In 21^st Century Australia, discrimination based on race, creed, gender or sexual preference, age or physical capability is prohibited by law. Most of us regard this as progress, as evidence of Australia’s commitment to basic human rights, an acknowledgement of the cultural benefits of tolerance and diversity. In colonial Australia, British assumptions about race – the inferiority of the Oriental, the inability of ‘whites’ to labour in the searing heat of the tropics – gave way to an economic imperative: populate or perish. When transportation ceased and penal labour was no longer available, alternative sources of cheap labour had to be found to develop the vast empty spaces of the continent, to assure future national security and prosperity. Legislation aimed at recruiting ‘suitable’ immigrants from Britain and ‘the kindred nations of Europe’ had limited success because factors such as drought and flood, the fluctuating price of wool and, most notably, the discovery of gold affected the numbers of immigrants that could be attracted and accommodated outside the major population centres. Such was the impact of Chinese immigration during the gold rush that Australians faced the prospect of a country dominated by non-Europeans.

By the 1870s, when Chinese immigrants were leaving the exhausted gold fields and settling into sparsely populated towns in rural and outback Australia, concern arose about control of a large population of foreigners on Australian soil and the possibility of foreign invasion. Australians, themselves invaders who had subdued a small indigenous population, understood that a sparsely populated coast and a largely uninhabited interior was an open invitation to invasion by land-hungry foreign powers like China. Despite Australia’s social and political structures seeming sufficiently cohesive to resist a takeover by Chinese immigrants, Chinese culture and traditions (love of gambling, use of opium) were viewed as a threat to Australian society. Anti-Chinese sentiment was pragmatic if not ethical when viewed in terms of economic concerns. Although most Australians accepted that Chinese immigrants were not a threat to their own job security or way of life (because it was believed that most of them came with the intention of finding gold and returning to China), the prospect of Oriental hordes from the north invading southern population centres and an Australia dominated by non-Europeans was sufficient to create apprehension that turned to fear that bred racism. Anti-Chinese riots broke out in major cities and towns across the continent. Despite the need for a supply of cheap immigrant labour, all Australian states enacted legislation designed to limit Chinese immigration and encourage Chinese residents to return to their homeland.

An appreciation of the events in Australian history that shaped the Chinese experience in this country is important not only to direct your research efforts (what to look for, where to look) but also to understand the political, economic and social factors that may have influenced and motivated your ancestor. Anti-Chinese discrimination extended to Australian-born children of Chinese descent and to immigrant women who married Chinese men. In some instances, these women forfeited their right to vote and to own property – rights that could not easily be restored if the husband died or the marriage failed. If family narratives are to be believed, Kate Lyons (my husband’s grandmother), almost certainly experienced discrimination because of her association with her Chinese partner Sam Foo. Their first child, born 1905, was followed by three more children, yet Kate and Sam did not marry until they left Surat in 1922. It is improbable that anti-Chinese prejudice within the small community of Surat had nothing whatever to do with their decision to postpone marriage.

Searching for obscure documents is difficult but the result is worth the effort. Fingering ragged-edged pages; reading letters written more than 150 years ago in the quaint deferential English of the period is curiously satisfying. Researching the history of an era or an area is informative and adds another dimension to the story of an ancestor, filling out the picture of a life that would otherwise remain unexplained and obscure. Researching the time and place in which your ancestor lived enhances your ability to a chronology of facts and to make reasonable assumptions which, in my experience, are often enough confirmed by subsequent research.

When I discovered that Sam’s first (previously unknown) marriage to a mixed-race Aboriginal took place within a few weeks of his application for Australian citizenship, I wondered whether the marriage had somehow improved his prospects of success in petitioning to become a citizen of Australia. A reading of the Aliens Act (Queensland)1867 confirmed that marriage was a pre-requisite for naturalisation, and that both the petitioner and the marriage partner had to have resided in Queensland for a minimum of three years. However opportunistic the timing of Sam’s first marriage may appear, the legal requirements, together with the climate of discrimination against the Chinese, would have made it difficult if not impossible for a Chinese male to wed other than an Aboriginal. Sam’s only alternative would have been to re-visit China to find a wife, then risk running afoul of regulations governing his own re-entry to Australia as well as a completely different set of regulations governing the entry of wives and dependents; few of whom were admitted under regulatory schemes.

