Film - Documentary, Wind & Sky Productions, Many Roads, 2017

Cash Brown, Curator | Conservator, Museum of Australian Democracy at Eureka:  There were already Chinese in Australia, prior to the gold rush. So, some of them came out freely. They came as early as 1820, they were gardeners in Western Sydney and out in Parramatta and all sorts of just different individuals - diaspora in Australia, people come from everywhere.

Then you had a situation where when the convicts, when convict transportation ceased, that there was a short fall in cheap, free labour. And so, indentured labourers were actually sent out from China. That was a system that had already been established with sending miners to places like Borneo, in the early part of the 19th Century. So, it was already an established kind of thing.

So, when the gold rushes hit, then more indentured labourers were sent out as a result of that. But, also a lot of free men, people that came out self-funded and that kind of thing.

Anita Jack, General Manager, Golden Dragon Museum:  The primary journey was to come to the gold rush but that was made hard by the landing tax, the 10 pound poll tax, to actually come in through Melbourne and to walk up into the gold fields. So, their journeys were from a distance. They travelled from Sydney, Robe, and Adelaide, and then walked here to the gold fields. So, it would have been very difficult. The terrain would have been harsh. Their supplies would have been low. They would have really relied on each other to support one another and to carry, not only their provisions but each other here to the gold fields.

Heather Ah Pee, Former Co-Ordinator, Gum San Chinese Heritage Centre:  I know when they got to Robe they expected the gold to be right there, just over the hill. Of course, it was four, five hundred kilometres away. But, I don't think they really had much clue as to what they were coming up against at all.

Anita Jack:  So in 1854, the campsites would have been, I imagine, fairly large at that time. A lot of men of range of ages, young and 20s, all, I guess, talking in their own village dialect.

Heather Ah Pee:  It would have been very noisy. Chinese, because they live so close together, they tend to shout rather loudly. Especially from the South. Often, when you're in places like Guanzhou and you hear people speaking Cantonese, you think they're really angry but they're not. They're just loud.

Anita Jack:  They would have worked really hard. During the day it would have been dusty. Would have been cold in winter. Would have been boiling hot in summer. I imagine sitting down to their meal time would have been a huge bond, would be like a brotherhood. They would've dealt with quite a lot of hardship, a lot of discrimination, and together very closely, you know. It would have been their temporary home, but at the same time a home that was welcoming. There would have been inside feuds too, I'm sure, like any family there's always a disagreement or two. But it would have been a place of comfort for them, for sure.

Heather Ah Pee:  One of the problems that the Chinese encountered was that the Europeans were quite jealous of them because the Chinese were very organised. They would have their whole group organised. Some would be miners, but some would be the butcher, some would be the gardener, some would do the washing, someone else would do the cooking. So, for the Europeans, they'd have to come in from their day of mining and get the wood for their fire, and cook their meal, and maybe do their washing, but they mostly did that on Sundays because they didn't have to mine on Sundays. Whereas, the Chinese were so organised that the miners came in and everything was done for them. This was one of the things that caused a lot of the friction because the Chinese were getting more gold because they were able to work longer hours because all of their other things were taken care of.

Anita Jack:  A lot of anti-Chinese legislations and laws were put into place to really limit the amount of opportunities for the Chinese to find gold, and a lot of taxes as well. And that was one way of enforcing legally, I guess, discrimination upon the Chinese and limiting what they could actually do here in the gold fields.

Professor Keir Reeves, Director, Collaborative Research Centre in Australian History, Federation University Australia:  Initially, they came to Victoria directly or Sydney and then went by their way to the diggings and then in time what's known as the Great White Walls are built, I guess, through a legislative framework and that's through the imposition of two taxes. One is the residents tax, where you have to pay to be a resident in the colonies, Victoria, New South Wales, the states, and the second is the poll tax, which is a very dramatic and pretty arbitrary way of raising a levy against a certain group of people, and of course this was the Chinese.

Cash Brown:  There was sort of a view of, "Ah, yes, it was just a bunch of sad Chinese labourers and miners coming out and that they had a really hard time and we were rotten to them and then they picked over tailings and went home," isn't really anywhere near the full story, or it's a part of it. And then when we just hear about things like the riots at Lambing Flat or the Clunes riot, and the Buckland River riots, and things like that. There's just such a big focus on those stories and yet, just by looking at those alone, which is often what happens, it doesn't allow for the richness of the contributions that the Chinese eventually made to Australian culture.

Keir Reeves:  There is a stereotype that they all smoked opium and lived on the edge of the community and were hopeless victims, not the case at all. Often Chinatowns were in the middle of town, near the action if you like, the commercial action and when you look at it you find a more revealing and interesting but ambiguous sort of social relations where, yes, on the one hand there is racism, there's poll taxes, and there's very challenging circumstances. But on the other hand people are making money. They're going into business ventures with European miners and I suspect on one level, they're just getting on with it and working their way around some of the injustices they would've encountered in what would have been, I suspect, a very challenging situation.

I think it’s like a lot of societies, that racism and harmony can exist side-by-side.

Cash Brown:  Of course, luck is like luck anywhere in the goldfields. If you haven't struck it rich, or if your group hasn't made a lot of money, you haven't got enough money to go home. Or you might not want to go home. You might actually think this is actually better than going back to the drought or the starvation or the Opium Wars and all the horrible things that were going on in southern China at that time.

So, how those decisions were actually made by individuals, we can only speculate on that a lot of the time. A lot of those men actually did stay and marry, and married European women, and established businesses and families, but using their transferrable skills that they already had.

We have to remember it's an incredible sophisticated culture that they've come from. And, that they have skills and their adaptability and ability to survive in this incredibly bizarre and harsh land is remarkable.

Keir Reeves:  The Chinese involvement in the Victorian rushes or indeed the Australian rushes, needs to be seen as part of a bigger pattern of the movement of the people. And, my suspicion is that people's motivations to go looking for gold in the mid-19th Century, are largely the same wherever they're from. And I think there are two things, there is the material self interest. If you look ... If you've gone gold seeking, as David Goodman put it, then you're there to make money, but also we're talking about in the 1850s, a time where there'd been a whole spate of failed revolutions in Europe. A time of incredible upheaval in certain parts of the world.

And, also the impress of the industrial revolution, was the reality of working there would have been quite overwhelming for a lot of people. The chance to have your own autonomy, that's known as "Jack was a good as his master," that must have appealed to some people. It would have been you would come out here, you could've won your future and obviously had a very different life than working in the mills of the British midlands for the rest of your life.

Likewise, for the Chinese. We're talking about the Opium Wars in prelude to the gold rushes, and then a really, very major civil war, perhaps one of the most bloody things that happened in human history. Millions and millions of people are dying. Ethic strife and just a time of incredible upheaval in China. A lot of people would've taken the opportunity to come out and win their fortune, have some autonomy, and escape a very uncertain situation back home.

Film - Interview with Anna Kyi, Wind & Sky Productions, 2017

Lucinda:  Tell me about what personally draws you to the story of the Chinese on the gold fields.

Anna:  I have a general interest in immigration history, how migrants settle in new countries and how their cultural identity evolves. Within that, working at Sovereign Hill, I had the opportunity to look at Chinese immigrants because we had two new exhibits. One was an underground mine experience, looking at Chinese involved in the quartz mining, and the second one was the redevelopment of the Chinese camp. I had the opportunity to look at a particular migrant group and explore how they had been portrayed, and perhaps some of the stereotypes around their identities, and how the actual history contradicted some of the stereotypes that existed. That's how I came more to focus on Chinese-Australian history, probably more so than other migrant histories.

Lucinda:  How have the Chinese migrants been portrayed in this gold rush period?

Anna: They're portrayed predominantly as sojourners. There's this perception that the Chinese would come to Victoria looking for gold, and then once they found the gold, they would return back to China. A lot of them did, but not all. In that particular time frame that we're looking at, the 1850s, it was the colonial era. Their [the colonial] understanding of identity is centred around essentialised identity. Your identity is fixed. There was perhaps a perception for some, not all, but some, that they couldn't change, and they were culturally stagnant, and the other, which the Chinese fitted into, was interpreted as being opposite to Western culture.

Lucinda:  The Western eye said, "This Chinese other, they don't change. They're fixed." What was that?

Anna:  What was that?

Lucinda:  Yeah.

Anna:  Basically, I guess you'd say the opposite of the Western culture. It's a binary opposition. For example, Western culture, with the big W, was predominantly Christian, where Chinese weren't of the Christian faith. They believed in ancestor worship. Also, things like they dressed differently. They spoke a different language. Although within Europe there were different languages spoken, those differences seemed to get blanketed out when you contrasted yourself against one particular group.

The things that they were stereotyped for was they had a gambling culture, which was considered a vice. They were predominantly a male migrant group. They left their women back home. That was considered a source of concern, as well. What else? Yeah, mainly the differences in culture, language, dress, but they're pretty much surface to the underlying discontent, which is about the economic threat that the Chinese represented. The Chinese arrived at a time, increased in numbers, about the time surface alluvial gold became scarce. This is the gold that people called easy gold. It wasn't difficult to find, according to some. In 1854, there was around 4000 Chinese coming into Australia, or Victoria in particular, and then the following year, it goes to over  11,000.

You can imagine this type of gold is becoming scarce, which even the lay person can find, and there's increases in Chinese competition, not just numbers but it's also their level of skill. Although the majority of Chinese immigrants or gold seekers were from an agricultural background, some of them worked in mining during agricultural slack seasons, so they had experience in mining as well as the numbers to create that sense of threat. Many of their mining practises were frowned upon by the Europeans, as well. Principally, I would say the underlying threat was economic, and then the cultural differences come on top of that and add further reason for the desire to want to exclude them.

Lucinda:  They're starting to come in numbers. This makes the threat more urgent.

