LONG TREKS

At first, like all gold-seekers, Chinese miners arrived at the Victorian ports closest to the gold fields.

Chinese corporations and associations organised to help the newcomers adjust. An English-speaking and dialect-speaking headman would meet the group and steer newcomers to lodgings in Melbourne. The Chinese offered highly organised support to newcomers through associations such as the See Yup Society for those whose home village was part of the See Yup 'four counties' region of Guangdong (Canton) Province.

Chinese working teams would then assemble provisions and head out to the diggings, walking the same route as other gold prospectors and entrepreneurs. Many headed north past the village of Flemington and then west, north-west or north-east towards the known goldfields up to 200 kilometres away, usually several days hike in good weather. To onlookers the Chinese were an exotic sight, walking in single file in groups of up to 700, carrying twin bags or baskets of belongings on a long pole, balancing the weight of the bags with a distinctive gait.

A powerful lobby group of non-Chinese miners resented the Chinese and pressured the Victorian government to ban Chinese immigration. In 1855 the government limited the number of Chinese passengers a ship could carry into Victoria and instituted a hefty poll tax (10 pounds per Chinese passenger) to be paid by the ship's captain. This was a punitive amount: the 1854 Eureka Rebellion was fought by miners protesting a 30 shillings monthly fee, when 20 shillings made up one pound.

To avoid paying the tax, ships carrying Chinese passengers began to drop them off in other colonies: Sydney in New South Wales (900 kilometres away); Port Adelaide in South Australia (700 kilometres away); and then, most famously, Robe in South Australia (500 kilometres away). For the Chinese it took weeks of hard walking over unfamiliar territory to get to the diggings.

DIFFERENT ROUTES

The Chinese found many routes to the goldfields.

Like all goldseekers they usually headed for the fabled goldfields of Ballarat, Bendigo (Sandhurst), Castlemaine (Mt Alexander) and Beechworth.

The first ships trying to avoid the 1855 Victorian poll tax dropped Chinese arrivals off in Sydney or Adelaide. This meant a 900 kilometre southward march from Sydney in NSW across the Murray River to the goldfields, or a 700 kilometre eastward trek from Port Adelaide direct to Bendigo. The journey from Port Adelaide through the north-west of Victoria may have seemed the most direct route to the rich goldfields of Bendigo and Mt Alexander, but it was dry, unforgiving and harsh country to walk, with little water along the way.

Soon Chinese voyagers dropped off at Port Adelaide began to head south via more populated tracks through the Coorong wetlands where they could catch rides with passing 'bullockies' - the 1850s equivalent of modern-day truckies - driving bullock teams doing long haul transport of goods.

Today 'Chinaman's Well' bears the memory of this route in its name. Chinese walkers would dig wells along their routes to ensure water for themselves and for other countrymen following the trail.

In around 1857 the shipping agents realised a new jetty constructed at the small port of Robe in Guichen Bay, in south-eastern South Australia, made a far more convenient drop off point for ship captains with Chinese passengers wanting to avoid the Victorian poll tax. There was a rush to Robe. The township's population of 200 people saw thousands of Chinese voyagers land in the next five years.

From Robe, different routes to the goldfields were taken around the natural barrier of the Grampians-Gariwerd mountain ranges. In general it was a 540 kilometre eastwards trek to the goldfields of Ballarat, a 3-5 week walk in good conditions, and 440 kilometres to the new gold field of Ararat, founded in 1857 by Chinese prospectors walking from Robe.

The walking was exhausting, muddy in winter and harsh in summer. Unfortunate Chinese travellers were often exploited by dodgy, inept or alcoholic guides and bullockies. If their rations ran run out they risked starvation. Many Chinese journeyers sickened on the way. In 1857 the Ballarat Chinese Protector reported 'great mortality amongst the Chinese...arising principally from the hardships and privations of the overland journey from the Adelaide District.'

Between 1857 and 1863 over 17,000 Chinese sojourners walked the long way from Robe to the Victorian goldfields.

At its peak in 1859 the Chinese population in Victoria reached 46,000. Chinese made up about one in five of the total male population in the mining towns in Victoria in this period.

SHARING THE LOAD, HELPING OTHERS

Chinese walkers dug wells, planted gardens and marked the route for others to follow.

The treks were long and dangerous. Muddy in winter and baking hot in summer with no clear directions, walkers could die of exhaustion or exposure, especially if undernourished by team leaders skimping on rations or if led astray by unscrupulous guides who took their money and abandoned them in the bush.

Large, organised parties were able to share resources and their sheer numbers provided protection from bushrangers. Along the way they built sophisticated wells ensuring fresh water not only for those who followed, but also for market gardeners, who began to coax a living from the earth to feed future travellers and settlers in the area.

The Chinese generally avoided towns once over the border to escape detection by the Victorian authorities. They stopped at inns and homesteads along the way, sometimes purchasing sheep for food. Penola was a rare town stop where the fortune seekers would rest with their guides for a couple of days. Some Chinese stayed and established market gardens.

Some Chinese groups later followed the paths without guides.

In fine weather these remarkable travellers could cover 35 km in a single day.

