Chinese In Australian Commercial History- Furniture and cabinet making - Indentured Shepherds - Fishing - Fish Curing - Market Gardening - Tobacco and Sugar Growing - Road and Railway Building - Gold, Tin and Phosphate Mining
Chinese people have been arriving in Australia for almost 200 years. However knowledge of their activities in Australia and the places linked with them is quite patchy. There is a suggestion that Captain Cook was using Chinese maps when he discovered the east coast of Australia but this has yet to be proven. We do know that the first Chinese person to arrive in New South Wales was a carpenter who arrived as a free man in 1803. His name is recorded as ‘Ahuto". Another early Chinese arrival was Mak Sal Ying. He came to New South Wales in 1818 as a free-settling farmer. In 1829 he became the publican of the Lion Inn in Parramatta. He was the first in a long line of merchants and entrepreneurs who set up stores and businesses in colonial cities and towns. Also among the earliest Chinese to arrive in Australia were three Chinese domestic servants employed by John and Elizabeth Macarthur at Elizabeth Farm, New South Wales in 1821. Furniture making was one of the first major Chinese industries in Australia. Furniture factories operated in most major urban centers by the 1870's. The first Chinese cabinet makers were two men employed by the Reverend John Dunmore Lang in Sydney in 1827. Melbourne had its first Chinese cabinet maker in 1836. South Australia followed suit in 1842 when its first cabinet maker set up in Port Adelaide. By the 1880s in Sydney, a quarter of all cabinet making workshops were Chinese, and by 1912, 862 Chinese people were employed in the furniture trades. This trend was not to last however, as the changing industrial climate and the introduction of restrictive immigration policies meant that by the 1920s few Chinese furniture factories survived. The Gee Hop Company and J.W. Wing Furniture Manufacturers are still operating today in Perth. Indentured shepherds and pastoral labourers began to land in the colonies in 1847. They were generally on a five-year contract. This was probably the first departure from State-Administered Convict slavery, and could well represent the first seedings of the movement against Transportation that would grow over the next twenty years in the colonies. The first of these Chinese pastoral labourers are believed to have arrived in Adelaide from Singapore; but most of them came from Fukien province in south-eastern China. By 1853 there were more than 3,300 Chinese shepherds and pastoral labourers spread from the Darling Downs in Queensland to southern Victoria, west to Perth and south to Tasmania. These people went home after they had completed their service. By the time of the Australian gold rushes in 1851, Chinese people had an established history of migrating to other countries to work in mining. They had already worked in mining in Malaysia and Singapore; they joined the Californian gold rush and later they came here in response to the Australian rushes.
The first Chinese miners arrived in Melbourne is 1853. Numbers steadily rose over the next few years as organised teams of miners arrived from Guangzhou (Canton) and Hong Kong. By 1855 about 19,000 Chinese had arrived in Victoria. By the end of 1857, this figure had climbed to more than 26,000. The proportion of Chinese across the goldfields grew to between 15 and 25%, reaching 43% in Bendigo. Tension grew in some areas when parts of the European population started to resent the economic competition from the Chinese and moved to oppose their immigration. In 1855, political pressure led to the first restrictive immigration legislation in Victoria. This imposed a substantial tax on Chinese people landing in the colony and also limited the number carried in each ship. To avoid the tax, ships carrying Chinese passengers diverted to South Australia and for the next two years South Australia was the principle port of entry to the Victorian goldfields. The would-be miners were met by agents and housed in temporary camps in what are now the Adelaide suburbs. They were then guided on the long overland track to Victoria getting water from wells that had been dug along the way specifically for this purpose. Some of these wells still exist as heritage sites today. Under pressure from Victoria, the South Australian parliament passed legislation that was almost identical to the Victorian legislation of 1855. This dramatically reduced the immigration flow. Sydney then became the third port of entry to the goldfields after Melbourne and Adelaide. From there they traveled overland to the NSW or Victorian goldfields. Pressure for restricted immigration soon grew in NSW as at had done in Victoria and South Australia. The Lambing Flat Riot, a drawn out series of incidents on the Burrangong Goldfield near Young in New South Wales between November 1860 and September 1861 brought things to a head. Two months after the Lambing Flat incident, the New South Wales Parliament passed legislation similar to Victoria’s. The effect on Chinese immigration to New South Wales was dramatic. Chinese arrivals dropped from 6,985 in 1860, down to just 63 in 1863. Occasional disturbances on the goldfields continued however at such places as Rocky River, Tambaroora and Adelong for the rest of the 1860's.