Anna:  Yes. The animosity of the racial conflict seems to flare up just after the Eureka Rebellion. There's some talk during the commission that occurred after Eureka that if this tax is going to be removed, the goldfields licence is going to be removed or altered, it could open the floodgates, so to speak. They're looking for ways to prevent further immigration happening so that other people, Europeans in particular, get that opportunity to find gold at the expense, I guess, of the Chinese who were excluded or restricted, more so, from that opportunity to find the gold.

Lucinda:  What specific restrictions were placed upon the Chinese that weren't placed upon the other general population?

Anna:  [On an official level] There was never outright exclusion, saying, "Chinese cannot come here." It was done in subtle although effective ways. The Chinese were expected to pay a 10 pound poll tax upon arrival. The number of Chinese that were permitted to travel on a particular vessel was restricted to particular numbers based on the size of the vessel. It made  it financially difficult to find gold, if you have to pay 10 pounds on arrival, and then various other taxes were introduced later on to add further difficulties in their way of making or trying to make a fortune for themselves and to take hold of the opportunities that everyone else had access to.

Lucinda:  They found ways around these restrictions, didn't they?

Anna:  Yes. To avoid the 10 pound poll tax, many of the Chinese landed in South Australia and then travelled across from South Australia over to Victoria, walked all the way. Some of them landed in New South Wales and walked overland to Victoria. There were various ways of avoiding the poll tax, and the government created or changed legislation to try and stop those or prevent those loopholes or close those loopholes. In 1855, you had the immigration poll tax put in. 1857, you need also to pay a residence ticket. If you can't show that you've paid your poll tax, then you can't get a residence ticket. There's gradually this way of narrowing down those who aren't paying, and also keeping the Chinese, hopefully, in Chinese camps. Chinese Protectorate Camps were another way in which they [the Victorian Government] tried to gather taxes and things like that, and made it difficult for them [the Chinese] to avoid, but some of them chose to live outside the camps. Again, tax evasion was a way of overcoming the obstacles that were put in front of them.

Lucinda:  Tell me a little bit about the pockets or the locations where Chinese people would live in the gold fields. You said a little bit about protectorates, but the Chinese people didn't always choose to live in the protectorates.

Anna:  Yes..... what do you mean? Where did they live outside?

Lucinda:  Yeah, I guess I'm wanting to get a sense of the way ... I probably mis-asked the question. What I'm interested in is the geography of encampment is quite culturally specific, but it's also mixed. There's a melting pot element, too. There's locations where a particular cultural group is known to be, and this happened with the Irish and the Welsh as well, and then the Chinese are known to live in Little Bendigo or Slaty Creek. That became a cultural hub, I suppose. I'm interested. They're very mobile and fluid, because it's where the gold is or where the economics fit.

Anna:  I haven't done a lot of research on the geographic location of all the Chinese encampments. The Chinese protectorate camps that I am aware of are predominantly located in Ballarat East. There was one at Golden Point, which is on the Llanberris Reserve not far from the Gold Museum. There was one in Stawell  Street and Clayton Street, as well, but there were more than that. There's a suggestion that there could have been around 11, and as you said, there was Chinese out in Little Bendigo, as well.

What's interesting in terms of understanding the Chinese presence in Ballarat today is that it doesn't seem as strong as other places like Bendigo. That's possibly because they were not as far away from the centre hub in Ballarat East. They were pretty much located in or close to Main Street,  Main road.  Main road used to be the main business district of Ballarat until the train arrived in 1861, and  central Ballarat moved up to  Sturt Street. When that happened, you see many of the shops in Main Street being run by Chinese.

There seems to be a bit more social fluidity between the two, and possibly crossovers with working-class Europeans and Chinese working relationships, interracial marriages, and that type of mixing going on as well, possibly to the extent that we don't have a really strong Chinese presence compared to what Bendigo has. There's also the various factors that can influence that. There's evidence to suggest that the type and the way in which mining progressed, it wasn't as competitive here between the Europeans and the Chinese compared to Bendigo. That type of, as I was saying, economic competition before that triggers the racial sentiment, is stronger possibly in Bendigo than it was here. I'm not saying that racism didn't exist, but to different levels.

Lucinda:  It was mapped out differently according to what the geology said, which then interacted with the economics, I suppose, and the social life.

Anna:  The geology creates different opportunities. After Eureka, not all of the gold had been worked over. The regulations that came in made it easier to look for gold, and so there wasn't that competition between the Europeans and the miners, but we had a lot of deep lead mines in Ballarat. Not so much in Bendigo. Different levels, different types of mining, I think could possibly have a different effect on different race relations as well. Up in the Northern Territory, Chinese were involved in tin mining, and there doesn't seem as much hostility up there as down here in Victoria. There's things to consider like that.

Lucinda:  What are other common misconceptions that we have of that period that are wrong?

Anna:  I guess possibly I've mentioned one, the sojourner, that they all returned back home to China. That creates difficulties for people who are of Chinese-Australian descent now, because where do they fit into that narrative? What's their story? For a long time, because of the discrimination that Chinese faced and Chinese-Australians faced, people from those families were taught to deny that heritage.

Yes, it's more a case of that stereotype, that misconception that they wouldn't change or settle in Australia would be that what's the place of these people who went against that stereotype. Stereotypes are sometimes put in place by images that we see of that era, the 1850s era, with Chinese in typical Chinese clothing, and Chinese hats, no shoes, etc., whatever it might be, versus Chinese being encouraged to, shall we say, assimilate or adopt Western culture so that they will fit in. This encouragement came from the societies that enabled them to settle and helped them to settle, Chinese societies that helped the migrants to settle in Australia, or in Victoria in particular. I don't know whether I've answered your question.

Lucinda:  No, you did. Are you aware of actual examples of second-generation entrepreneurs or family stories? Have you got those sorts of anecdotes that you might?

Anna:  More so relating to the quartz mining sector with the Woah Hawp Canton Mine. People like James Wonglep came over during the initial gold rush, and settled, and married an Irish woman, had children here, and then he became an investor in the mine. His children became involved in working at the mine. The investors in this mine were a broad array of Chinese people, from merchants to market gardeners to farmers to miners, showing that they were willing to invest in this type of venture.

One of the stereotypes was that they wouldn't become involved in quartz mining because it was a long-term venture, and the Chinese wanted to find their gold quickly and then return. Those types of stereotypes say that Chinese are scared of going underground because of fear of underground gods and spirits and things like that. That's why you don't see Chinese involved in quartz mining as much as Europeans. Often, that hides the legislation that kept them out of that type of mining and that involvement in that aspect of mining.

Lucinda:  We've talked about the poll tax and the resident permit.

Anna:  Yeah, residence tax.

Lucinda:  Residence tax. What other legislative forms of discrimination did Chinese face?

Anna:  I've mainly focused on that immigration legislation that was designed, where they're using taxes almost as weapons to discourage Chinese immigration, but I guess are you talking about racial conflict or examples?

Lucinda:  You just talked about the way that certain types of business were discouraged, that Chinese had faced bigger barriers to, say, do quartz mining than others. Why was that?

Anna:  Why were they excluded, are you saying?

Lucinda:  Yeah.

Anna:  Economic competition. If the Chinese were successful at quartz mining and settling there, then obviously competition in terms of enabling non-Chinese to be more successful and effective. There's probably all different types of discrimination in different ways, not just legislation, that you could look into, but that's not what I've focused on.

Lucinda:  Tell me the stories that are in the petitions. We've had a look at some of the petitions. There's some beautiful ones on display at MADE at the moment.

Anna:  Yes.

Lucinda:  Each one of those petitions tells a story about protests and community, doesn't it?

Anna:  Yes. I guess one of the challenges of looking at Chinese-Australian history and trying to overcome the stereotypes is actually getting to the Chinese voice and understanding the Chinese perspective. That challenge exists partly because the Chinese didn't leave many records. It can sometimes exist because those rare records that are in Chinese, if you don't have the skills to translate them, that's another barrier.

Also, the dominance of the Western stereotype. These petitions, which were against the anti-Chinese immigration legislation, they were signed by numerous Chinese coming from different districts of Victoria. They rolled out every time there was a legislation change relating to it. It's a unique opportunity to get to the Chinese voice. They're protesting. They're saying basically, "Why are you imposing this tax on us? We deserve to be treated equally, the same as everybody else."

They're also taking the opportunity to challenge some of the fear mongering that's going on in relation to the Chinese, such as rumours about their gambling, criminal activity. They put forth that, "There's no more evidence that we've got criminal activity happening in our group compared to other groups." They're openly challenging those accusations. They're explaining some of the cultural misconceptions that are occurring, like why don't you bring their wives here and settle here. You can see where that's coming from in terms of fears of racial miscegenation and mixed children, but they're saying, "We won't bring our wives here because they're too fragile. They can't travel long distances."

They're trying to dispel some of the myths, and they're trying also to fight for their rights and equality, as well. In doing so, they're challenging the perception that they are passive and willingly take what people, I guess, dish out to them in terms of what other people thought they deserved. There is also the stereotype that Chinese were passive victims and they just let people do things to them, but they fought back, just in the same way as the miners fought back against the gold fields licence, and that being considered as an unjust tax. The Chinese fought against, protested against, the taxes that were imposed on them and made life difficult for them, as well.

Lucinda:  We've talked a little bit about how there's pathways through democracy or that they're learning, they're becoming more sophisticated in their political protest through the petitions, as well.

Anna:  Yes. What's happening is that the Chinese are using Western forms of constitutional protest. They're speaking the same language as the dominant culture, and therefore hopefully communicating effectively, and therefore trying to change something in their lives, something that they find to be oppressive. Part of the problem was that due to changes in our government during that period, they start sending petitions to, say, the Governor, who is the representative of the Queen here, but in our time, in the mid 1850s, the Legislative Assembly comes in place. The petitions that are sent to, say, Governor Barkly don't have the same effect as they would if they were sent to the Legislative Assembly. It takes them a little while to nut that out and figure that out, and then they start using the appropriate channels.