Anecdotally, trekkers chanted “Ballaalat, Ballaalat” (meaning Ballarat, a known goldfields town) to keep in step. Other accounts say they chanted “Dai Gum San, Dai Gum San” (the Cantonese name, 'New Gold Mountain', for Bendigo). Paths were littered with discarded belongings, too heavy to carry despite their usefulness.

Text by Museum of Australian Democracy at Eureka ‘Chinese Fortunes’ curator Cash Brown.

WAYLAID

Sometimes Chinese were blackmailed into building structures along the way.

Buildings at Chetwynd Station, the woolshed at Mundarra Station, a sheep wash and long stone fence at Dunkeld, buildings at Fulham Station and Warrock Homestead were apparently built by unpaid Chinese craftsmen fearful of being reported to the authorities.

Not all land owners were so wicked. Edward Henty of Muntham Estate, near Coleraine, employed Chinese workers to build a dam using the wheelbarrows, picks and shovels they had at hand. This dam holds water as well now as the day it was completed.

One group of sojourners, caught in Hamilton in 1857, were unable to pay the 4 pound overland poll tax (introduced in 1857 in an attempt to limit overland Chinese immigration) and were sentenced to two months in prison. They camped in the police paddocks in Portland to the south without guards, and made no attempt to escape.

Every day they worked the public gardens in Portland 'wherein this place their enforced labour turned from a wilderness into one of the beauty spots of the south.'

Text by Museum of Australian Democracy at Eureka ‘Chinese Fortunes’ curator Cash Brown.

CROSSING ABORIGINAL COUNTRY

In their overland journeys, Chinese travellers passed through many Aboriginal countries.

These drawings by Tommy McRae show Chinese men interacting with Aboriginal people. Two depict Aboriginal men chasing Chinese men.

Tommy McRae, also known as Tommy Barnes, Yackaduna and Warraeuea, was an Aboriginal artist born in the 1830s. He uniquely depicted colonial and Indigenous life in the mid nineteenth century. He was probably a Kwatkwat man from North Eastern Victoria. His country stretches from south of the Murray River to near the junction of the Goulbourn and Murray Rivers. Several drawings of his depict Aboriginal interactions with Chinese people, dating probably from the 1860s to the 1880s.

Tommy McRae lived much of his life on or near the Murray River at Wahgunyah in Northern Victoria near Rutherglen. It was a convenient crossing point over the Murray for those travelling overland from New South Wales seeking to join the 1850s-60s goldrushes of the Ovens and Indigo Valleys in the North-East of Victoria, or for those in Victoria seeking gold in New South Wales. A shortlived gold rush in Wahgunyah/Rutherglen itself saw many Chinese people take up residence there in the 1850s and 1860s.

There is strong evidence to show that Victorian Aboriginal people prior to and during the gold fields period viewed Chinese people in a disparaging light. From an Aboriginal cosmological perspective they were neither ngamadjidj (resuscitated clans people), as many Victorian Aboriginal people in the colonial period considered whites to be, nor mainmait, foreign undesirable Aboriginal people.

With thanks to Fred Cahir and Ian Clark for parts of this text.

REENACTING THE WALK FROM ROBE

In May 2017 the Victorian Government made a formal apology to Australian Chinese for discriminatory government policies during the era of the gold rush.

The apology came after a group of community members, including some descendants of original Chinese Victorian goldseekers, re-enacted the Great Walk from Robe in South Australia to the goldfields of Victoria. The re-enactment was performed in honour of the 160 anniversary of the first walk of Chinese to the Victorian goldfields from the South Australian port of Robe in 1857.

Chinese migrants seeking gold in Victoria were forced to disembark in South Australia and New South Wales after the Victorian government imposed a discriminatory and hefty £10 tax per Chinese passenger landing in Victoria. The Chinese were the only nationality subject to the tax.

The port of Robe, close to the South-Australian Victorian border, became a popular dropping off point for Chinese goldseekers after 1857. It’s estimated that 17,000 Chinese walked from Robe to Victoria in a gruelling 500 kilometre overland trek, during which some perished.

On the 6 May 2017 a team of community walkers, including descendants of original Chinese goldfields migrants, walked eastwards from Robe through Lake Hawdon, Penola, Casterton, Coleraine, Hamilton, Dunkeld, Skipton, Linton, Smythesdale and Ballarat before arriving on the steps of Victorian Parliament House on the 25 May 2017.

Premier Daniel Andrews made a formal apology to Chinese Australians for the discriminatory policy decisions of the Victorian Government in the 1850s.

The Great Walk from Robe Re-Enactment was organised by the Chinese Community Council of Victoria, Australia in collaboration with regional Chinese Australian community groups including the Chinese Australian Cultural Society of Ballarat.

The walk was inspired by a re-enactment undertaken by Ballarat resident Charles Zhang and his son Oscar in 2013, who walked from Robe to Ballarat carrying simple backpacks and camping gear. Charles, who migrated to Australia from China in 1989, wanted to understand what early Chinese migrants had experienced in the 1800s. Charles Zhang was also part of the 2017 re-enactment team.

The photograph above depicts a moment in the 2017 re-enactment when walkers passed under a rail bridge near Bacchus Marsh in central Victoria. The trekkers had been walking for two weeks and were only three days away from their final destination of Parliament House, Melbourne.