As a result of, and in the wake of the gold rush, Chinese workers spread out into many related and subsidiary industries. For example fishing and fish-curing sprang up as an industry to supply miners working on the goldfields. Chinese and European fishermen alike fished in Lake Macquarie, Broken Bay, Port Stephens, Jervis Bay and Twofold Bay in NSW, and in Port Phillip in Victoria. In Sydney in 1858 three Chinese fishermen were licensed to operate sailing boats to catch fish and gather oysters. In 1861 a George Street merchant, Ah Chuney, owned and leased out 20 boats to European and Chinese fishermen. He guaranteed to buy their catch which was cured and sold through his stores. The number of Chinese involved in fishing reduced in the late 1880's, even so between the 1880's and 1900's Chinese fishermen and fish curers continued to work in a number of other places such as Mandurah in Western Australia. Fish curing involved salting the fish, and this was an enterprise run mostly by Chinese. Herbalists and doctors of traditional Chinese medicine also practiced in Australia from the time of the gold rush. While some recent work has been published on the practice of Chinese medicine in Australia, little or no research exists on doctor’s surgeries or herbalist’s shops. In Western Australia, the Pang Chong Fe and Sho Hen herbalist shops in Northbridge, Perth still remained open up until 2001.
Many Chinese immigrants came from rural backgrounds and brought agricultural and water management skills with them. As a result considerable numbers of them took up market gardening and wider vegetable and fruit production when the gold fields played out. This was one of the few industries where little competition, and hence little friction, existed with European workers at that time. From the 1850's on, Chinese market gardens became a mainstay of the urban food supply and were found in most cities and towns. Most gardens were leased by groups of five to ten people, allowing individuals to visit China for a year or two at intervals without closing the garden. By 1885, 54 Chinese gardens were being worked in the Alexandria and Botany districts of Sydney alone. By 1901, 67% of all NSW market gardeners were Chinese. Following Federation, restrictive Commonwealth legislation was introduced which narrowed employment opportunities for the Chinese. Exemptions for market gardeners under the Immigration Restriction Act did not keep up with retirements of Chinese from market gardening and so after World War II Italian and other European immigrants largely took over this work.
A few Chinese market gardens do still survive today, including the Robert Tang and Lo Wun Leong’s gardens in Sydney's Botany area. As well as growing fruit and vegetables, Chinese people also marketed their produce. ln the first decade of the twentieth century, almost half the merchants at the Melbourne Fruit Markets were Chinese. Chinese merchants and growers certainly dominated the colonial banana trade in particular. Many of Sydney’s Chinese store owners also owned plantations in Fiji. When tariffs on imported bananas were raised they promoted banana growing in northern NSW. By 1919 Chinese growers owned or leased nearly 500 acres around Mullumbimby. After World War I, returned soldier settlers resisted further Chinese involvement in the industry; and their participation eventually stopped when disease struck the banana crop in 1925. Chinese farmers also pioneered tobacco growing in NSW but their involvement was short-lived there also. In 1891, 464 growers were working in NSW and Victoria but within 10 years this had dropped to just 89. Many rural properties employed Chinese gardeners and sometimes, Chinese cooks. Relatively little research has been done into this aspect of their agricultural labour, but it known that at Mount Wood Station, near Tibooburra in far northwest NSW, the Chinese gardener Tom Chaw maintained an irrigated vegetable, fruit and ornamental garden in front of the homestead from about 1889 until at least 1913. He is believed to be buried near the homestead. It was gold that first attracted Chinese to Queensland where they worked on a number of fields, but they were most dominant in the Palmer River Goldfield which was discovered in 1873. Chinese miners started to arrive a few weeks after the find was announced, coming at first from the southern goldfields. By the end of 1874 about 1,500 Chinese people were distributed across the the Palmer Field. In 1875 Chinese from Hong Kong began arriving in Cooktown, the nearest port to the goldfields. The Hopkee Company organised up to two steamers a week to bring them in. Most were recruited from the lower Pearl River district. Within months the Chinese population grew to