In terms of understanding their protests, I've pointed this out before, they weren't alone. There were Europeans who supported them, and that's a very important side to understand. It wasn't just a case of us versus them. There were various reasons and motivations for Europeans to either support the Chinese in their own protests or to send petitions to government saying that, "We don't want the Chinese to go." Those motivations vary in terms of economic considerations, like if the Chinese left a community like Ararat, for example, where they were the predominant group, then a lot of European businesses would suffer, to motivation where there was a genuine sense of concern for Chinese interests, perhaps more so reflected in the views of Chinese Protector William Foster, where he tried to rewrite laws for the Chinese and signed petitions together with the Chinese, as well.

Lucinda:  What was the thing that surprised you the most in undertaking this research?

Anna:  What surprised me the most was that the actual European support for the Chinese, and looking at the different motivations for it, not just saying, "It's all about the money." In some cases it is the economic considerations, but it's not always about that. Also, what surprised me was the diversity of voices in the petitions. There was a period of time when the Melbourne Chinese were saying, "Why are you imposing this tax on us? We don't live on the gold fields. Why are you imposing these laws on us? If the same thing had been done in the Eureka Rebellion but the Europeans in Melbourne were blamed for it, it wouldn't have been taken the same way."

There's been a tendency to see the Chinese voice, if there has been a Chinese voice, as one and the same, and that's it. There is a diversity of views and opinions, and they've used different arguments over different time frames and different districts. Some of them were willing to pay less taxes where others didn't want to pay any tax at all. Those differences often get overlooked when we're looking at stereotypes. Everyone's homogenised and seen as the same when they're not. The area of difference was fascinating to me.

Lucinda:  Were there any favourite characters or locations or businesses that you have a soft spot for?

Anna:  I'd have to say William Henry Foster, the Chinese Protector in Ballarat, was very interesting in terms of his willingness to assist the Chinese, and as I mentioned before, to rewrite laws to make things easier for them, and to go to bat for them, to reclaim sometimes mining sites that they lost because they hadn't paid the tax. That was unexpected. His sense of justice and fair play is across the board, not just from what I know of him and understand of him specific to his own economic interests. That those feelings of social welfare and concern  can exist at that time is quite interesting, as well.

Lucinda:  Yeah. You're talking about an era without the safety net.

Anna:  Yes, definitely. He's one that stands out particularly in my mind, but other people who stand out as crossing cultural boundaries, shall we say, and crossing back when they need to, I like looking at that flexibility of cultural identity and how people adapt and change. People who took on the role of Chinese interpreter, facilitating the protectorate system and the challenges they met, and what led them to that position, as well.

Lucinda:  All of these stories are really counteracting that very first stereotype that you mentioned, which is that the Chinese who came here were unable to change. They were fixed in their identity.

Anna:  Yes. A lot of it, yes. By picking out identities and characters or historical figures where their cultural identity changes, it's one way of challenging those stereotypes, whether it's because they choose to settle in Australia, they choose to marry someone of a different culture, they choose to take up a Christian faith. Not to say that they should have to do those things, but that they choose to, and they can, and it's their choice to do it. To what extent they did it to gain acceptance is another question altogether. At what point does someone say, "This is what I'm choosing to do, and this is what is forced on me," I think depends very much on the individual and different historical contexts, as well.

Lucinda:  If you had to give a very overall explanation of the journeys that the Chinese migrants took, how would you describe it? How do you see the journeys that the migrants took?

Anna:  In some cases, I don't see them as being any different to the journeys that people took when they came here to find gold, and they came here from Europe. There's a similar aspiration to escape poverty, social and political conflict in their old country, in their hometown, and this desire and search for a better life. That makes it difficult to understand why they couldn't develop a sense of empathy for each other, but at the same time, when someone's success means that you're missing out, then you begin to understand where the conflict comes from.

In that regard, the hopes and the dreams were the same, and the experiences of having hardship back home were the same, and the hardships in mining here, the difficulty of mining. People portrayed it as being easy to find gold. It wasn't necessarily easy, but their journey, the Chinese-Australian journey, is different because of the way in which they were excluded, deliberately singled out to avoid, to keep them at a distance and to minimise numbers so that other people could look for gold.

Europeans didn't have the same obstacles in terms of taxes. They had a gold fields licence, but that was removed in 1855, and then they could go on. I think there's elements of the journey that are the same. There's opportunity to feel empathy for one another. As I said, the Europeans faced a harsh tax, why couldn’t they understand the same thing was being done to the Chinese, but it depends on to what extent the group is willing to empathise when their own personal interests are at stake.

Other than that, I think for the Chinese-Australians, it's probably been more of a harder journey to find ways of belonging and fitting in. Even though they might have undertaken activities, whether it was deliberate or not, that enabled them to strive for that sense of belonging, there's always the potential to have it thrown back in their faces that they're not there. That moment can change at any time or any point in history, depending on how the outside world is feeling.

Lucinda:  There's a vulnerability that they experience to that kind of pressure that the others don't.

Anna:  Whether they belong or not?

Lucinda:  Yes.

Anna:  Yeah, I think so. I think it can still happen, today. Racism can flare up all of a sudden. It's not a constant, but it's always underlying, depending on what tensions working out there in the real world sort of thing, whether people want to bring it up. When it does come up, it often brings back all those stereotypes that emerged in that 1850s period, and reforms it in different ways. That's why I think it's so important to understand the racism that evolved during the gold  rush era, because it emerges at various times throughout Australia's history yet again and again and again. Not always as a constant, but different periods.

Lucinda:  It flares up.

Anna:  Mm-hmm (affirmative). You look at federation, 1901, where Chinese again, they want to exclude Chinese people from immigrating to Victoria, and people who don't fit the racial ideal, I guess. They don't outwardly, openly say, "Here is a list of the different cultures that can come in, and here is a list of the different cultures that can't come in." There's no list made up, but it's done indirectly through a dictation test. Taxes are an indirect way of doing it, as well. The pattern and the tone of discrimination that's set in the 1850s is the pattern and tone that's set in Australian history, of those indirect methods of exclusion when not being outwardly racist but somehow finding the means when needs be, sort of thing.

Lucinda:  You alluded earlier to Chinese-Australian families, second generation, third generation, that might have been encouraged to hide their ancestry in order to fit into this new perception of what Australia should be.

Anna:  Yes.

Lucinda:  What impact does that have on our perceptions of ourselves as Australian, our perceptions of our history, and the cultural diversity of our history?

Anna:  I think in multicultural Australia, we're encouraged to find an ethnicity that we have. Sometimes that process is forced. Sometimes it comes naturally. It's made it easier for people or the descendants of those Chinese-Australians to want to access those histories and ask relatives, but sometimes because those relatives come from a period of time where that wasn't allowed or wasn't encouraged, they don't want to share. That has to be in some way respected.

I think there are challenges in terms of writing a multicultural narrative of Australia where everyone fits into a story. We often tend to go, "What did that migrant contribute?" That's justifying your position in Australia. You have to justify it, otherwise what right do you have? What I call contribution history, where I think more complex histories need to be written about how people coped and adapted and changed. Sometimes we can't force those who were second or third generation Chinese-Australians or Italian-Australians, whatever. You can't force them to have a cultural identity that they may well not have anymore, because they've never been back to China or Italy, or they may have. It really depends on not where you're from but where you're at at a particular stage.

How you write that into a grand narrative about Australian history is a massive challenge but probably a very interesting one in terms of including everyone belonging to two places or sometimes belonging just to here. By third generation you might find Chinese-Australians joining the war effort and that type of thing, and yet they're not allowed to do so until time passes and they are. They probably wouldn't have seen themselves as Chinese, because they hadn't had that experience of being in China, or the parents had become so Westernised that it would be hard to live that culture, but as I said, the outside world is forcing them to be something that perhaps they're not anymore, or never were to begin with. This is so complicated.

Lucinda:  Those Chinese ANZAC stories that we're starting to see more of, yeah, they just wanted to join the war effort like everyone else. They weren't trying to prove a point.

Anna:  Maybe not. I guess if it was thrown up in your face that you don't look like one of us, and that you wanted to make a point, that probably was there for some, but I haven't looked into that side of history enough to comment on it. Once you move to another country, you're translated, and you can't necessarily go back to the way it was. If you've had no contact with that culture, ongoing contact, then it makes it harder to live up to that ethnic identity for some. It depends on various families and how different families are brought up, that type of thing.

Lucinda:  I love this idea, once you move you're translated. We're all in a translation. It's an ongoing thing, isn't it? There's no fixed identity for any of us. Why would we assume that Chinese migrants have to conform to some?

Anna:  In some ways, it's about a feeling of a need for our own security. If I know what you are, and I've got you in that box, then I know who I am, but if you change and don't play the rules of the game, and say you're something different, then who am I? I have to change, or I'm not who I thought. If it's about power relations, as the colonial mind really was, Western, other, then if the other says, "I'm not who you think I am, I'm different," then the power of the Western culture is undermined. It's about that threat of having the other person's position undermined as well.

Lucinda:  Without falling into a contribution history, what can we see that is there to celebrate about the experience that we now all share in this foundation of Australian identity, the colonial period? What is there to celebrate in this experience?

Anna:  I'm not necessarily ... I don't have all the answers, and it's still something that I think about a lot, but I don't think necessarily we have to have a celebratory history all the time. I think history needs to be looked at in different ways for different stories and lessons that can be learned. If you try and force everything into saying everything should be a celebration, not that I want everything to be black armband history, but I think if you look at a history of how different cultures interact, and how they came to understand one another, or didn't come to understand one another, then that can potentially have lessons, and hopefully prevent disharmony in the future in that way.

It's like the history of the biggest and the best. Is that the best lens to look through history all the time? Not necessarily. It's just one of many lenses that you can use, depending on what you want to get out of history. I understand for national histories, you often want to have that celebration, and that the bigger and the best kind of thing, it's a part of our need to feel proud of ourselves, but that desire sometimes outweighs the value that can be obtained from looking at history in other ways.

Lucinda:  Do you have a favourite artefact or object that you like?

