Significant Chinese emigration to Australia only began in earnest after the discovery of gold and the sequent gold rushes in Australia. This migration shaped and influenced Australian policies on immigration for over a century. While small numbers of Chinese settlers had arrived as early as 1818, the gold rush triggered a dramatic increase in their presence. However, existing prejudices and cultural misunderstandings led to conflict between Chinese and European communities, culminating in violent riots at Lambing Flat and Buckland. These tensions resulted in the enactment of anti-Chinese legislation by various Australian colonies, foreshadowing the implementation of the discriminatory White Australia policy from 1901 to 1973.
Earliest Chinese contact with Australia: pre-1848
Some have speculated that northern Aboriginal Australians had dealings with Indonesian traders and so may have had some indirect interaction with Chinese traders in the trepanging market. The first recorded link between China and Australia occurred during the establishment of the Colony of New South Wales. 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.The Dictionary of Sydney, The First Fleet, https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/first_fleet The Bigge Report attributed the high level of tea drinking to 'the existence of an intercourse with China from the foundation of the Colony ...''Bigge Report, Remarks on Distillation, 28/1/1821. Many East India Company ships used Australia as a port of call on their trips to and from buying tea from China. 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. John Macarthur, a prominent pastoralist, employed three Chinese workers on his estates in the 1820s, though his records may well have neglected others.
Indentured labour: 1848 to 1853
The ethnic Chinese such as Macarthur's employees were part of the varied mix of people that inhabited early Sydney Town. It was the increasing demand for cheap labour after convict transportation ceased in the 1840s that led to much larger numbers of Chinese men arriving as indentured labourers, to work as shepherds for private landowners and the Australian Agricultural Company.Darnell, Maxine, Life and labour for indentured Chinese shepherds in New South Wales, 1847-55: [Paper in special issue: Active Voices, Hidden Histories: The Chinese in Colonial Australia.] Journal of Australian Colonial History, Vol. 6, 2004, pp.137-158. These workers mainly came from the province of Fujian via the port of Amoy, with some having been kidnapped and brought to Australia. The practise was often referred to pejoratively as the 'sale of pigs'. In the 1850s, the opening of ports such as Amoy as treaty ports facilitated the practice of importing indentured labour.Michael Williams, Chinese Settlement in NSW, p.4, https://www.heritage.nsw.gov.au/assets/Uploads/a-z-publications/a-c/chinesehistory.pdf
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. Little is known of the habits of such men or their relations with other New South Wales residents except for those that appear in the records of the courts and mental asylums. 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. The British were conscious of jeopardising the stipulation that British subjects be allowed to reside in the newly opened treaty ports in China and they made this stipulation reciprocal. So as to avoid antagonising the ruling Qing dynasty, the British government often overruled the Australian colonies when they attempted to exclude Chinese immigration.Michael Williams, Chinese Settlement in NSW, p.5, https://www.heritage.nsw.gov.au/assets/Uploads/a-z-publications/a-c/chinesehistory.pdf
Gold rush: 1850s and 1860s
The 1850s and 1860s saw the largest pre-federation Chinese migration to Australia, with numbers peaking around 40,000, although most returned to China after the gold rush. These numbers were only reached again after the abolition of the White Australia policy in 1973. Gold was found at several places in Australia in 1851 but significant Chinese migration to join the diggers only began late in 1853.Shirley Fitzgerald, Red Tape, Gold Scissors, State Library of NSW Press, Sydney, 1997, pp. 13-18.
Most Chinese who came to Australia for the gold rush were from Southern China. The Californian Gold Rush had been known as 'old gold mountain' to the Chinese of Guangdong. The Australian rush was known as 'new gold mountain'. Chinese immigrants to Australia left such conditions as overpopulation and poverty. 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.
The average voyage from Canton via Hong Kong to Sydney and Melbourne took about 3 months. 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. These fares were often paid through a system of debt to clan leaders and/or to agents who accompanied them on the ship. Such methods of travel were known as credit-tickets. However, some Chinese were able to pay their own way. These were often the wealthier city-born men who were coming to Australia to be merchants or work in an industry other than gold mining. From 1853 to 1855, thousands of Chinese disembarked in Melbourne and headed for the goldfields.
