The Chinese in Australia 1930-45: beyond a history of racism

© 1995 Wendy Margaret RankineThe present thesis is a contribution to the history of the Chinese in Australia. In it, I have endeavoured to look at the relations between European and Chinese settlers in Australia from a perspective other than that of racism. Discrimination against the Chinese was common in all settler societies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the basis of archival documentation and in conjunction with contemporary sources, I would suggest that a different history can be told in regard to Australian Chinese. To look at the history of the Chinese in Australia in light of the immigration policy alone ignores other aspects of Australian-Chinese history, aspects which concern the daily lives of those Chinese who lived and worked in Australia as Australian citizens. With due regard to Federal political policies implicated at a bureaucratic level, the actual experiences and achievements of Australian Chinese still indicate that they fared better than most authors on the subject would have us believe. ..... In presenting the results of my research, I do not mean to belittle the experience of racism suffered by people of Chinese ancestry in Australia. This experience has been well documented and is, moreover, still being endured. My point is merely that racism was not the sum total of the Chinese experiences of Australian society. As a recent collection of essays shows, the time has come to write about other aspects of Australia's Chinese history. In this thesis I have documented the attitudes and efforts of the Chinese Nationals and Australian Chinese in Australia during the war years. Their efforts, combined with the Australian Chinese communities' supportive role and the increased wartime interactions with other Australians contributed during this period to establishing a greater understanding between the different communities in Australian society. (From introduction