Anna:  I have to say the Chinese petitions when they protested against the legislation. It's just such a rare, unique perspective that offers a strong voice, and a voice that stands out against all the stereotypical understandings of what they were, and them saying, "We're not like this," or, "This is the reason why this happened. It's not the justification you're giving it." Yeah, that'd be my most interesting, fascinating, or favourite objects rather. There's a few of them, not just one.

Lucinda:  When you were going through the questions and looking at our project, what are you hoping that it will be able to say to an audience?

Anna:  What am I hoping it'll be able to say? I'm hoping that in the particular format that you're going to present it, that has a broader ability to access the general public. This conversation about Chinese-Australian history has been going on for quite a while now between academics, and that's important. You need the groundbreaking research, but to get to a level where it's getting out to the general public, whether it be through museums or whether it be through schools, and they're using these resources to rewrite and rethink Chinese-Australian history, that's where the difference starts to begin.

Not everyone studies history at university level and gets to ask the bigger-picture questions, but that has a greater chance of happening if the history textbooks include these stories, if there's resources out there that are made user-friendly and accessible to high school students that might lapse back into stereotypical understandings because there's nothing else on offer. It's really, really important to put it in media formats that have that high accessibility to those groups.

Lucinda:  If you're imagining a secondary school student or just someone coming across this story, what questions would you like them to leave asking?

Anna:  What questions would I like a secondary school student to leave asking? I'd like them to constantly question the stories they're being told and why they're being told those stories. I could say, "The stereotype existed," and I could say, "It shouldn't exist," but there was a reason why it existed, and when you look at myths and why they exist, it can often tell you about broader social relationships and insecurities. Not just that it's not fact, it's, why does someone want to believe that? What's in it for them to believe that way? Just to have a more open mind about how history can evolve, and to know that history is always a selective process.

We choose what we want to remember and what we want to interpret from the past, and there's no avoiding that. You can't tell everyone everything at once. That process of selection always happens, but to have that critical thinking about, why am I being told this story? What's in it for the other people? What impact might this story have on social relationships? I think they're the questions that I'd like students to think about, and to always think, "Is there something more?" Then they're always learning.

Interview with Cash Brown

Lucinda:  Tell me, what personally draws you to the story of the Chinese on the goldfields?

Cash: That's a really big question. There are so many stories, and I think that when you are asked to put on an exhibition like this, and you come at it from a background that has absolutely no idea to start with, you come in fresh. One of the things that you can look for is, I feel like if I get excited about something, if I'm uncovering something, then I hope that that's transferred to the general public and to the people who engage with the exhibition material.

Right from the start in developing this kind of body of work, there are some biased filters. I think that when you find yourself surprised or moved, and when you think, "Gosh, this is a really big story. Everybody should know about this, because it changes the way that we see ourselves." And I think to me that there was a view of, "Yes, it was just a bunch of sad Chinese labourers and miners coming out, and they had a really hard time, and we were rotten to them, and then they picked over tailings and went home," isn't really anywhere near the full story, or it's a part of it.

Then when we just hear about things like the riots at Lambing Flat, or the Clunes Riot, and the Buckland River Riots, and things like that, there's just such a big focus on those stories, and yet just by looking at those alone, which is often what happens, it doesn't allow for the richness of the contributions that the Chinese have actually made to Australian culture. I think that to me, with digging around, we came up with some absolute gems. They're really surprising, and they're very moving. It's not just one story that's in amongst the tapestry. There are a lot.

Lucinda:  Maybe we could contextualise by you telling us a little bit about the Chinese Fortunes exhibition and what it is.

Cash:  Okay. The Chinese Fortunes exhibition was conceived as an opportunity to tell untold stories, to actually broaden people's idea and perspective of Chinese diaspora in Australia in the 19th century. As a museum, one of the things that we like to do, is to present a more fair vision of what the past was like. Part of that is because we often feel, especially white Europeans often feel, that a lot of our past and past behaviours and things are actually really embarrassing. We cringe at them. We can't own them. We are told that we are inherently racist and things like that.

It's not really the case. When you start digging around and you start looking at what scholars have recently researched, and what they've recently written and why, it becomes apparent fairly quickly that history, although we know it is always being revised, and it depends what kind of lens it's put under, that when we start looking at, for example, the Chinese voice, where is that in all of this? Then you start to uncover a very different kind of story, and a lot richer and deeper things that contribute to our identity. Not just our collective identity, but also to engage Chinese audiences, too, in what their ancestors really got up to, and that they weren't just victims of a bunch of thugs.

Lucinda:  Okay. Starting with these people who aren't just victims, who are they?

Cash:  There were already Chinese in Australia prior to the gold rush era. Some of them came out freely, even as early as 1820. There were gardeners in western Sydney and out in Parramatta, and all sorts of just different individuals. Diaspora in Australia, people came from everywhere. Then you had a situation where, when the convict transportation ceased, that there was a shortfall in cheap or free labour, and so indentured labourers were actually sent out from China. That was a system that was already established, had already been established, with sending miners to places like Borneo in the early part of the 19th century. It was already an established kind of thing, and so when the gold rushes hit, then more indentured labourers were sent out as a result of that, but also a lot of free men and people that came out, self-funded and that kind of thing.

When the miners or when these groups came out, we imagine that, "Yes, it was 100 people that came out just to mine," but it had to be much more organised than that. You'd have a group where you'd have quite large groups of people. There would be a scribe. There would be a barber. There would be someone who could do the washing. There'd be people that could be doing the cooking and the market gardening, so that they could have very, very coordinated efforts. Part of that is, it's that if you're really coordinated in your effort, you can do things far more economically and you can pay off your debt faster, because you've gone into debt to get there in the first place.

Of course, luck is like luck anywhere in the gold fields. If you haven't struck it rich, or if your group hasn't made a lot of money, you haven't got enough money to go home, or you might not want to go home. You might actually think, "This is actually better than going back to the drought or the starvation or the Opium Wars," and all the horrible things that were going on in southern China at the time. How those decisions were actually made by individuals, we can only speculate on that a lot of the time. A lot of those men actually did stay and marry, and married European women, and established businesses and families, but using the transferrable skills that they already had.

We have to remember, it's an incredibly sophisticated culture that they've come from, and that their skills and their adaptability and ability to survive in this incredibly bizarre and harsh land is remarkable in its own right. We often hear about people going into market gardening and furniture-making and laundries and fishing and all of these sorts of things, but we don't often hear about the incredible business people that came out, and that actually were supplying not only the Chinese miners but supplying, for example, all sorts of luxury goods and things to the burgeoning marvellous Melbourne, and all that kind of stuff. They were often part of the Dutch East Indies trade routes and that kind of thing, and of course opium was quite a big deal, as well.

The incredible efforts by some of the Chinese merchants and the influence that they had on trade in the region is quite remarkable. You start digging around those stories and think, "Wow." They were very active citizens. They would lobby and petition governments for reform, and not just on behalf of Chinese people but on behalf of all people in Australia. Yeah, I think those sorts of stories, of the people like Lowe Kong Meng and Mei Quong Tart, they're some of the big characters, but a lot of the small characters, the more everyday people, the people that ran the local general store, the people that delivered fruit and vegetables door to door to people, the people that would make life a lot easier for people, particularly in regional towns, is incredible.

There are many, many, many of them. We've only just skimmed the surface of it. We've got about 50 stories in this exhibition, and most of those stories interlace. They come across a lot of different topics, from intercultural relationships through to fitting in and wanting to fit into this rapidly evolving multicultural landscape. A lot of it's quite hard to track, too. People forget, too, that Victorian society was highly mobile. People were mobilised. They were driven. They'd move around a lot, often following gold, but sometimes they'd be following water even, or following other business opportunities and things like that. If the gold runs out, you might think, "Great, we'll go up to Queensland and grow peanuts and bananas or something."

Lucinda:  We've touched a little bit about my next question, which is journeys that these Chinese migrants have taken. What are their journeys? Where are they travelling from? How are they travelling? Where do they go to?

Cash:  That's a really good question. I suppose it depends who you are from China, whether you are an indentured labourer, whether you've gone into debt with the threat of perhaps having your wife and family sold if you can't repay your debt, or whether you have had your own money to come out. There are two different kinds of journeys.

To start with, the indentured labourers would be recruited through teahouses and what have you in the southern provinces. Some of them may have actually been sold a bit of a dream. "Come to the new gold mountain, and make your fortune, and come back as a gold mountain man, and you can help provide schools and temples and things for your local village. If you go with your brothers and a few other people, then it'll all be fabulous." They would go into debt for that, and then they would pack up their belongings and some of the things that they thought that they would need to survive here, often buying those from the same agents and what have you. They would put them in baskets on a pole, and then walk.

The first thing starts with a trek. The first part starts with a trek for them. Then they would walk to the nearest port. That would often have a shantytown kind of situation in it. Then they would get onto a junk, and that would take them to Hong Kong. Then from Hong Kong, they would sail out. They would have gone into Canton or Amoy as one of their first two ports. Then, in Hong Kong, there were shantytowns as well, and then that was often where they would be sitting around waiting for the next boat. Sometimes there would be gambling and opium, which they might not have been involved in beforehand, and then that gets them into more debt, and that kind of thing. That side of the system isn't very nice.

Then they would get onto these boats. Some of them weren't really, in the early days especially, very fast. They weren't very well equipped for human cargo. The journeys were often rough. Approximately 11,000 died on their way, that we know of. Statistics can be interesting things, but there were a lot of wrecks. Those figures actually do include people who died onboard from illnesses and ones that died soon after arriving. Pretty quickly, the ships' captains and things would have worked out, "We don't want our cargo to die, because we're not going to get our debts repaid. We want them to go more quickly, and that kind of thing."

In the first instances when the Victorian gold rushes started in 1851, by 1852 there were only a couple of thousand that came out. They would march from Melbourne. They'd land in Port Melbourne. They would be helped by a headman, who would help translate for them and things like that, and point them in the right direction. They would often be sold more bits and pieces, or pick up bits and pieces here. Then they'd head to whichever diggings they were destined for. It was highly organised. There's nothing random about it.