between 9,000 and 12,000, and by 1877 had reached 18,000 more than 90% of the goldfield’s population. Chinese entrepreneurs and Community Societies organised most of the supplies, including food, for this community. By 1882 the Palmer’s alluvial gold was worked out and only about 2,000, mostly European miners, remained. The Chinese miners either returned to China, moved to new goldfields or took up other work elsewhere. Today, the Palmer River area still retains many mining sites, houses, water races, gardens, cemeteries and other Chinese heritage sites. After 1878, many Chinese left Queensland’s Palmer goldfield and moved to the nearby ports of Cooktown, Port Douglas, Cairns and Geraldton (later lnnisfail), where they established tropical agricultural industries. Chinese farmers cleared Atherton Tableland rainforest to grow maize, and the Hop Wah Company founded the Cairns sugar industry in 1881. Gold was discovered in the Northern Territory in 1872, the most notable discoveries being in the Pine Creek district which was similar to Palmer River in climate and terrain, although not nearly as rich. The first 186 Chinese arrived on the Pine Creek goldfield in 1874 from Singapore. They were part of an organised team hired by a European mining company to work the alluvial diggings. Ships carrying Chinese miners from Guangdong started to arrive in Darwin soon after. The Chinese population swelled to 10,000 in the early 1880's, and constituted nearly half the Northern Territory population in 1910. By the 1920's however as the gold ran out, the Chinese population concentrated into Darwin. Only a few dozen aging fossickers stayed on the goldfields. Most of the remaining buildings in the mining townships, including the temples, were destroyed by Australian troops between 1942 and 1945 although a small number of Chinese sites do still exist especially around Pine Creek. In like manner Cavenagh Street, Darwin’s Chinatown at the time of World War II, was a row of timber and corrugated iron buildings. During the war they were damaged by bombing and so the Chinese were evacuated and the area demolished as part of official Australian wartime policy. From the latter part of the nineteenth century Chinese labourers worked on a number of large-scale construction projects including road and rail building. One such example is the railway built from Darwin to Pine Creek in 1888 which involved almost 3,000 Chinese construction workers. Sites associated with these works may still exist across Australia but have not yet been identified and assessed. Even through the Western Australian colonial government organised the importation of indentured Chinese labour from 1847, non-contracted Chinese did not start to migrate to Western Australia in the 1880s. Most contract laborers served out two to three-year contracts working on pastoral properties as labourers, cooks, as servants or gardeners and then went home. For WA's initial Chinese contract labour, the Agents in Singapore drew from a greater mix of Chinese districts than that for other Australian colonies and this meant that the strong family and district ties seen in the eastern Colonies were not present in WA. When Chinese free settlers did start arriving, most came from the other colonies to set up businesses in the coastal and inland towns as well as in Perth and Fremantle. They ran general stores, laundries, boarding houses, furniture factories and tailoring shops. By 1904 at least 50 Chinese laundries operated in the Perth/Fremantle area alone. Another unique industry they participated in was pearling, where they worked as divers, cooks and, by attachment shopkeepers. Chinese pearlers worked at Shark Bay in WA until at least 1886. The pearling town of Broome, also in WA, still has a Chinatown with a number of Chinese buildings. The local cemetery has a Chinese section. In Tasmania they mined for tin and not for gold. Tin was discovered at Mount Bischoff in 1871. The price of tin was rising in the late 1870's and by 1878 Chinese miners were moving into the district around Weldborogh. By 1882 they became the biggest group in the local population. The 1891 census lists 931 Chinese in Tasmania, 695 of whom were alluvial miners while 122 were market gardeners. In the 1920's tin was no longer profitable so most of the Chinese left the mining towns. Many younger people moved to Launceston or Hobart and turned to market gardening or service industries. Another of the more unusual activities involving Chinese miners was the extraction of phosphate on Christmas Island from 1897. Chinese were recruited largely from Singapore to work the phosphate deposit. Today, the island still has a "Chinese community”.
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