relationship between Australia’s emerging labour movement and ideas about race and Australia’s White Australia Policy. By the 1980s and early 1990s, when interest in social history was blossoming and government policies also favoured a multicultural approach to Australia’s population, the field grew as both scholars and descendants of early Chinese immigrants sought to high- light the hitherto ignored contribution of Chinese individuals and families in the making of Australia. Since then the field has continued to evolve. Over the past two decades scholars have been exploring in more detail the nature of the Chinese communities that developed in Australia, the significant and influential individuals who were part of these communities and the ways in which they interacted within Chinese communities, as well as with broader Australian communities. Scholars have become much more interested in the motivations and perspectives of Chinese Australians themselves, rather than examining Chinese lives through the eyes of white Australians, as had been the case with much earlier scholarship. Recent work is also addressing the com- plexity of what it meant to have Chinese and mixed Chinese ancestry in Aus- tralia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and how forces that operated across and between nations have shaped the lives and identities of Chinese in Australia. Searching for “Chinese Australian voices” within the his- torical record has led scholars into painstaking and detailed research in gov- ernment archives and also towards exploring a much wider range of sources than might generally be seen in such a small field. It is not uncommon for scholars to draw on material culture, archaeology, memory and oral testimony, and visual imagery in addition to more traditional documentary sources in order to locate these “voices”. It is also pleasing to see a much greater interest by scholars (both those literate and not literate in Chinese) in engaging with Chinese‑language sources. The field has further benefited from the expansion of digitized historical source material available online. Recent scholarship in Chinese-Australian history is also overthrowing some of the standard tropes that have influenced the portrayal of Chinese Austra- lians in mainstream historical works. John Fitzgerald’s landmark book, Big White Lie, tackles an assumption that Chinese immigrants did not share the same values — of freedom, equality and mateship — as other (British) immi- grants to Australia (Fitzgerald, 2007). Chinese immigration and the rights of Chinese immigrants were curtailed on the basis that they were incapable of