The individual Chinese that came out for opportunities, I think in Ballarat here we've got a wonderful example of John Alloo, who was actually here before the gold rushes. An interesting character, he actually had a restaurant here at Eureka, on the Eureka diggings, and then by late 1854, he'd moved that to Main Road in Ballarat. He also had a coach business. He was able to organise coaches between here and Geelong. A pretty remarkable character. You can see in the wonderful S.T. Gill drawings the interior of his restaurant, where it doesn't look very Chinese at all. It looks like all European fare, but he was clearly quite successful in that.

He obviously benefited greatly when the gold rush came out, but also because he could speak English quite well, he became an interpreter, and he also became a policeman here. He wasn't paid as a policeman, and so he was poached by the Kiwis. He ended up going to central Otago and was in Otago as a policeman and then as a detective. He rose quite high up the ranks, took his children and wife with him, and his wife actually opened the Ballarat Hotel in Otago. That's where they ended up staying. That's a unique trail, and I think that that gives you a bit of an idea that for those that stayed, that didn't go back in their various groups and things, everyone's trail was different.

Then, after there were some difficulties and riots and things like that, the Chinese Question was addressed in Victorian Parliament, for example. Really harsh taxes were placed, not just on the Chinese but also on the ships' captains that were bringing them into Victoria. They were restricted in really financially what was reasonable. Think about the level of debt that they were already in. The first ships diverted to Sydney and to Adelaide, Port Adelaide. That meant that those mining groups had to walk over 800 kilometres to get to either Ballarat or Bendigo.

Two completely different routes with two completely different sets of issues. There were rumours that there were cannibalistic Aboriginals on the track from Sydney to Bendigo. I don't know if anyone's actually substantiated those claims, or whether they were rumours to just stop them coming. That seems more likely to me.

Then the treks from South Australia are really interesting, because at first they took the Tolmers gold route, which was a gold escort route, where gold was being take from Ballarat and Bendigo, but mainly Ballarat, back to South Australia. That's a whole other story. That route was very dry, though, so a lot of people died on those early treks. Then they redirected themselves down via the Coorong, because they knew that there would be reliable water sources. There still is a Chinaman's Well in Coorong, which is in the very southeastern part of South Australia.

Then there were different routes depending on the weather. Just over the South Australian-Victorian border, it becomes a massive swamp from even in March, so it depends when the ships landed and what was going on, how they actually went. It also depended  on whether they could find bullockies to carry things for them, or whether they could pay those bullockies. It depended on all sorts of things. It starts to get quite complex quite quickly.

After the first few trips from Adelaide, then the port in Guichen Bay in Robe was a little bit more well developed, and then the first ship, the Land of Cakes, landed there in January in 1857. Over the following couple of years, it was just under 20,000 that arrived there. In fact, at one point, which is coming up around about this time 160 years ago, there was one week where there would have been over 4000 Chinese guys camped all around Robe. They were often of different dialects, and they came from different parts of the southern districts in southern China. The local doctor there attempted to segregate them into different groups so that there wouldn't be infighting and things like that.

Apparently there was never any real trouble, even though troops had been sent from Adelaide. There were reports of them flying kites and singing and drying out seaweed for their journey and things like that. They also set up different market gardens on the way. They'd mark trees so that the people behind them would know where to go. They would hang coins from trees to mark the paths. They would often hitch rides with the bullockies, because of course the bullockies would have come in with things to load onto the ships. They'd be going back with empty carts and things, so all sorts of things.

Yeah, and they'd be waylaid by different things. They'd be distracted by different things, like finding gold in Ararat, for example. No need to march on to Mount Alexander or Ballarat when you've found the Canton Lead outside Ararat. It becomes very rich and very diverse very quickly.

Lucinda:  What numbers are we talking about in proportion to the numbers of other nations that are coming into Victoria at that point?

Cash:  Depends when, and it depends which figures you look at. At its peak, about 40,000 in Chinese in Victoria in 1859-1860. In some of the towns, it's highly visible, because it looks like it's about 50% of the population, but in terms of overall population of Australia, we're still looking at somewhere like 3.8-4%, which is about what it is now. It just depends where.

Like I said, before it's so mobile, that society is so mobile, how you track where everyone's going and what they're doing and interstate and who's arrived by land and who's arrived by sea, and all those kinds of things, extremely difficult to track. We've got best guesses based on the information that we have. The shipping records are different in each state, but how that actually correlates to what's happening in any one particular point in time is quite difficult.

Lucinda: Tell me a little bit about the Chinese communities that formed in the gold fields townships. What were they like?

Cash:  Depends where, again. I think we can look at Ararat as a really good example of something that's quite unique, in a sense, because it was the first permanent Chinese settlement in Australia. It was almost by accident. The Chinese had gone in there on their trek from Robe, on their way to the gold fields, and there was already mining activity in Ararat, but the Europeans basically booted the Chinese out and said, "Look, go over there. Go over the other side of the hill." They did that, and they went over there, and then basically stumbled across a huge and really significant lode.

As a result of that, a lot of them did actually stay on there, because there's no point in going any further. That Chinese community wasn't without its difficulties, socially and what have you, but it's interesting that by 1862, with all the really harsh taxes that are put on them, the Chinese are actually being driven out by these taxes. Then we've got this wonderful document, which is the Ararat petition of 1862, which basically says, "Please stop taxing them, because they're all leaving and our economy will collapse. We are stuffed without them." There's a pragmatism behind it. We'd like to think it's a lovely, romantic thing in some ways, but I suspect too that a lot of the rural Europeans would have actually been very attached to having the Chinese in town, because they're providing cheap fruit and veggies door to door. They're providing alternatives to Western medicine. They're also providing money to build hospitals, orphanages, and benevolent asylums, which is one of the most surprising things that has come about from looking at all the material that's available. Ararat in itself is a really unique story.

Then when you start looking at every single town that sprung up around the place, and which ones had their little mini Chinatowns and that kind of thing, the stories are all a little bit different. Sometimes it can revolve around particularly strong families in those areas. Sometimes it can revolve around them just being really prosperous, because the Europeans actually embraced having them around. I think that when we look at Braidwood, which is a town about 90 kilometres northeast of Canberra, remarkable town because you've got basically a monopoly of Chinese business going on, particularly in the final quarter of the 19th century. Where you've got Chinese businessmen that have established branches of the Oriental Bank where you've got a Chinese family that have brought the first truck ever into Australia, where you've got furniture businesses, general stores, trade, all sorts of things happening, and no records of any conflict. Remarkable.

Some of those families ... One of the Nomchong family, Eddie Nomchong's still running the electrical store in the main street now. Their family have been unique in that they have actually donated a lot of material to the historical society there. The great thing about that is, we've got absolutely secure provenance of these wonderful items that Mary Nomchong brought out from China with her after she married Chee Dock Nomchong. They were kept in the family because they thought it was important.

Then, all the stories that fall off that union, and all of the stories about his relationship not just with his brother but with someone like Mei Quong Tart. Once again, it becomes complex very quickly, but very, very, very rich, and it totally tips on its head some of these ideas that we have about they didn't want to assimilate, or they stuck to themselves. It seems to not be true at all.

Lucinda:  Tell me more about the early philanthropy that you found about these Chinese communities in the gold fields.

Cash:  As early as the mid-1860s, we've got records in Bendigo of some Chinese involvement in the Easter Parade there. Certainly, by 1879, it was more than just an involvement. There was fundraising in amongst the Chinese community, where they almost taxed themselves to raise money, to send that money back to China to have costumes and parade regalia made, so it would be brought back into Australia and then shared amongst different Chinese communities around the state, where they would be used for operas and parades and things like that. The aim of that fundraising was basically to assist Chinese people either to survive, so it's almost like a bit of a social security thing to survive, or sometimes to send them back to China, or to send their remains back to China so that they could be with their ancestors.

A lot of that money, though, was actually diverted directly into building hospitals, benevolent asylums, and orphanages. They of course are institutions that benefit anyone in the community. That level of highly visible, colourful engagement is probably, it is actually to me, the most remarkable story that has come out of the work that we've done here. We are so lucky that the Golden Dragon Museum in Bendigo has these costumes, the ones that were actually used in the parades and things. They were still, many of them, were being used right up until the 1930s. There's nothing like that in China. It's an internationally significant collection.

To just look at the love and the care with which they're made, and the beautiful gold couching, and all of the wonderful little mirrors, and the attention to detail, and the fact that different people would wear these things, men would wear women's costumes sometimes, and women would wear men's, and they'd mix it all up. It was a big mix and match thing. It's just incredible. You look at the old wood engravings that were in newspapers, the illustrations of these fairs and parades, and it's exuberant European audiences cheering and carrying on at this spectacle. That doesn't smack of racism to me. They're very powerful images. It actually shows not only a willingness to integrate, but also to support a broader common good. I think that's incredible. That's in spite of the horrible taxes and the horrible treatment that they were getting a lot of the time. It's in spite that, they've still got this incredible generosity of spirit. That does continue through in their culture today, and in aspects of 21st-century life in regional towns in Victoria and the rest of Australia.

Lucinda:  The parades would actually physically put on entertainment and raise money for a town's hospital.

Cash: Yes.

Lucinda:  That would be a donation from the Chinese community for the town.

Cash:  Yes, absolutely, and there are a lot of records of those donations still, in some of the hospital records and things like that.

The other side of that, there are a few sides to that story, and one is the sharing of the costumes. The same costumes might have been worn in Ararat and Beechworth and different places. That says there's this high level of organisation involved, and a great concern, too, for the kinds of things that they were raising the money for, but also there were troupes of performers that would come around and entertain not just Chinese, once again, but entertain Europeans as well. There's one lovely story about Zhan Shichai, who was Chang the Chinese Giant. He was an enormous character. He came out, and he was touring around the gold fields 1870-1871. Apparently, half of his earnings went to the benevolent societies and things like that. That's quite remarkable, I think.

