After the gold rush; before Tiananmen: how Chinese-Australians put down deep roots in the regions
Three years ago in the town of Moree, a small general store shut down, just eight years short of what would’ve been its hundredth anniversary.
The name didn’t really strike me as one that would seem odd to those outside the north-west. Not until years later: Hong Yuens. Not until I spent some time in Brisbane, and saw that people seemed amazed that, yes, there were Chinese people outside Sunnybank – sometimes way outside.
The name never struck me as odd, growing up in Bingara. But not out of some innate Asian-Australian familiarity with Chinese names.
To me, Hong Yuens was just the name of the shop at Moree. It had been there since I’d been born. It had been there for 30 years before my father was born. Hong Yuens had just always been there.
The popular history of Chinese people in Australia seems limited to pre-federation, pre-White Australia policy goldrush miners, their skill and diligence raising the ire and envy of the Europeans. Only taking, never contributing. Or some sort of 1980s-era boomer-approved refugees, fleeing from Tiananmen and Type 59 tanks.
Either a villain or a victim, but always the other, interlopers in the Aussie milieu.
The White Australia policy was the first thing the new commonwealth passed into law in 1901. It didn’t just halt the influx of Chinese migrants; it also had the effect of freezing the narrative of Chinese people in Australia as simply a people excluded.
The popular narrative is that there are roughly two eras of Chinese immigration in Australia: 19th-century miners, those ponytailed ghosts of the goldfields; and then the post-White
Australia influx of immigrants, starting with those fleeing Tiananmen tanks in the 1980s.
But this ignores a hundred years of history of the Chinese people who managed to stay after federation, like my grandfather, or those diaspora from the outposts of collapsing empires – Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Timor-Leste – some of whom emigrated to live and work in Australia during the height of the White Australia policy.
The concept of Chinese people as foreigners in Australia was always a foreign concept to me, mostly because I never really felt Chinese – at least, not in the way that I was supposed to be. Hell, I’m allergic to shellfish.
It’s never really been my identity. Instead, I was always just … Australian. Small country town, hunting, fishing, raising the odd cow or two, nearly getting murdered by horses. OK, yes, there was some occasional gold panning, but the return on that isn’t really worth the effort these days.
The reality is that the Chinese diaspora in Australia stretches beyond these boundaries, and, well, some of us slipped past the net and forged a life.
Diana Giese, in her 1995 book Beyond Chinatown,called it “the often hidden history”. Chinese-Australians: Chinese people who were, and are, Australian. Not separate, not others, not dwelling on the fringe. Not on the outside looking in.
My grandfather – Goong-Goong, or Charles See-Kee, gave a lecture in 1987, published as an occasional paper for the Northern Territory library called Chinese Contribution To Early Darwin.
He notes that four previous attempts to settle the Northern Territory all failed, until Chinese labourers, used to the heat and humidity, were brought in from Singapore on the fifth attempt in the 1860s. Only then did Darwin take root.
And only once Chinese workers had laid the foundations and gotten things going were the doors shut to them, with tariffs placed on their entry to Australia. A string of alarmist tariffs and rates on their travel beyond the new northern settlement were also imposed. Without Chinese labour, it’s unlikely Darwin would even exist at all.
But many stuck around, building businesses and a thriving Chinatown.
These people slipped through the net of the White Australia policy by dint of already being here. They were part of the foundation of the new country; after all, they helped build it.
I’ve never been exactly clear on how Goong-Goong ended up in Australia, at least from a legal standpoint. I know he fled the New Territories after a mock execution (where he debated with his captors about whether to be shot or beheaded). Goong-Goong had been working for EWO Brewery in Shanghai, and in the chaos of the second world war, no one seemed to mind him being in Australia. I’m not even sure he had citizenship, even when working as the secretary to the NT administrator on 19 February 1942, on censorship, or joining the RAAF.
The See-Kee family owned a pearling company, See Yick, on Thursday Island, and Goong-Goong attended Nudgee College in his 20s. His mum had an Aussie passport, and he had Hong Kong residences, but none of that was a guarantee of acceptance and citizenship.
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After the war, he raised a properly Catholic number of kids, and between work he found time to help found the Chung Wah society, coach sports teams, throw my mother into a cupboard on Christmas Eve of 1974 to shelter her from Cyclone Tracy and feed and settle boat people at the request of the Hawke government in the 80s. There was an OAM, and when he died, Charles Darwin University named a scholarship after him.
None of this was the life of an outsider. This was not a function of being peripheral to the community.
Somehow, it seems, Goong-Goong became a fixture, then an institution.
In regional Australia, there’s almost always some echo of the Chinese presence, remembered fondly as a general store, a market garden, a shoe shop, or the omnipresent Chinese restaurant. In places like Darwin and Broome, the Chinese presence runs deep, not as the story of outsiders, but of founding members.
This sort of engagement and integration of Chinese people with Australian communities over the years, and especially for most of the 20th century during the dark days of the White Australia policy, seems to have been forgotten. Or, at least, unnoticed. I’ve never really thought of myself as anything other than Australian, but still that Chinese family history is there.
But that’s the point, isn’t it? These Chinese people grew to become … Australia. So much so that they’re not really noticed as anything new or different or special.
We’ve always been here.