You are fortunate if, amongst family documents and/or narratives, you know the Chinese characters of your ancestor’s name, because it may be possible in the not too distant future to search on-line for a translantion of Chinese characters that will provide useful clues for further research. More likely your search will begin with an anglicised name. Because of the inexactitude surrounding the recording of the anglicised names of Chinese immigrants entering Australia in the 19^th Century, one or more other individuals of the same or similar name may have lived contemporaneously with your ancestor. There were four Chinese immigrants named Sam Foo/Fou/Fhou who lived in Queensland between 1850 and 1920 and I needed to eliminate the possibility that their records were not mistakenly incorporated into the documentary evidence I was compiling for Sam Foo.

Where to begin your search?

Queensland State Archives

• Registrations of Asian immigrants

• Colonial Records (Series 5253 Inwards Correspondence; Series 4416 Registers of Letters Rec’d)

• List of Chinese aliens resident in Queensland

• Combined Index to Naturalisations

• Index of Chinese Australians serving in Australia’s armed forces (WW1 & WW2)

• Registers of birth certificates of Australian-born Chinese entering or leaving Queensland ports

• Permits to re-enter Australia (Series J3115) (Chinese Immigration Restriction Act 1888 – Chinese were denied re-entry to Queensland without this permit)

• Certificates of Domicile issued in Queensland

• Microfiche directories of rural Queensland businesses

• Photographic collections (Sam Foo became the town baker in Surat; QSA has a 1914 photograph of a Cobb & Co Coach that likely carted Sam’s bread from Surat to surrounding districts)

• Government Gazettes

• Court and police records

• Land tenure records

• Inquests

• Will and intestacy files

• Cemetery records

• School admission registers

• Electoral rolls

• Pension records

Background information is also available at QSA on legislation and regulations affecting the Chinese community (levies, head taxes, permits and other restrictive measures):-

• • 1875 Queensland legislation requiring quarantine of vessels coming from Hong Kong to Cooktown (the port nearest Palmer Goldfields)

  • 1876 Goldfields Act requiring Chinese to pay disproportionately higher licence fees to prospect or trade in gold

  • 1878 Amendments to Goldfields Act introducing a 3-year exclusion period for Chinese from mining any new gold mine unless discovered by an Asian or African

  • 1878 Queensland Government program offering to refund the entry tax to Chinese immigrants returning home

  • 1884 Capitation fee (head tax on Chinese entering Queensland) raised to £30 to stem the tide of Asian immigration which by that time was considered inimical to the desired outcome of immigration progams – to plant a British population on the Australian continent

  • 1884 Increased restriction on numbers of passengers entering Queensland by ship, based on ships’ tonnage (eg, 1 Chinese :10 tons increased to 1 Chinese : 50 tons)

  • 1901 The Immigration Restriction Act 1901 introducing a literacy test that became synonymous with the ‘white Australia policy’

National Archives of Australia

• Microfiche records of ships’ crews (many Chinese worked their passage to Australia as crew)

• Certificates of Exemption from the Dictation Test (CEDTs) including photographs

• Military records (NAA Series B2455)

• Research guides (see suggested reading below)

State Library of Queensland

• Post Office Directories (names and addresses of residents, equivalent to the ‘white pages’)

• Photographic collections

• Reference books and maps on specific geographic areas of Chinese settlement (eg Palmer Goldfields)

• TROVE (digital newspapers, books and other publications, photographs)

• Index to Central Queenslanders serving in World War I (available from mid-2017)

Genealogical Society of Queensland

• Birth/death/marriage records

• Selected Post Office directories

• Queensland Pioneers Index

• Selected Cemetery and Funeral Director records

• Church, school and shire histories (which may include some family records)

• Reference publications

• Aboriginal tribal histories (Chinese immigrants felt a kinship with native Australians – both groups considered themselves the subject of discrimination within the Australian community; some Chinese married Aboriginal women)

• The Wheeler Project – Central Queenslanders serving in World War I – biographical data with photographs where available

All of the above repositories have additional resources – research guides, reference works, historical texts, seminars and workshops for the beginning researcher; their staffs are knowledgeable and helpful in locating documents. 

Suggested reading:

Chinese-Australian Journeys – Records on Travel, Migration and Settlement, 1860-1975, Paul Jones, National Archives of Australia Research Guide. One of 20 research guides available from the NAA, Cannon Hill; an overview of the Chinese experience of settlement in Australia, with guides to the location and accessibility of collections

The diggers from China: the story of Chinese on the goldfields, Jean Gittins, Melbourne, Quartet Books 1981 – open access SLQ

Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia, John Fitzgerald, Sydney, University of NSW Press – open access SLQ

Good luck tracing your Chinese ancestor

Geraldine Lee