There are many, many, many stories like that, of different operatic troupes and acrobatic troupes. They would also sometimes band together, so for example with the Easter Parade in Bendigo, after the parade there would be a carnival, and people would pay to get into the space to go and see all these different things. They might see furniture displays, or fashion displays, or things from the exotic Far East, and certainly performing arts as well. It'll be interesting to think about did that actually influence any of the local theatrical troupes, or maybe even amateur opera. Who knows, but yeah, it's an interesting side of it.

Lucinda:  It's fascinating because the picture that you're painting is a very diverse community, but it's mucking in together and making up its culture together, drawing on all sorts of different cultural traditions, but it's together. It's not, as you said at the start, an isolated set of poor indentured labourers. It's a much more sophisticated intercultural exchange.

Cash:   Yeah, it is, but I think a lot of that was driven by the different societies, like the See Yup Society or the different associations, whether they're through kinship or language or whatever. A lot of that organisation did actually stem from those, also some just inspired leadership on occasions. People who had certain skill sets, who had for example a really good command of English or that maybe understood a couple of different Cantonese dialects, were more than capable of advocating for not just Chinese needs but helping rally the troops with regard to lobbying governments for reform.

I think that it's all these different layers of levels of organisation that is really great, but it shouldn't surprise us. People are people. There were great levels of organisation with every kind of, whether it's a discrete or ethnic minority that's here. Everybody, apart from the Indigenous Australians, came from somewhere else. Everybody brought with them something from their own country and their own culture, and everybody hung onto bits of that, but you can't hang onto absolutely everything, because your diet's different, the landscape's different.

In fact, a lot of what happens culturally here is dictated by the physical landscape. There's also that basic need for survival, and that's another thing. A lot of the miners would have suffered from scurvy and beriberi had it not been for the Chinese being able to really quickly grow herbs and different fast crop veggies and things and help with the dietary requirements to keep people from just living solely on boiled mutton.

Aboriginal people played a role in that, too. There's probably a whole other series of stories and scholarship on the relationships between Chinese and Aboriginal people, as well, particularly up around Cooktown and that area. That's a whole other series of chapters there too, I'm sure, but yeah, there's a far higher level of integration than most of us realise.

I think that that is reflected in the multicultural society that we're in now. It's easy to look at any group and say, "That's them over there, and they don't really mix." You have to.

Lucinda:  What do you look at either in the landscape around you or in the artefacts that you curate and say, "I can see the legacy of the Chinese in this here today"?

Cash:  As a self-confessed foodie, it might seem like an obvious thing, but in the food. I'm not talking about country town Chinese restaurants. That often bears no resemblance to what the food's actually like in China, but there's some kind of weird hybrid going on there. It's about how different foods have been introduced to our diet and into the kinds of things that we just take for granted.

In looking at the artefacts around that, I also think about these wonderful pots, like the ginger pots or the thousand-year-old egg pots. What kind of food did the miners actually bring with them? What's so special that you're going to carry something hundreds of kilometres through swamps and across desert in a ceramic pot? Is it delicious dried duck? Is it these preserved eggs? Is it preserved shrimp? What is it? Also, you'd be carrying rice with you, because there wasn't any rice being grown in Australia, and it's obviously your staple.

Then the trade thing that's set up, too, to support the Chinese miners, in bringing out things like rice and tea and those sorts of things. Those food legacies, they might seem a little bit obscure sometimes, and there's certainly more work to be done in that area, as well, but when we consider again the availability of fresh and plentiful and cheap fruit and veggies in our regional towns, it's a great thing, because they were just far more successful at it and far more economical about it than a lot of the European market gardeners and things. They were very, very, very good at redirecting water. They were very good at recycling waste. As we often think about, the Chinese don't waste anything.

There's actually one story about these types of Australian curries that were going around. I thought, "Oh, curry. We don't usually associate that with Chinese food," but apparently it was a thing. It was a spicy thing, and it's a way of just making mutton less vile, I suppose. Yeah, there are all sorts of things. In fact, there were a lot of fishermen in St. Kilda, for example, and they'd be catching the small shrimp and then drying and preserving those, and sending those out into the gold fields, and that kind of thing.

We've got beautiful images of Chinese hawkers within the fish markets and that kind of thing, selling birds. Of course, they were criticised for a lot of their activities, even though the Europeans were doing exactly the same thing. For some reason, if you were Chinese and doing these things, it wasn't quite as, I don't know, acceptable. Nonetheless, a lot of those people actually did really make fabulous businesses for themselves, and prospered greatly.

Lucinda: Thinking about this wonderful story, what is it that makes you saddest when you think about it?

Cash:  I think the real sadness, for me personally, comes from the misconceptions that still exist about Chinese culture, and about the past, and about what really went on in that era. I think that there's a lot to be celebrated. We should never ignore the tragedies. I think it's really important to remember those. I think it is important to remember what happened at Clunes and Lambing Flat and Buckland River, and I can see why historically there has been a focus on those sorts of things, because finding information or finding the Chinese voice from the 19th century is an incredibly difficult thing to do, unless it's come down in family histories, and they're quite scarce. The sadness in that is how many Chinese wanted to hide their ancestry as a result of the White Australia policy, and as a result of being socially and economically marginalised, and as a result of being squeezed out of things.

That didn't happen everywhere. It didn't happen all the time, and if we keep seeing them as victims of that, it's not useful. It's not useful to Chinese Australians. It's not useful in honouring their ancestors, and it's not also useful in honouring a lot of the Europeans who actually genuinely and wholeheartedly fought very hard to reform.

Lucinda:  I suppose that the natural follow-up question is, what should we find hope or joy, or what are the positive stories? What are the positive things we can reflect on from this story?

Cash:  I think the most positive thing that we can reflect on is that stereotyping any group is dangerous and it's boring. It doesn't do anybody any favours. I think that when you actually really dig into the extraordinary contributions that Chinese people made in the face of the restrictive legislations and things that they faced, it's that incredible spirit.

People often talk about Aussie spirit, and it's like, "Well," and mateship. I think that the idea of mateship is very interesting. The Chinese guys that came out in those big gangs, there's a lot of mateship that went on. They were intense, whether it be six of them in a tent, and they had to rely upon each other. In the literature, and in the historical records, it's like his mate, Louie's mate, so and so's mate. Even then, there might only be two or three of them, those really old men living together in the Mount Alexander diggings, they were still called mates. This idea of mateship, and this idea of a pioneering spirit, an Aussie spirit, is absolutely not unique to Europeans. I think that's really important to remember.

When we look at triumph in the face of adversity, and the triumphs might be modest. They might be small ones that yes, somebody established a market garden and had six kids, married a lovely young Irish girl, or whatever, or that they travelled around Australia with their own family band, or that they had pubs, or that they became interpreters, or that they maybe did go back to China. All those little things turn into ... It's all of those little tiny contributions that make up the bigger story, and the bigger picture. The bigger picture, when we put all of those things into it, is vastly different to the picture that most of us were brought up with.

It's sad in one way that we don't all acknowledge this, and we don't know these stories, and that this isn't part of the great Australian history, but it's our hope, and not just mine but many people who have dedicated tens of thousands of hours on researching many of these topics, is actually to be able to share these stories, and to give them some life, and to give them some love, and to give them a platform so that it can benefit everybody who comes along to engage with the material, to have a really good look at who we are and where we've come from, and what that means in terms of where we are now, and where we're going, and what our prevailing attitudes really are, and where does that information come from. Is it a broader picture, or is it just a very narrow perspective told through one or two protagonists' lenses? When we look at contemporary politics, and when we look at xenophobic attitudes, it becomes increasingly bizarre to me that anybody can have these ideas, because their ideas are so far removed from the truth.

Yeah, you can take from that what you will, but it's not meant to be a forced lesson in how to think. These are actually facts. They're facts, and it is part of Australian history that really can't be ignored.

Lucinda:  Was there any particular point that you really wanted to make in today's conversation?

Cash:  I think I've pretty much made them. A lot of my comments have been quite personal. I've said, "If I get excited and moved by things, and think gosh, that's a surprise, I had no idea, and wow, look at that over there," it's wonderful. I think that what would be really great for people to understand, though, is that it is a very complex and rich and diverse set of cultures and subcultures and discrete ethnic minorities that we're looking at. When we think about China, it's almost a bit like looking at a part of Europe, lots of different things going on, but also to remember that a lot of the people when they came out, they were escaping some pretty horrible situations, as well.

When we think about the boats that they came out on, and some of the parallels with contemporary global issues, nobody leaves home unless they really, really, really have to. Some of it's for the want of a better thing. Some, it's because there are great prospects somewhere else. For some of them, it's just a matter of survival. In a way, not a lot's changed, and I think that that's one of the fairly clear messages that you can take from the particular collection that we've put together here. Whether people agree with it or not is beside the point. It's really a series of stories that is designed to shine a light on aspects of history that we know so little about.

Lucinda:  What would you like an audience that might be watching or looking at the gallery or coming and visiting the exhibition to come out thinking or questioning? What question or thought do you want in their minds?

Cash:  I would hope that it encourages people to actually delve a bit further into aspects of Chinese culture, and then also to think about all of the other cultures, and all of the other stories in our past, and think, "Is that really the full picture? Is that really all there is?" To actually develop a bit of healthy cynicism around the tales that we're brought up with, about what we were taught in school, and sometimes what is still being taught in schools, how certain things are only touched upon, these keystone topics. They're not really the keystones. They're just the headline-grabbing things. Really to just take into consideration that we are a multicultural society. There are a lot of rich stories, and it's not just all from the white male perspective. There are a lot of different perspectives.

Then, when you start to do that, I found for me personally, it's softened things for me in a way. I hope that it softens people a bit, and that it opens their minds up a little bit and makes them think, "What else is out there?" And to think about the role of museums in that, think about the kind of resources that we have. Why do we do what we do? Go to places like the Golden Dragon Museum in Bendigo and see the amazing things that they've got there, and the incredible stories that they've got to tell. Go to your local historical society and see what they've got.