Very few Chinese women came to Australia during this period. In 1861, at least 38,000 Chinese people lived in the Australian colonies with the vast majority being men.Australian Bureau of Statistics, Table 8.3 Population(a), sex and country of birth, Qld, Census years, 1861 - 1891, https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/[email protected]/mf/3105.0.65.001 On the goldfields in Bendigo in 1861 there were 5,367 Chinese men and only one Chinese woman. By 1861, there were around 40,000 Chinese people living in Australia, constituting 3.3% of the total population.Au-Yeung, W., et al(2012), "Australia-China: Not just 40 years ", Economic Roundup, 2012(4)
Chinese Restriction Act and The Walk from Robe The arrivals of large numbers of Chinese gold seekers into the only recently created Colony of Victoria caused great alarm among its politicians and gold seekers. In the Victorian parliament, it was argued that it was a security risk to have so many Chinese in the colony who were fighting the Europeans. But the real issue was fear of competition on the goldfields, and in 1855 the Victorian parliament passed the Chinese Restriction Act in an effort to restrict Chinese immigration. These restrictions, including a £10 poll tax on Chinese and a limit to Chinese passengers per tonnage of shipping, caused a reduction in ship owners' profitability, leading to an increase in the already high fares. The Act did limit the numbers of Chinese arriving in Victorian ports, with official Victorian records showing over 10,000 Chinese arrived in Victoria between 1853 and 1855 but only a few hundred in the next two years.
However, the numbers of Chinese on the Victorian goldfields continued to increase heavily. The Chinese were instead travelling to South Australia, and between 1855 and 1857 thousands of Chinese landed in the Port of Adelaide and in Robe, South Australia. The population of the small town of Robe quickly doubled as it developed into a port of call for Chinese continuing onto the Victorian goldfields, while many others disembarked in Sydney and began to enter the NSW goldfields of the central districts. 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. Parties of Chinese men would often pay for local guides to take them to the goldfields in what was a well organised exercise.
Experience on the goldfields After finally arriving on the goldfields the Chinese goldseekers faced many hardships. There was a lot of anti-Chinese sentiment amongst the European miners. In July 1854 in the Bendigo Advertiser it was reported that William Denovan called for an uprising for the purpose of 'the driving of the Chinese population off the Bendigo goldfield'.Bendigo Advertiser, 1854 A riot was averted by the local police commissioner. However, this sort of sentiment was widespread throughout the Australian gold rushes. In 1857 this sentiment caused the Buckland Riot and in 1860-1861 the Lambing Flat riots in NSW. There was also unrest around Ararat when a party of Chinese men were the first to discover gold there and kept the find quiet.
In answer to these problems the parliaments of Victoria and NSW had differing approaches. Victoria installed Chinese protectors modelled on a similar effort in Singapore in 1855. However, the Chinese miners resented the extra £1 per annum residency tax this system required and strong resistance meant it had lapsed by 1861.Anna Kyi‘“The most determined, sustained diggers’ resistance campaign”: Chinese protests against the Victorian Government's anti-Chinese legislation 1855-1862’, Provenance: The Journal of Public Record Office Victoria, issue no. 8, 2009. ISSN 1832-2522, https://prov.vic.gov.au/explore-collection/provenance-journal/provenance-2009/most-determined-sustained-diggers-resistance After this the Victorian system was similar to that in NSW, where Gold Commissioners in charge of the goldfields handled all disputes. In general this meant segregation to minimise the chances of conflict, though again in reality many Chinese people lived where they chose.
Thus, in most of the goldfields of Victoria and NSW Chinese people lived in so called "camps". The camps soon consisted of buildings similar to others but were the forerunners to later Chinatowns in many places. The organization of these camps was often done around clan, or dialect differences where this was applicable. While most of the men were from the Guangdong province, several different dialects and Chinese languages were present on the goldfields.
These camps were their own little communities. To the Europeans these were notorious and exotic places. At the same time in China, opium addiction was rampant, some of the men brought this addiction with them to the goldfields. Two of the most common finds by modern fossickers in the area of Chinese camps are Chinese coins and opium pipes. However, the records of local health groups and hospitals show only low numbers of Chinese were ever treated for their opium addictions.