Introduction

by Kate Bagnall

Draft only, March 2017

‘A few Celestials . . . marry barbarian girls’ – Illustrated Australian News, 18681

People of the West always imagined themselves to be very different from the Chinese. When the two groups encountered each other in the colonies of south-eastern Australia in the mid-nineteenth century, this idea of difference underpinned the white colonials first and subsequent impressions of those arriving from the ‘Celestial Empire’. Small numbers of Chinese men and boys had arrived in Victoria and New South Wales before the 1850s, but it was with the discovery of gold that immigration from China rapidly increased. Between YEAR and YEAR, NUMBER of Chinese men arrived in Victoria, and NUMBER in New South Wales. Only a very small number of Chinese women and girls made the journey, particularly in the early years. NUMBERS.

The Chinese were only one immigrant group among many. The colonies also became home to new arrivals from Italy, Germany AND SO ON, as well as the many thousands arriving from England, Scotland and Ireland, but the Chinese were the most visible minority and the one which seemed most foreign to white Australian colonists. Not only did the Chinese look different from those of British and European stock, but their language, customs and religion were unfamiliar and unsettling. It was easy for white Australians to make unfounded and often outlandish accusations about the Chinese, from allegations of widespread homosexual practices and a supposed preference for eating dogs and cats to mockery of their broken English and queues (pigtails) and complaints about their frugal lifestyle and lack of ‘family life’ in the colonies. All of this rendered the Chinese more foreign and the Chinese became well aware of quite how white colonials perceived them.

Quite how the Chinese saw their new white neighbours and the landscape of their new home was much less obvious to the Australian eye. Some Chinese had come from the Californian goldfields and would have known something of the language and customs of the ‘foreign devils’. Others had encountered Westerners in the Chinese treaty ports or in Hong Kong, some were schooled in missionary schools and spoke English. For others, it was their first real encounter with the people they knew as ‘barbarians’ with red hair and big noses. SEE FRANK DIKOTTER BOOK. The landscape too was foreign – summers hot and dry and brown, not wet and green and humid…

By 1860 however, something else was happening in the colonies which demonstrated that for all the rhetoric of racial, cultural and biological difference, Chinese and white Australians were meeting and mixing in the most intimate of ways. Even with their apparent differences, increasing numbers of Chinese men and white Australian women were coming together, forming relationships, getting married and having babies. GO INTO SOME STATS AND INFO FROM EARLY REPORTS. By the time the colonial censuses began to enumerate those classified as ‘half-caste Chinese’ in the later part of the nineteenth century, the numbers had grown much larger. The Victorian census of 1871 (the first to record ‘half-caste Chinese’ separately) found that there were NUMBER in the colony; in 1881, SOMETHING ABOUT THE TWO FOLLOWING CENSUSES IN VIC AND NSW. By the turn of the new century, the numbers of ‘half-caste Chinese’ were reported as being NUMBER in Victoria and NUMBER in New South Wales, almost equally divided between men and women. These figures did not, of course, include those who might have chosen to hide their part-Chinese ancestry, or those who identified purely as Chinese.

These interracial relationships, and the mixed race progeny they produced, were not met with enthusiasm by many white commentators. DISCUSSION OF RHETORICAL STUFF – pollution of race etc. The response to mixed relationships shown within different parts of the Australian community was complex and contradictory though, ranging from the most vehement of hatred and violence by some, to acceptance and even encouragement by others. On a general level, there was a measure of toleration. Unlike parts of the United States which had anti-miscegenation laws, no legislation was introduced in the Australian colonies that forbid marriages between Chinese and whites, nor were there specific laws such as the NAME OF LAW in Canada which prevented white women from being employed by Chinese. The children of marriages between Chinese and whites were legitimate, and mixed race families were not subjected to particular interference by authorities. In many ways, it seems that colonial communities adopted the attitude expressed by NAME in his NAME OF WORK in DATE:

Quote the bit about general and particular.

White women, their Chinese partners and their mixed race children lived in many communities, small and large, in both rural and urban parts of Victoria and New South Wales. They worked, ran businesses, raised families, were education, attended church – they did all the things that other people did. RICH, POOR, ETC. DATA FROM MY MARRIAGE RECORDS.

But even as these families got on with living their often very ordinary lives, there were continuing concerns at a political level about the Chinese presence, the so-called ‘Chinese Question’, and interracial relationships continued to be a part of these concerns. 1861 DEBATES, 1888 DEBATES, 1901 DEBATES = WHITE AUSTRALIA. IMMIGRATION RESTRICTION ACT. These debates centred around what happened when the Chinese were allowed in, and focused on keeping the Chinese out. But by the turn of the twentieth century there were already lots here, settled, Australian-born, living Australian lives.

This book tells the story of one young Anglo-Chinese man whose life became entangled in the mechanisms of White Australia and the fears and suspicions that Australian nation had towards the Chinese foreigner. If his father had not decided to take him to China as a boy, James Minahan may well have gone on to live one of those more-or-less ordinary lives of other Anglo-Chinese born in the colonies. He may well have been among the ancestors of Australians today who can trace their family connections back to a Chinese great-great-grandfather etc. DISCUSSION OF FAMILY HISTORY RENAISSANCE. But James Minahan’s life didn’t follow that path, and the legal case that ensued provides us with a rare insight into how White Australia, that is, how the men who dealt with the law and policy of White Australia, thought about Australians of mixed race and how the system dealt with them.

The story is mostly revealed through a file of the Department of External Affairs and a file of the High Court. Alongside the bigger picture about White Australia is the detailed and intimate facts of a family’s breakdown, of a child’s loss of his mother, of a Chinese community where there was a different kind of family life, bound by clan and kinship and native place.