It's not just about Chinese stuff. It might be about the Swiss, Italians. It could be about indigenous Australians and indigenous people, and the kind of journeys that they had. All our lives are made up of journeys, and they're very complex things. Everyone's got their own story to tell. It's just what lens you put on that when you're listening that's important.

Interview with Keir Reeves

Lucinda:  Tell me first about why you are personally interested in the story on the Chinese on the Goldfields?

Keir:  Good question. There's a number of reasons that I've been thinking about. I thought I'd get asked something like this. There's a number of reasons. First of all, when I was young, we used to go to a place not far from here called Castlemaine. My great uncle [Tom] was the principal of the high school. He was married to a woman called Zeta and they had four daughters. When I was very little we went to the Campbell’s Creek cemetery to bury Zeta. I was six years old, I twigged the time that she was actually Chinese Australian.

For many years people thought that my family, the Cavanagh family, had been in the district forever. In fact they had but they had been there by virtue of Zeta's - the Govey or Ah Gooey family's connection to Castlemaine and the area. In fact, my side of the family's connection with Castlemaine only begins in the 1950s when Tom went along to become a teacher at the high school. That was sort of always kicking around in the back of my mind and then later we moved to Castlemaine and I spent my teenage years there. One thing that I'll never forget is that there was a fellow that was running ... A European guy was running the Chinese restaurant and he left and people in town were a little bit up in arms because they weren't sure if the Chinese family could run the Chinese restaurant.

This was the 1980s in Australia, country Australia anyway. Just little things like that were always kicking around in the back of my mind and one thing led to another and in 2001 I was fortunate enough to start doing a fairly major research project called the Mt Alexander Diggings Project with folk from Melbourne Uni, Alan Mayne and others and La Trobe Uni some archaeologists lead by Susan Lawrence. My job was to write a history of the Chinese on the diggings. It was a great few years and I worked with people like the heritage archaeologist David Bannear and the Chinese Museum, the Museum of Chinese Australian History in Melbourne.

All those sort of themes that I'd been thinking about or had been introduced to as a younger person was sort of up front and what I found myself doing was uncovering a hidden history. Not to put too fine point on it but the question begged if one in nine people in Colonial Victoria in the late 1850s came from Southern China and arguably one in four men in some goldfields communities came from Southern China, where were they in the history of the region or indeed the Victorian history. It was very much that sort of history. It was a bit of a reappraisal of what happened on the goldfields and asked those bigger questions like who is a pioneer, these sort of things.

Lucinda:  How extraordinary that you had all of these formative experiences in Castlemaine because that area turns out to be really significant -

Keir:  Yes it does. It is very significant. There is this tendency in goldfields communities to claim that boosterism of our town did it best, whether it's Castlemaine, Ballarat, Bendigo, Ararat, that sort of thing but in this case Castlemaine is unusual because it had so many Chinese gold seekers and they were there for such a long time and they weren't a faded community. The story goes that the Chinese came along, they searched for gold, they went into other occupations and then they either left or returned to Southern China or faded into small communities in place like Bendigo or China Town in Melbourne or the South Melbourne temple. We're talking about something a little bit more complicated than that I think.

Lucinda:  What is the story?

Keir:  I think what happens is the Chinese involvement in the Victorian rushes or indeed the Australian rushes needs to be seen as part of a bigger pattern of the movement of people and my suspicion is that people's motivations to go looking for gold in the mid 19th century are largely the same wherever they're from. I think there's two things. There's the material self-interest. If you're going gold seeking, as David Goodman put it, then you're there to make money. We're also talking about the 1850s, a time where there'd been a whole spate of failed revolutions in Europe. A time of significant upheaval in certain parts of the world and also the impress of the industrial revolution was the reality of working there would have been quite overwhelming for a lot of people.

The chance to have your own autonomy, what's known as Jack was as good as his master. That must have appealed to some people. You could have come out here, you could have won your fortune and obviously had a very different life than working in the mills of the British Midlands for the rest of your life. Likewise for the Chinese, we're talking about the opium wars in the prelude to the gold rushes and then a really very major civil war. Perhaps one of the most bloody things that happened in human history. Millions and millions of people are dying. Ethnic strife and just a time of incredible upheaval in China. A lot of people would have taken the opportunity, mostly men ... nearly all men in fact, to come out and win their fortune, have some autonomy and escape a very uncertain situation back home.

Lucinda:  When we're talking about the journeys that the Chinese migrants took to the goldfields, we're not actually talking about the whole of China are we? We're talking about quite specific regions that tended to send their as you say mainly young men?

Keir:  Yes you are. You're talking about, predominantly Southern China. Not exclusively, but predominantly and coming from certain districts or regions. Some people call it the Pearl River Delta region around, it's around Zhuhai, Guandong, these parts of the world. Some would have left from Hong Kong as well. It was a fairly serious movement of people. Initially they came to Victoria directly or Sydney and made their way to the diggings and then in time, what's known as the Great White Walls were built I guess through a legislative framework and that's through the imposition of two taxes. One is the residence tax where you have to pay to be a resident in the colonies of Victoria and New South Wales, the states, and the second is the poll tax which is a very dramatic and arbitrary way of raising a levy against a certain group of people and of course this was the Chinese.

 South Australia, perhaps because it was the free state. It didn't have a poll tax. In time, and this is sort of the popular story and people have been recreating the route and retracing the steps quite beautifully in fact as a reminder of what these people experienced. In time it became apparent that the most convenient port to drop the Chinese gold seekers at was Guichen Bay, which is not far from Robe in South Australia down near the Coonawarra, perhaps better known for it's crayfish now days than it's Chinese gold seekers. They would literally hop off. They would disembark the ship and would walk these incredible distances across the south eastern part of South Australia and then across through western Victoria.

Today you can see a nice little historical legacy, I guess an ecological footprint, in some of the market gardens and botanical gardens were first laid out with or buy Chinese itinerants who were making their way to what they would have known as Dai Gum San, which was New Gold Mountain. It was Central Victoria, it might have been Ballarat, Bendigo. I'm not sure if it was a whole region or one place. They were coming to this part of the world and of course, Gum San was California. It was the original gold mountain. These people are part of a much broader global pattern of movement, gold seeking. They share the same motivations and I suspect they didn't have a lot of options. It would take a certain amount of desperation or need to want to walk all the way across western Victoria. For those who know the area we're talking about, hundreds and hundreds of kilometres through all sorts of terrain. Some of it's lovely but some of it's quite hard and difficult and uncertain.

Lucinda:  It's even changed now in our contemporary experience of it. I've heard that it was difficult to get across some areas because of swamp lands and all sorts of things and now that's all drained.

Keir:  Everyone's draining the swamp now.

Lucinda:  Yeah they're draining the swamp.

Keir:  Absolutely we're looking at a very inhospitable landscape and I don't imagine walking through marsh lands. I guess it would have been not unlike walking through the Koo-Wee-Rup swamp ... That's what the barrier was with Gippsland. Its the same sort of thing. Quite big natural barriers it would have been very difficult to navigate the terrain.

Lucinda:  When you said that your research you uncovered hidden history, what was it about the Chinese experience, the Chinese gold seekers in the gold rush that historians hadn't been focusing on?

Keir:  Great question. A couple of things I think. Maybe Victoria's fascination with mining history as a foundation story, which I suspect it is. It’s a touch stone for our state’s history that perhaps our convicts are for New South Wales and other parts of the country or Tasmania. I suspect that for a long time was caught up in wealth creation, industry, trade unions, those sort of more obvious discussions about what the legacies of the gold rush era was. Also the massive and rapid rate of city formation. The gold builds Melbourne. Ballarat and Bendigo are obviously cities to look at that have been extremely wealthy. Perhaps people's historical gaze went in other directions.

That's the more positive and understandable side of it. And the other side of it is that maybe there just wasn't an interest in it for very long time and perhaps by the 1980s where there was a move away from a discussion about Victoria emerging as an amazing success story. Or if you have a different political stripe as a more radical tradition: Eureka. You might be interested in [that] rather than the amount of gold won. By the 1980s it became apparent that there are a number of different historical interpretations, a number of different stories and perhaps people, like say Morag Loh and other, started to turn their gaze towards other communities and migrant communities and recover histories such as the Chinese on the Victorian goldfields or indeed through colonial Victoria.

Lucinda:  If we cast our eyes and our mind back to the 1850s, 1860s, diggings in Castlemaine or in Ballarat or in Bendigo or in any of those gold rush towns, what would a Chinese camp be like? What would it sound like, what would it look like?

Keir:  What one would have to qualify this by saying it's over one shoulder we imagine this rather than through the eyes of the Chinese because obviously we weren't there. There is an interesting interpretation of it at the Sovereign Hill across the road a part of the Gold Museum and Sovereign Hill experience. You're looking at largely calico tents, you're looking at temples, a club house. One particular community, the See Yup community, had a number of temples. They had a fantastic one in South Melbourne. They had a number throughout the Victorian goldfields. These would have been the social hub. This is where you would have gone to perhaps gamble, definitely to socialise, to be a place of devotion and it was the hub of everyday life and practice of the Chinese community.

There would have been a number of different commercial enterprises. They tended to live fairly close together and not exclusively but for the most part, they did live with people from China. There were Europeans living in some Chinatowns or some called Chinese quarters in goldfields communities. They had their own distinctive appearance. You can see the last of the legacies of them in places like in Bendigo where the Golden Dragon Museum is. That was a very notable and famous Chinatown. The Chinatown in Ballarat isn't nearly as obvious but there's a lovely memorial to the Chinese community and the Chinese gold seekers, the John Young public sculpture which is around when Chinatown was in Ballarat.

For the most part, the experience would have been one of just illustrious energy. Very busy and people from different parts of Southern China in their own community groups identifying, working together. Perhaps making money or maybe not and hoping to either find their own independence financially or just pay off a debt to get home to China, depending on how they felt about the situation.

Lucinda:  What are the common stereotypes or misconceptions that we have about the Chinese in those days?

Keir:  There's lots of misconceptions about I think the gold seeking era for a lot of reasons. Some of them are really tricky. People say that every round hole dug in the ground is Chinese and that's not actually true. Structurally, a round hole is far better than a square. You'll find the Cornish miners worked that out very quickly as well, because they're very good. Not every round hole you see is Chinese. There is a stereotype that they all smoked opium and lived on the edge of the community and were hopeless victims. Not the case at all. Often Chinatowns were in the middle of town.

They were near the action if you like, the commercial action. When you look at it, you'll find a more revealing and interesting but ambiguous set of social relations where yes on one hand there's racism, there's poll taxes and very challenging circumstances, but on another, people are making money, they're going into business ventures with European miners. I suspect on one level they're just getting on with it and working their way around some of the injustices they would have encountered in what would have been, I suspect, a very challenging situation. I think that's like a lot of societies. Racism and harmony can exist side by side.

Lucinda:  Do you have any favourite characters that you've come across in your research?

Keir:  The one thing that I think is really interesting about biography and I will come to a point here. One thing I think is really interesting about biography is that for so long we talk about the Chinese like some generic group of people. We'll have an intimate portrait of Peter Lalor or somebody like that and just by virtue of how much information we know, that leads us to privilege certain people. Part of what I've tried to do and others in writing Chinese Australian history is to tell those personal stories and in a sense recover figures for history that would otherwise be forgotten. In doing so, just provide a bit of a pallet of identities and experiences rather than the Governor, the captain of the camp, a bush ranger and Lola Montez.

They're all great characters, they're really important but it's nice to hear about other stories as well. Those hidden histories that a number of people have discussed. I'm really interested in the obvious characters, someone like Quong Tart who's in New South Wales. He's sort of an amazing figure in many respects with his Scottish lifestyle and accent and living between two worlds, closer to this part of the world. Thinking about James Ah Koy, the court interpreter. On one level he's a businessman, another level, he's the court interpreter. One level he's friends with the Captain John Bull, he's the head of the camp in Castlemaine. They seem to be in on a lottery racket together. I know I'm making him sound like some sort of figure out of Deadwood, Ah Koy is a fascinating character. The other thing's interesting is even today you can go to places and see where folk lived.

In Ah Koy's case, he built a house with his wife Catherine Hornick and they had a family. They lived out in Bowden street in Castlemaine, the house is still there to this day. There are little glimpses of the past that you can still sort of recapture the stories of people like James Ah Koy and Quong Tart and others. There are another group of people that, not many of them, that are the sort of very successful, the stand out type characters and I guess the two that really springs to mind for me, are Louis Ah Mouy who was a very prominent member of the Chinese community in Melbourne, Victoria really during the 19th century. Somebody that had a massive commercial success.

It's argued that he had one of the best relations with O'Shanassy who was the former premier of Victoria. He lived in East Melbourne, which is obviously one of the more rarefied suburbs of the great city and by no means is he anywhere near those stereotypes of an opium addled faded digger who's sort of camped out by the side of some old washed out gold field. Ah Mouy’s always really up front and centre in many things during the 19th century. He's obviously politically connected. He's got investments in banks and he's obviously very connected up country with the various Chinese associations and groups of workers.

Another who springs to mind is Lowe Kong Meng who can be seen in some respects as Louis Ah Mouy's counterpart and the interesting story about Kong Meng is that people would apparently send him quite extraordinary things as tribute, given his significance within the community. He's a signatory to a document with a couple of other people, calling for a better deal if you like. Remonstrance of sorts. Later in the 19th century for the Chinese, his attitudes hardened towards them.

These sort of people are fascinating. In Ah Mouy’s case perhaps he had one of the largest probates after the Hentys in 19th century Victoria, very wealthy, very interesting characters. I think it's very important that their stories are told so we don't just talk about ‘the Chinese’.

Lucinda:  From the picture that you're painting and others that we've interviewed as well, it's not just gold digging that we're talking about in terms of the activity that Chinese migrants are participating in. There's a spectrum. They're part of the whole community. They're business people, they're market gardeners. What were some of the other ones that you listed?

Keir:  Primarily, mining and market gardening but merchants as well. Later, in the furniture trades. There's a whole raft of occupations and I think you make a very good point that we're not just talking about people who come out and dig up massive sections of creek flats to extract gold. They then diversify into a whole range of occupations and for a very long time. Chinese herbalists, apothecaries, formed a very important complement to western medicine for a very long time, in fact, well into the 20th century. The Chinese herbalist was an important part, if you like, of the public health mix in goldfields towns or wherever they were found.

Lucinda:  That's fascinated. I'm fascinated about the ongoing legacy. Even though, as you say, those walls start to close in the early 20th century, we've actually still got communities that are in the goldfields towns that are a part of the community, that have just been there like the other migrants.

Keir:  Absolutely Lucinda. I think what we're looking at with the benefit of hindsight is a set of two tides if you like crossing and on one level there is this hardening of attitudes. You can see maybe through social Darwinian attitudes of race, of issues of fear of Asia from the European community. Maybe a sojourning mentality from the Chinese gold seekers, they were here to win a fortune and some did just want to go home. But a small and significant section of the gold seekers stayed and had families. They might have met or gathered around a church or a community association in places like Bendigo or in Chinatown in the city of Melbourne. In some cases, they are still going strong well into the 20th century.

 This is the first major movement of Chinese people to Victoria. It goes back over 150 years. There are people that can claim roots to these original pioneers that are part of that great wave of people that occurred in Victoria as a result of the Victorian gold rushes.

Lucinda:  Why don't we see this aspect of Victoria's history?

Keir:  I hasten to say that we haven't seen it for a long time but in the last 25 years or so I think you could say there is a realisation to tell the Chinese story as part of a multicultural history of Victoria and now multiculturalism is a public policy, community harmony, is state and federal policy then telling a multiplicity of experiences from people of different ethnic and racial backgrounds is an important part of the history of Victoria but for a long time it wasn't and it was a story of wool, wheat and these sort of narratives, which is fine, they're good.

Now the historical gaze has turned to telling the histories of other communities in Victoria. Given that the Chinese have such a long and were such a significant part of the community. I'm just speculating here but proportionally, there were holding more Chinese in Victoria in the 1850s than there are today. I think there was about one in nine. I'm not sure if it's quite that amount today. It's a long and enduring association with this part of the world. It's right that their story is told. As I said, that's only really come to light in recent decades.

Lucinda:  Where do you think the remnants of this legacy of the Chinese are in the goldfields today? Is it in us, is it in our culture, is it in the landscape? Where do you look and say I can see a direct linkage to 1850s Chinese diggers there?

Keir:  Great question. This has been one that's been on my mind for ages. Sorry, you're really going to have to edit this bit out. When we're talking about the Victorian goldfields like anywhere that's experienced alluvial mining and that's within six, seven feet of the surface, some people argue deeper. We're talking about turning the earth upside down. There's an immense impact. We're currently sitting in the store room of a fantastic museum and there's a lot of material culture from various club houses. Ballarat becoming a city of great significance. It basically evolved over it's goldfields. The pressures on the old temple that were obviously too much and they were dropped in the name of progress. Similarly the same thing happened in much of Bendigo but there is a lovely temple there out at White Hills.

These are the sort of places you can see the Chinese legacy in ... The White Hills temple, the burning ovens of various cemeteries throughout the region such as in Beechworth. In the river flats where you can still see the self sowing pear trees and the old Chinese village Vaughan Springs. They're little touch stones. There is no Chinatown unfortunately like you'll see in places like Melbourne or Victoria in Vancouver Island or in San Francisco. If you look carefully enough you can find them. You suggested that we find them in our inside of us.

I think anyone who has an interest in the gold rushes would be turning the other way if they didn't sort of consider the history of the Chinese as a part of the broader story. For that matter, a whole lot of people who came from all over the world. To a certain extent, the great legacy of the gold rushes is not the wealth, it's the fact that the population increases by a factor of 10 in a decade. Just to put that in perspective, if we've got four million people today in Victoria, imagine if we had 40 million in 10 years time. That's the sort of impact the rushers had and are really quite extraordinary.

Lucinda:  If you had an opportunity as you do now to talk to your audience who might be school students, they might be just interested members of the general public, they might be researchers. What question would you like them to have in their mind after watching this film?

Keir:  Okay, great question Lucinda. I feel like we're having a PhD vibe. I feel like I’m revisiting my PhD. What's the significance of it all? I don't know. I never quite worked that out. I couldn't find anything, that's why I did cultural landscapes. I've got a document for you, an article that we published. In all seriousness, I think the question that you would want to ask, it's a couple bound up together is: when did multiculturalism begin in Victoria?; who is a pioneer? - If you're among the first to arrive I would suggest that you are a pioneer – and; is it important to tell a number of different stories and interpretations, some conflicting, sometimes a little bit edgy that provide a more comprehensive picture of what's happened in this part of the world for the past 150 years?; and do we need to have those conversations to fully know who we are as a society today?

Lucinda:  Yeah interesting. Where do you look to in this story? When you're thinking about this whole story, particularly of the Chinese migrating here during the gold rush, what resonates with you personally? What makes you feel sad to think to reflect on?

Keir:  I think if you're the richest colony in the Empire briefly and you have the run of the green and given the sensibilities of today ... The opening decades of the 21st century, it's slightly wistfully that I reflect that we didn't find a place for everybody in the community at a time of such excitement and dynamism.

Lucinda:  Conversely, where do you find hope? What gives you hope when you look at this story?

Keir:  Well I think the exciting thing is that when we examine the actuality of the historical experience of the gold rushes, we find stories of success, we find stories of diversity, we find stories of mutual commercial benefit, we find stories of hostility, we find stories of Europeans and Chinese marrying, we find stories of happiness of families, we find stories of enduring communities in places like Bendigo that continue with the Easter Festival and a vibrant community into the present day, and we find now in 2018 an acceptance that the Chinese were an important part of what happened. For some it was a place that Australia was good to them.